Message Development & Campaigning
Quantitative polls and pinprick surveys often generate a wealth of useful and interesting statistics and results can vary widely depending on the wording of the statement concerned.
However, diagnostic data is far more useful in the long term than just interesting data. To really change public opinion research projects often require a long-term strategy. Whilst data can be exciting and unexpected it rarely provides a platform from which to advance your aims. At best, it achieves a flurry of media attention with stakeholders asking themselves what they should do next.
Message development and campaigning provides you with a real opportunity to re-invigorate and champion the argument surrounding your issue. But, without a clear understanding of what your target audience thinks, and even more importantly the associated emotional drivers that can make that audience change its opinion and behaviour, any campaign will lack direction, focus and bite, and consequently fall short of its objectives.
Sophisticated strategies cannot be based on guesswork. Only in-depth qualitative research (most usually in the form of focus groups to allow free-ranging and open-ended discussions) can reveal not just what an audience thinks about a certain issue, but why they think it and how they feel about it. Focus groups can also throw up fresh ideas and ways of tackling subjects that have not occurred to those closely involved in running a campaign. To make substantive progress in raising public awareness of and support for your cause, policies and practices, one needs to be equipped with a thorough knowledge of how the views you are seeking to promote are perceived by those whose hearts and minds you are seeking to win over.
By identifying the messages that resonate with your target audience ORB and their messaging team help you formulate a communications strategy which taps into the way your audience are thinking and feeling.
By conducting a segmentation analysis we can identify (both attitudinally and behaviourally) your key groups and reveal which messages and which media resonate with each segment. Only then can we tailor a communications campaign and use qualitative and tracking quantitative research to monitor its' effectiveness.
|
