CWC 18: Jason Booms on how primary research can help communicators

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Chip Griffin: You’re listening to Chats with Chip on the FIR Podcast Network.

Hi, this is Chip Griffin, and my guest today is Jason Booms. He’s a colleague of mine at CARMA as the Managing Director for Market and Influencer Research for North America. Welcome to the show, Jason.

Jason Booms: Oh, thanks for having me on, Chip.

Chip Griffin: It is great to have you, and you bring some background in primary and survey research that I think is something that more communicators need to know more about.

And so hopefully over the next 20 or 25 minutes we’ll be able to share some of that with the listeners. but you know, why don’t you just share a little bit if you could about, you know, your background, in research and, and, and then we’ll, we’ll talk about trends and, and where we go from there.

Jason Booms: Yep. well, I started off, in research in the early nineties, started off as a political pollster. So it was really more about political communications at the time, work with a, Michigan based polling firm and came down to DC in 1996, where I just missed out on the opportunity to work on, Phil Graham’s presidential campaign.

terrible loss, but,

Chip Griffin: I had some good friends who worked on that campaign, so, and they tried to get me to join as well, but at the time I was not looking for a political campaign on my resume, so I stayed where I was at the time.

Jason Booms: There you go. And the campaign was flush, so I had that going for it. So I did that for a couple years in D.C. I, I worked, for a couple of really great pollsters, Linda Duvall, and, and then, worked for two and a half years as a research director, for a, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, who has since gone on to different things, I understand she works in the Trump administration now.

Chip Griffin: That, that, that, that’s a rumor, yes, I think, I think you’ve heard that one.

Jason Booms: You don’t hear much about her these days. But, And then, I really wanted to shift over from, political communications to something that, still enabled me to work on, public affairs, reputational campaigns, and so I switched over to working for a PR agency, for several years in Washington, D.C. before founding my own, research and communications, consultancy, prior to, which I did for a decade, which, right before I, joined CARMA.

Chip Griffin: That’s great. And, and, you know, you and I share that, that background in politics and, and public policy. And I, you know, I, I think in, in that sphere, people sort of take for granted, that you’ll use survey research to enhance your communications.

But as, as we look more broadly throughout the communications field, you know, I, I think that, A lot of folks are, are not leveraging, that primary research in the same way as in the political field. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?

Jason Booms: That’s absolutely right. It’s actually been a really long term challenge because I remember, when I started in 1999 working, where was a new entity, within Edelman Public Relations at the time called Strategy One.

And, it was very easy to sell research. To our communications colleagues in DC, in New York to a certain extent, but when you really started taking it out to other offices, you know, Edelman being a global company, to Chicago, for example, or Texas or California, you had less familiarity with, with the world of research in a sense, less, it was a much harder sell to sell consumer as opposed to people in DC who get it because they.

Perhaps they had a political background, that worked with a pollster to one extent or another, maybe on the Hill. but yes, having to, to sell the value, it really took far more effort, to convince folks why they should be doing, omnibus survey research or focus groups. And that to this day remains quite frankly, a little bit of a challenge, just that lack of, perhaps awareness or personal experience.

it takes a bit more of an educational focus. I think. to really sell that kind of research.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s fair to say that most politicians, you know, probably don’t pick out a tie without doing a survey to figure out what people will think of it. Whereas, you know, as we look to other parts of communications, I mean, you know, certainly on the, you know, the marketing side of the equation, I think there is, there is more of an embrace of some of the primary research type tools.

But, when it comes to more of the PR side, you know, folks are, are still, relying more on, on gut feel and, and things like that, or perhaps, you know, borrowing from their marketing colleagues, but if they’re able to leverage the, the research directly themselves, I think that would improve a lot of communications programs.

Jason Booms: Oh, definitely. And that’s, that’s part of a consistent effort where we try to get people thinking from the start about where can research fit into this. Is it, is it something that should, fall naturally at the beginning, before a launch of a campaign, which is what we’re always talking about. some people tend to use it in a bit more episodic basis and they just want to have a tracker to gauge, okay, what’s our favorability, what’s our rareness.

and, and in that way, they’re using it a bit less strategically than they could, than if they, you know, Formulated the strategy from the outset using research, and that’s one of the reasons why, I really like to stress a language first sort of approach to this. If we’re going to be developing a narrative, why not go out there with research to justify a particular approach?

