Need Quick and Dirty Answers? Go Meta.

Recently I was speaking with a client who shared some of the big questions a client of hers was grappling with. This government agency envisioned a future brand identity for one of its sub-brands. Questions about what its customers thought about the brand, and precisely what it did, loomed large. What was the brand’s relevance? What emotions did customers connect to the brand? What didn’t they immediately connect with it? And the list probably goes on.

While I was not armed with a complete list of questions, what I did have was pretty valuable. On my computer were a handful of research reports and a trove of transcripts from other projects I conducted for my client’s client, ready to be unearthed and unpacked. Over the last several years, this sub-brand was mentioned many times —in both an unaided and aided fashion— with numerous audience segments. 

Back when I was in a more academic setting, meta-analyses were much more common; they were also valuable to review when considering one’s own research questions and to perform. I wonder if they’re less used in commercial applications because research companies would prefer to conduct primary market research (the fees are larger). In layman’s terms, secondary research is frequently a compilation of studies on a research question of interest and an analysis of the work to date, in part or in total. In the case of this non-academic work, I reviewed the past research I had conducted on the topic (the “meta” part), and reviewed the source transcripts with new research questions, which is essentially a secondary data analysis.

While these types of analyses have limitations, they can help to offer insight into a topic studied before or one that has serendipitously come up in past research. It can also stretch market research dollars and reduce study time by using secondary data instead of collecting additional data.