Research Tip: Write Dream Headlines
Yesterday we were in Milwaukee at a film studio, shooting for a soon-to-be-released Versta Research video about making research matter. It explains how to design and execute research to ensure that it gets heard, understood, and put into action by your business partners.
The video outlines three tips. Here’s the first: begin by writing dream headlines. Even if your research is for internal strategic insight, there should be something you want to report to your manager, executive committee, or internal business partners. So go ahead, dream big. Write out the headline findings you want to report when the research is done. Then ask yourself why. How would each headline help? What would come of the research if each headline were true?
Writing dream headlines encourages a laser-like focus on the outcomes that will really matter, which in turn helps us (your research vendor) identify and unravel the questions we need to answer. Of course, we don’t know until the research is done whether your headlines are true. In fact, oddly enough, we’ll deliberately design research to disprove your headlines (to understand why, see A Quick Puzzle for Market Research Brains).
Writing dream headlines is an exercise that lets us work backwards to crucial topics and then survey questions so that whatever the data show, the findings will be relevant, true, and likely to be noticed by your audience.
If you have not yet met us in person, the video will put a face (um, my face) to the voices on our phone calls. It will give you and your business partners some great ideas about research, plus a great deal of confidence that you’ve selected the right vendor to work with.
