Empathy Research connects brands to how people feel, think and behave. For group managing director Declan O’Reilly, the aim is to bridge the notorious “say-do” gap.
It’s the difference between what consumers say they will do in surveys, questionnaires and focus groups, and what they do in the real world.
It’s a chasm he is well used to navigating, having started in research with Core Research before joining Empathy, which was founded by rewards pioneer Michael Dwyer of PigsBack.
O’Reilly joined Empathy in 2014 and within a year had bought the business out, having long had a yearn to be his own boss.
RM Block
Since then, the strategic insights consultancy has worked with Irish companies including Musgrave Group, Kerry Group, Bord Bia and An Post as well as global brands such as EY and Britvic.
“Ultimately, clients come to us when they have a blind spot, a gap in their knowledge that they don’t have the resource or bandwidth to tackle internally,” he explains.
Right now, the research sector is being upended by artificial intelligence.
The technology is driving a “fundamental reboot of our entire industry, both in terms of how we structure internal operations and processes and how we hire, staff and train, as well as our product and service offerings and our value proposition for clients”, he says.
He’s not only up for the disruption, he’s helping to drive it.
“It’s incredibly exciting. Absolutely, there are going to be challenges ahead, but fundamentally, both agencies and ultimately clients will be the better for it,” says O’Reilly.
While AI and, in particular, machine learning have been around for years, what generative AI has done is made them more accessible, he points out. It is already feeding through the entire research cycle, from design and field work through to analysis.
But the sector is now bifurcating, with a “two-speed” market emerging.
“One is essentially a commoditised layer where certain types of research are being automated and accelerated with AI, typically ‘bread and butter’ work such as ad testing and concept testing and even basic brand tracking. That’s going to continue at pace and is a good thing in terms of making research more accessible to smaller brands with smaller budgets,” he says.
“On the other side of this split is the transformational work. This is the strategic layer where clients still come to researchers with a lot of experience and deep human expertise. It’s those human skills around asking better questions, knowing what data to trust and ensuring it is representative of the people or audiences you are researching.”
Such skills matter. “AI still isn’t great at understanding context and empathy. It misses a lot of that and yet research has always been about helping businesses to translate those insights into business strategy and I think that is the split we will see going forward,” he explains.
Low-strategic value work will become what he calls “platformified”, while high-value strategic work will continue to require deep human expertise.
For brands, it’s important to evaluate both. “You can be in one camp or the other, or indeed both. But the worst thing you could do is be caught in the middle, in no man’s land,” he says.
Research has already become a technical discipline. “Technology is inherently foundational to absolutely everything that we do. Whereas 10 years ago, technology was supporting our work, today it’s inseparable from it,” says O’Reilly.
We take all the experience we have and give it to clients in a very structured and controlled way
Indeed, AI innovation is an area Empathy is active in. It is currently developing a solution that draws on all its experience to add value to what he calls ‘bread and butter’ research.
Where the industry will always offer greatest value, however, is in deep specialism. That requires research companies to continue bringing in juniors and training them up by immersing them in their clients’ businesses, so that they become deep sectoral experts.
“Specialism is going to be a big trend for the future. AI is going to give you generalist types of research and results. But deep specialism is going to be really big and what research companies have to consider now is how we translate that in terms of our employer branding, recruitment and onboarding, and the implications of that for our clients,” he says.
AI is not about replacing humans. Indeed, as we all gain access to the same AI, there will only be two differentiators left.
“One is the proprietary data, knowledge and expertise that you have and that you can fine-tune. The second is the humans in the loop, the expertise you have in your organisation that you can leverage in terms of asking better questions, understanding context, knowing what to trust and what to question, and ultimately translating that for clients,” explains O’Reilly.
In marketing, research has always been about understanding people. “It’s about removing risk and uncertainty and allowing clients to make confident strategic decisions based on robust data and insights. That will never change but how we go about doing it is changing, and will change fundamentally in the coming years,” he says.
AI will also allow the value of passive behavioural data to shine. After all, in recent years, the problem hasn’t been getting data, “the world is drowning in it,” he says.
“But what clients are really struggling with is how to make sense of it, when they don’t have the internal resource or budget to do it. AI will help with that, but what it won’t help with is truly understanding it. There is an empathy gap,” he says.
It is precisely this gap that it intends to plug with its proprietary intelligence and insights platform, EmpathyIQ. Currently in beta mode with a handful of clients, it is helping those clients who want to do their own research to do it better by building on the expertise of market research professionals.
“If you’re not trained and experienced in questionnaire design, you are going to write leading questions or introduce biases or force people to answer questions without an exhaustive list of options to answer from. For us, it’s about how do we take all the experience we have and give it to clients in a very structured and controlled way that safeguards the research they are doing,” he explains.
“Again, it is this two-speed market emerging which is really interesting. We can play in both the more technology-driven, automated area, as well as, from a traditional Empathy Research perspective, staying in and upping our game in terms of the transformational, strategic value-adding work that we do for our clients.”
For research agencies, the opportunity to “truly make that leap now to becoming strategic partners” is now, he cautions.
Legacy players have an advantage over pure tech players, but only if they can successfully transform themselves.
“The path to true strategic partnership is built on the ability to demonstrate genuine expertise in your clients’ categories and their challenges, being fluent in their business language rather than research jargon, and their ability to help them see around corners,” says O’Reilly.
“As technology handles more of the operational work, including data interpretation, agencies are going to be forced to either elevate what they are doing, or become irrelevant.”
To hear more from podcast and content series Inside Marketing, click here