Truly understand what your stakeholders are thinking, what they’re saying, where they live. Fundamentally, because there’s a variety of different trues that could emerge out of a, communications campaign. you know, whether you call something agile, nimble, spry, all these, all these words fundamentally mean the same thing, but they all carry different gradations of meaning.

so in that regard, if you’re going to have a message, it talks about. a certain characteristic, you know, why not find the best word or the best phrase or the one that really resonates with their audience, the one that’s, that’s credible and using research for that purpose, you know, for public relations campaigns, I think ensures you have something that connects far better from day one.

Then using it, then using research on a more, casual approach.

Chip Griffin: Sure, and in an ideal world, you know, you would use the research, I imagine, you know, before, during, and after a campaign so that you can continually tweak and evaluate. Obviously, not everybody has the budget to do that, but, you know, one of the things that strikes me is that, You know, CARMA has built its reputation, for delivering effective insights, you know, based on media analysis.

But that, that marries so well with the primary research that helps, you know, guide your messaging, and then the media analysis helps you evaluate, you know, if that messaging is, is indeed working, and then, you know, you can follow up with further research to see, you know, did that media coverage actually sway.

You know, your stakeholders, your target audience, etc.

Jason Booms: Yeah, I look upon it really as two sides of the same coin. Media analysis, if you tend to look upon it as being public conversations. what’s being said in the news, what’s being said in traditional or social media. And you really want to dig deeper as far as understanding why things are being said, why influencers are saying things a certain way.

You can have private conversations. And these can be in the form of in depth interviews, surveys. dyads or triads, any one of a number of, of, methodologies and approaches to, just talk, you know, one on one or directly, I should say, with, with a key stakeholder, population member and figure out, okay, what’s most important to you?

What are you really thinking about? I noticed you seem to be talking about this, you know, why issue A versus issue B. and really getting a sense of what the motivation is and the worldview of a particular respondent is. I think getting that information really helps inform, the work the communicators do.

especially if you have a researcher that’s acting very much as an honest broker. Because the interesting thing really, for communications research professionals is you have to walk that fine line. You’re, you’re, you’re an advocate clearly, because you’re, you’re working on behalf of a client, you’re working on behalf of the PR agency and, and, and, and their customer base, but you really have to be agnostic as far as outcomes are concerned.

I mean, you have to be willing to, to frame questions properly, you have to have a, a knowledge of the proper question order and, to, and to whet any bias in, in the phrasing of the questions. and so in that regard, when you have these private conversations in the form of a quantitative or qualitative research exercise, you really need to make sure the methodology itself is sound, because only with that can you truly add value, as you should, to the communication side of things.

Chip Griffin: Sure, and as we know, having come from the world of politics, you can manipulate a survey to end up with pretty much any result that you want. But at the end of the day, that doesn’t really serve a useful purpose to a communicator looking to improve their program. It might help them, you know, justify what they’re already doing to their bosses, but it’s not the same as really truly evaluating, you know, what works and what doesn’t.

But, you know, one of the things that that struck me and I, I really like is the, this construct of public versus private conversations and how the media analysis sort of focuses on the public side and the survey research is on the private side. You know, that, that I think is a valuable way for communicators to understand how it fits into the puzzle because as we all know, sometimes people will say something in private that they wouldn’t say in public.

Jason Booms: Well, that’s definitely true. And, and even if, it can’t be, because we often do influencer research where obviously anonymity is very important and, but that said, so you can’t disclose necessarily who precisely said what, but if you do enough interviews and you’re noticing recurring themes coming out of this, you can definitely frame your argument, or change the kind of argument you’re making.

I’ll give you one example of that. Actually, I did work a few years ago, for the, Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library. And, from a researcher perspective, it was, it was really a just golden opportunity, to, to talk with some people that were very close to President Reagan, and to find out Then the communications purpose here was to basically establish a narrative to communicate the Reagan administration and its accomplishments to generations who were necessarily alive or politically aware when he was in office.

And it was for the centennial. So it’s sort of looking at the hundred years in the future. What should people really understand about the Reagan administration? And the fascinating thing was, and, and I will readily meant to being a bit of a presidential geek on such matters as I’m sure you are, that, You know, having lived through the administration, having read extensively about it, you come away with certain assumptions as far as what the influencers will want to say.

