Just “Agile” Isn’t Enough: Why a Consultative Approach to Research Maximizes Your Budget and Time

Brands around the world are in uncharted territory. They have to navigate new consumer trends, needs, behaviors, and habits, and adapt to these changes at a pace never required before. Old strategies and playbooks are out of date, and in an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace where both time and budget are scarce resources, it’s essential to pivot strategies quickly and effectively.

To navigate their path forward, many of the world’s most successful brands are leveraging the power of agile market research. And as the pioneer in that space, they’ve looked to us as a partner.

Personalization Leads to Better Outcomes

Only by gaining a full contextual understanding of business challenges, objectives, and opportunities can you design a research roadmap that leads to success and long-term growth. Otherwise, you’re just going to end up wasting time and money.

At GutCheck, our mission is to make heroes out of our clients. That’s why we start every single one of our client relationships by listening to their needs, learning what’s most important to them, and then basing everything around that. And we also make it a priority to identify how our processes will best integrate with our clients’ internal teams, so they receive actionable insights quickly and enjoy a seamless experience.

At the heart of this consultative approach to agile market research is something we refer to as “service planning.” This may sound similar to what you might get from traditional research vendors, but an advantage of our unique approach is taking agile principles and applying them to strategy. This means living by a philosophy of executing research based on our clients’ specific goals, while continuously iterating and improving at the speed they need to take action that drives results. Service planning is not just another box to check – for us, it’s a constant state of mind. 

Benefits of Service Planning:

We know that time is precious and limited. While service planning does involve spending a few more minutes of time in conversation upfront with our team, it pays off in spades in the long run by enabling us to increase the efficiency of our client partnerships, make the most of their time, and improve the research insights they receive. The three most important benefits of service planning include:

Rigor (Depth of Insights)

By fully understanding a company’s strategy and initiatives, we can build upon a strong contextual foundation and identify ways that our team can best support the end goals. This allows us to take a more agile approach, iterate upon any previous research, and visualize how individual projects map to larger objectives to answer key business questions. We deliver more reliable insights, so our clients can experience better outcomes.

Speed (Velocity of Insights)

By completely aligning on reporting preferences and processes up-front, our teams save hours of time in the project execution phase so our clients can act on insights faster. Speed is a critical competitive advantage, especially since most marketplaces are more crowded than ever before. 

Efficiency (Process Integration)

By coordinating operating models for efficient & effective communication and project execution, we can best integrate our own process with our clients’ processes and can press go without any glitches. This integration minimizes errors and supports high-quality deliverables, which lead to less headaches and improved results.

Quick and cheap research without context and rigor is risky. And on the other hand, waiting three months in today’s competitive environment for insights could mean the difference between staying ahead of a new consumer need and missing the boat entirely. Today’s brands need to navigate these trade-offs and partner with a proven agile market research provider to get insights they can truly rely on to make critical decisions at the speed modern business requires. 

GutCheck has spent more than a decade combining rigor and speed to uncover and activate our clients’ target audiences – and we’ve done that by first starting off with a conversation about what matters most to them.

Let’s tackle the new normal together. Set up some time to talk with us today.