Education, training and strategies for companies that thrive on unique expertise

Planning a Game-Changing Study

Clients for this service come to us with a study in mind whose budget has been approved. Their thought leadership professionals are under great pressure to make the study a big hit in the marketplace – to generate lots of media attention and inquiries from prospects that turn into work.

This, of course, can be a great opportunity for a thought leadership group. If the study becomes a huge marketplace hit, they can bask in the glory. From our experience, they can also look forward to getting more attention and budget.

However, clients who come to us aren’t confident the study they have in mind can deliver on their firm’s high expectations.

We help these clients design a study that will have a far better chance of fulfilling their firm’s big expectations. We do this in three ways:

  • Directing a search (if it hasn’t already been done) to determine what has already been published in the marketplace on the topic. The goal is to identify what’s most important for the target audience to understand on the topic and what hasn’t been sufficiently answered by other research.
  • Defining the scope of the topic so that new and deeper insights can emerge from the research.
  • Designing the research streams: the optimal mix of qualitative (case studies), quantitative (structured surveys) and desk research (especially using generative AI tools), and the tools to collect the data (case study interview guide, survey questionnaire, and series of LLM prompts). We also determine how to identify “best-practices” from the data to be collected.

With all this in hand, our clients will be much farther ahead when it’s time to analyze their data and unearth the biggest insights.

Where have we done this work?

  • For Deloitte’s consulting business. It led to a cover article in Harvard Business Review’s print edition on the topic of business model innovation.
  • For Tata Consultancy Services, we designed 10 studies in the 2010s, three of which led to HBR articles.
  • For RGP, we designed two studies on the same topic, which led to an HBR article.

Ask us how we could help you design a thought leadership study to become a marketplace hit.