And I think the communications team had certain expectations of, well, if we’re shaping programming, or we’re shaping a communications campaign about Reagan, we’re probably going to want to talk about, The big things, how we dealt with the Soviet Union, tax reform, the, the rekindling of the American spirit after the malaise of the seventies.

But one thing that really, leapt out that I thought was quite fascinating with these private conversations with folks, was to the extent to which at one point in time or another, they all refer to one of the key, one of the critical moments of the Reagan presidency. was how he dealt with the air traffic controllers and their union.

And, which is obviously received a great deal of coverage at the time, but nonetheless, they looked upon that as being, that’s the moment that really to them defined who Ronald Reagan was and where he was going. And as a result of that research, we’re able to incorporate that a little bit more into the programming, a little bit more into the communications.

to, to really ensure that, that that was reflected, in, in the, in the public narrative about his administration. So that, that’s I think one example, obviously where research played a role in terms of making sure that the messaging captured, the remembrances of the man and, his accomplishments.

Chip Griffin: Right. And that’s particularly interesting because I, you know, I think that, you know, if you were to go ask, you know, a lot of people, you know, more broadly, that that might not be the first thing they would say would be part of the programming. But, you know, if the research actually uncovers that, then I, I think that that is the kind of insight that you can get from primary research that you probably couldn’t get anywhere else.

Jason Booms: Sure, and those are, those are the golden nuggets. When you’re doing research, most of the time you’re going to find information that is fairly well aligned with expectations going in. Something might be horribly amiss if you’re getting radically different information from a respondent base compared to whatever organization or corporation you’re doing the work for.

But sometimes you get a very interesting handle on, for example, I did work for a financial company not that long ago, that really wanted to find out on the topic of, financial inclusion. How can you really build a community of, Influencers, everyone’s time pressed, you know, what, what really drives people there in, and there are certain expectations as far as, well, we think this is what’s really likely to get a community of similar folks gathered in one place, but, we definitely had some surprises, as far as the expectations for the ability to share information, the ability to talk with one another, the ability to not just have sort of a a think tank, but something that was really an engaging process where people could network, build connections, not only talk about the issue, but sort of learn from one another.

So it was really much more of an online conference, if you will. And that, I think, was an interesting wrinkle on some of the results the client wasn’t necessarily expecting, but it definitely came through on the research.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, that makes sense. You know, I, I think one of the things that, that can often intimidate people who are not familiar with survey research is, is some of the terminology, and, and, you know, you, you’ve thrown out a couple of terms, over the course of this conversation that, that I think it probably would be good to explain to the listeners, you know, because you’ve talked about things like dyads, triads, IDIs, you know, these are not necessarily sort of common parlance for people who are not, you know, doing everyday research.

So, so, so if you could define a couple of these terms for listeners so that they understand, you know, that they’re not really as intimidating as they sound, so let, let’s start with dyads and triads.

Jason Booms: Oh, sure. a dyad or triad, you can think of as being a miniature focus group, by and large focus groups with which most people, I think many people in communications research are probably familiar.

It’s where you, you gather usually 8 to 10 people in a room and you have a conversation on a particular topic that’s led by a focus group moderator. usually there’s a mirror in the back through which the clients are watching, and hopefully not making, too much of a ruckus. M& M’s are usually consumed.

But, it’s, it’s a place where people gather for 90 minutes to 2 hours, and they discuss a particular issue or an organization. A dyad or triad is a smaller version of that. A dyad is 2 people, triad 3 people. those are more useful for, very specific purposes where you don’t necessarily want to have 8 to 10 people in a room.

say, people are very time pressed or it’s a very hard to reach population. actually, I just put together a proposal, for, dyads and triads, with, with, school age children to discuss, financial literacy, related issues. And that’s a situation where having two or three, fifth graders is probably better from a research perspective than trying to manage eight to ten and hold their attention for ninety minutes.

Chip Griffin: I, I, I would say so as, as someone who has, had, had some kids in that age group not too long ago. And I’m not sure you’d want to have ten of them in a room at the same time.

Jason Booms: Yeah, that represents its own unique challenge. and, so really those are, those are, mini focus groups essentially. one on one in depth interviews is something actually, I’ve specialized in a great deal over the past, 10 15 years, quite frankly.

