The Hidden Message of Zero Value
By: Kerry Edelstein
President and Founder, Research Narrative Inc.; Insights Association 2022 Laureate, with contributions from an anonymous client-side SVP of Data Strategy and Insights
I once had a client, let’s call her Jessica, a capable Research Director who found herself constantly overtasked and overwhelmed with too many requests. For months, she begged her supervisor for extra headcount on her team.
One day, she called me, elated.
“They approved an intern!” She told me.
“That’s fantastic, they finally found budget!” I exclaimed, congratulating her.
“No,” she replied, “it’s an unpaid internship.”
I instinctively cringed. Her “solution” signaled the price point at which “Jessica” valued a portion of her work: $0. And that meant her supervisor now valued that work at zero dollars as well. Which meant her quest for permanent headcount (and perhaps also a raise) would never happen. And it didn’t. “Jessica” left soon thereafter for a higher paying job with a bigger team.
But that’s not an isolated example. Throughout the insights industry, researchers often unconsciously accept and communicate a lack of value.
DIY research is perhaps the most egregious example of this. In the DIY space, we constantly reinforce the idea that labor is free. I imagine everyone who works for an agency has experienced this; our full-service rates are habitually compared to the cost of DIY licenses, as if the labor behind using DIY software and generating designs, analyses, reports, and compelling activations has no cost.
Case in point: Back at the 2022 IA Annual conference, I attended a presentation on The Cost of DIY. Many different specific and hidden costs were outlined by the speaker; it was quite a comprehensive list of hidden overhead costs. But I quickly noted to myself that humans weren’t on that list. So I raised my hand and asked simply,
“Did you factor in the cost of labor into your calculations?”
The response I received was astoundingly brief.
“No.”
OUCH.
The entire presentation was inherently predicated on the notion that insights labor is free, that it has no financial or intrinsic value.
But that labor not only has real cost – internal salaries, benefits, insurance, payroll taxes, etc. – it also has opportunity cost: i.e.,
- What were you previously doing, that you no longer have time to do, now that you’re doing research yourself?
- How much impact are you losing without a third-party perspective to bring legitimacy and broader perspective?
That's not to say that DIY is inherently bad, but rather to say that we calculate the cost incorrectly. We calculate it as if client-side insights professionals work for free. That’s ludicrous.
This oversight serves only to reinforce the idea that our time and expertise doesn’t have value1.
We’re presently faced with many real challenges in the insights industry, from identify fraud and bots to respondent inattention the impact of Generative AI. But to me, our collective habit of signaling that we have low value is the most existentially disastrous problem in the insights industry. Over the past 15-20 years, we’ve allowed the tech industry and its investor community to convince many stakeholders that the tools we use have value, while our ability to use those tools effectively does not. Why do we allow our brainpower and labor to be undervalued – or worse – entirely left out of the cost equation?
It's madness, and we ourselves must stop that madness. Ascribing zero value (or perhaps less dramatically, insufficient value) to the work and intelligence of humans has consequences. And right now, the biggest consequence is the defunding of quality, impactful research - a problem already well in motion.
I watched that defunding happen last summer, when a major government agency told one of our partners outright, “We’re no longer funding research.” I saw it this spring, when a research client had her entire budget pulled just a couple weeks before she was due to kickoff a study. I saw it this summer when a brand aiming to launch an “innovative” product in a multi-billion-dollar product category, thought two focus groups would be enough to inform that entire initiative. I see it in the form of layoffs, budget cuts, interminable project delays, understaffing, and burnout. And I know from conversations with colleagues across the industry that I’m not alone; we all see it.
These are all signs of an industry in crisis. But I can’t place blame on the external sources; I place the blame on ourselves, on our unwillingness to fight back on the narrative that our time and expertise have no value.
Repeat after me.
You’re worth more than an unpaid intern.
You don’t work for free.
Your time has value.
Your insights have value.
YOU have value.
Of course, messaging our value means holding ourselves accountable for understanding and communicating the value of our work. Activating research, not just doing research, is what gives insights its value. And that means admitting that delivering data tables, charts, and graphs isn’t insight, it’s a data dump. An intern CAN do that. I imagine that in the very near future, the combination of AI and analysis tools will even allow technology to do that without humans. Sorry, interns.
Real insight lies in the human labor: it comes from being curious about business context, fromforming opinionsabout what data means, from effectively communicating the implications of our learnings, and from taking ownership of the knowledge we’ve acquired to guide others toward action and impact. That’s where the value lies.2
And value is why our industry exists. We need to start saying that quiet part out loud, and much more loudly. We need to hold ourselves accountable for having and creating value, and then we need to make sure everyone knows our value.
To address that, I’ve created five commandments for creating and communicating value:
- Thou shalt do the right math. Comparing the cost of fieldwork to the cost of full-service isn’t real math. We all must calculate the cost of labor on every DIY initiative. Time, overhead, all of it. Then we must compare that labor-inclusive cost, to a full-service cost. That’s the apples to apples.
- Thou shalt calculate the opportunity cost of every DIY project. Client-side researchers, what would you do with the extra time, if you weren’t running your own brand tracker or concept test? Name the opportunity cost, out loud. Calculate the financial impact of that opportunity cost. And then compare it to what you saved. ARE you, indeed, saving? Perhaps yes! But you owe it to yourself and your organization to do that analysis and know the answer.
- Thou shalt leave your desk. I know, some of us went into research because we genuinely like dealing in data more than people. Unfortunately, that isn’t the entirety of insights, and it never was. You have to actually leave your desk and go talk to people about what you learned, what the business context is, what the data MEANS. You must build relationships with the people who use your data and insights. Otherwise, straight up, you’re not doing your job.
- Thou shalt say yes to approved opportunities to communicate, even if it’s scary. If I had a dollar for every client who turned down a speaking engagement I brokered for them and that their internal corporate communications team approved…. Ok I’d only have like $10, but that’s 10 occasions of people I thought were capable enough and doing interesting enough work to have a real voice in industry, turning down the opportunity to have their voice heard. You can’t communicate value if you don’t communicate.
- Thou shalt stop talking in jargon and acronyms – and stop accepting when others drown you in jargon soup.3 Here’s a trick. One day, sit down with your next-door neighbor and explain what you do, without using phrases like “programmatic” or “anthropological ethnography.” Then do it again, perhaps with a friend or family member. Then keep doing it, until it’s habit. Because most of your stakeholders don’t know that jargon or technical acronyms, and they’re either too embarrassed or too disengaged to ask. And if they’re not asking, I can assure you, it’s usually not because they’re following along – it’s more often because you’ve lost the room. Likewise, if you’re in that audience listening to what sounds like jibberish, speak up. Not understanding doesn’t mean you’re dumb or they’re smarter; on the contrary, it often just means the speaker is an ineffective communicator. And you know what has value? You guessed it: effective communication of insights.
I look forward to standing that ground with you. Together we will put to rest the myth that researchers don’t have value. I’m not here for that, and I don’t think you are either.