And that’s ideal for many kinds of influencer oriented research. And by influencer, I’m talking about policymakers and shapers. I’m talking about, think tank executives, NGO officials. industry analysts, academicians, business executives, people like that who are very hard to reach and they’re very hard to get into one room at one point in time with other similarly situated individuals.

So in order to be as flexible as possible, and flexibility is absolutely essential in market research these days, because there, there, there’s many distractions, if people choose to, To not engage in market research, we have to make it as as convenient for them as humanly possible. And one way of doing that is doing a phone based or Skype based in depth interviews.

We’re at a time and place of the respondents choosing. You talk for 30 minutes for 45 minutes. about whatever topic it is that the client wants to explore. Usually, with, communications or business strategy focus. And, it’s just two people talking, just like you and I are. But it’s, within a, within a formalized structure, where there’s a, a formal list of questions.

they tend to be more open ended in nature, more explorational. whereas a survey may have agree, disagree, support, oppose type questions. One on one in depth interviews tend to have more questions like, well, why do you think that? Or what do you think some of the emerging trends, in the field are going to be?

So you really give it a chance for the respondent to talk at length about something that they know about and they care about, and they, they can, they can render, an informed opinion on. So that’s, that’s one reason why in depth interviews, I think, are a very important methodology, especially for, more,

Chip Griffin: I was just saying, and for folks like that, I would assume too, that, that doing an in depth interview or IDI, as you’ve called them, is, it’s a, it’s a way to get them potentially to be more candid than if they were sitting amongst a group of their peers, you know, because generally people who are, you know, more influential, more senior, they tend to be more cautious when they’re, you know, amongst groups of other people, whereas one on one, you know, they, they might be a little bit more candid in the, the feedback that they’re giving you.

Jason Booms: That’s absolutely true. And, and even, and obviously, in a focus group situation, and sometimes you have to, the moderator has to control for a certain group dynamic, you want to make sure that the quieter folks, they express their opinions. You’d want, you want to make sure there’s no dominant personalities that are emerging that may be skewing the conversation.

Generally, you see a bit less of that. With influencer populations, but it’s still there and you still have to control against it. Whereas if it’s this one on one, just two people talking And especially if they’re responding to you know, perhaps their home or their home office I think you can really get some candid conversations and another benefit with this particular approach is Pound for pound, you get more data from these one on one discussions.

In focus groups, like I said, you’ve got eight, 10 people in a room. You ask a question and most of the time, you know, maybe get responses from four, maybe five people, give you a response. When you do an in depth interview, every question gets a response from the respondent. So I, from that way, I think they’re richer.

I think there’s more opportunities to, to gather more intelligence. I mean, they’re all great ways of, of gathering data, but when you really want to dig deep on a particular topic, with an influencer population, I think IDIs, for the reasons we discussed are a really good way to go.

Chip Griffin: Now, you know, the, and influencers are, are all the buzz today, right?

I mean, if you, if you talk about, you know, influencer marketing, you know, that is something that is on the minds of just about every communicator. It of course means all sorts of different things to different people, but, you know, one of the ways that people have historically done, influencer research, particularly in more modern history is by looking at data from social networks and things like that.

You know, you can use primary research as a way to uncover, you know, who the influences are either by name or by, you know, description, right? I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s a way to, to help improve that targeting as well.

Jason Booms: Mm hmm. Oh, yes, it is. And that’s another reason why media analysis can work so well with primary research.

you, through media analysis, you can determine, Who is being quoted in the stories, who is being, who is perceived as an expert, who is being treated like an expert. And from that you can build a sample, which is a universe of potential, survey respondents and, And so that one can feed into the other so you get a sense Okay, these are the 10 folks that are that are cited most often, speaking about, you know spent nuclear fuel rods or Tiered copays and formularies in the biofarm space, and, we know that we want to talk to them.

And, and from there we can go and we can, you know, conduct whatever the appropriate, study design is and gather their opinions from them. And then hopefully, we’ll start seeing, the messaging in the, the public conversations of, in the media change as there’s more, as the corporation or organization knows what messages are working based on the feedback they got from these, individuals.

they can change their messaging accordingly, and hopefully it becomes, more prominent in the news coverage about organization X.

Chip Griffin: mm-Hmm, , you know, we, we’ve spent a fair amount of time talking about these, you know, high touch, you know, highly personalized interviews, focus groups, et cetera.

You know. What do you think though about, you know, online surveys? There’s a, there’s a proliferation of, of tools and services out there that allow you to, you know, to build audiences and do online surveys, whether it’s something as simple as Google surveys or, you know, working with some of the, the, the higher end, polling firms, everybody seems to have this as an option now, do you view this as something that’s, that’s worth considering or, or do you really need, you know, need to have that more, human interaction in order to have valid results?

Jason Booms: Great question. earlier on, several years ago, we saw the introduction of, of, like SurveyMonkey, for example, and the rise of DIY sort of research. I think a lot of folks are interested to look at this with a little bit of skepticism married with apprehension. like, okay, are, are folks gonna start deeming themselves to be experts in the field?

the good news is, I, I think those kinds of tools, they serve a role for just basic sort of gut check sort of things, but what we’re really talking about here are, platforms that are being used, by data collection houses or by, you know, communications firms working in conjunction with data collection.

with pollsters, with researchers, with folks like us. there’s definitely a role for these, these sorts of platforms to do these large, sample, studies where, you don’t necessarily can have that one on one connection with the individual respondent. Let me give you an example. well, number one, it’s still a very good means of tracking, large populations.

for example, you can do, like, some serious, you know, global work of, say, Honda car, you know, purchasers within the last, you know, six months. online studies are really good for reaching out to that kind of population. they’re relatively affordable, especially if, you don’t have the labor cost of telephone, interviewers involved.

And so they’re, they’re a very effective means of reaching out to a very specific population. Now, there are still technically, some concerns that are voiced in the research community about, true randomness of such samples. And then we get to some more, more of an esoteric discussion on, on what that means.

but I think the industry as a whole and, you know, going down to the, level of the, American Association for Public Opinion Research, which historically has been the guardians of, of, of sound science, are tending to look more favorably upon online research tools as a means of gathering information.

going back to what I was, gonna raise a second ago, they’re extremely useful when you’re dealing with, very hard to reach, segments of the consumer population. For example, I did a study two years ago on a very rare disease state. there were like 14, 000 folks suffering from this particular condition, in the United States.

This would have been a very difficult population to reach. Five, 10 years ago, you know, medical privacy, and just the, the, the sheer, representation within the U S population. I mean, we could have done a, you know, several, omnibus surveys and came away with, you know, maybe it’s a couple of respondents who had this particular condition.

but because you’ve got ways now of reaching out to these folks via online panels, because you can actually house a link. to, a survey at, an association or a forum where people can gather to talk about these issues. it becomes a very compelling tool and, and frankly, a very good way of ensuring that the voice of these folks is actually heard.

Because I, this is one of those conditions that’s, that there’s, a lot of embarrassment about it, given some of the symptoms. and being able to find these people and talk to them, many of them find it to be a very healing process and are just very thankful that, that their concerns are being listened to and they feel that this is a step, towards ensuring that, perhaps care improves and there’s greater public understanding about their situation.

So, so in that way I think online research Plays a very valuable role in reaching out to very difficult to find populations.

Chip Griffin: So it sounds to me like what you’re essentially saying is that all of these different tools have their place. You just need to understand, you know, what to deploy and when, and it’s not so much that, you know, online surveys are either good or bad, or that focus groups are good or bad, or that IDIs are good or bad.

They, they all need to be used at the right time and place.

Jason Booms: Exactly. They’re all different, arrows in the quiver. You know, just finding out which one is most appropriate, whether you’re looking for hard numbers you can get from a quantitative approach, or whether you’re looking for rich, detailed findings, nuance oriented communications qualitative approach.

They all have their value and merit.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. And that, that I think is probably a great note to end on that, you know, that, that listeners just need to think about, how to incorporate, primary research into the work that they’re doing, and figure out, you know, which tools will be most effective for them in advancing the quality in, of their communications programs and ultimately their business outcomes.

So again, my, my guest today has been Jason Booms, the Managing Director of Market and Influencer Research for North America for CARMA. Thanks for joining me, Jason.

Jason Booms: Well, thank you, Chip.