How to build a great research story

We've tried to make submitting a research story as simple as possible, but it may require you to think a little differently about the work you have done. Each story requires four brief elements:

1-2 lines about the business problem research helped with
How much you believe the research influenced the business outcome
How much the research cost (a rough banding is fine)
The business effect - eg profit, sales, new customer growth. A rough estimate is fine

We don't require proprietary financial information. And you don't even need to include the name of your brand (although we think it will give you kudos if you do). Just as long as you give us an idea of the sector or market, that will suffice.

Read below for some tips on how to construct your submission.

Contextualise your research commercially

Start with reframing your project in terms of the business outcomes it contributed to. For example, insight generation for advertising campaigns or creative evaluation work feeds into great marketing which drives sales. Directly and indirectly, your efforts will have contributed to the success of that campaign. It doesn't matter that your work was done 2, 5 or 10 years before a product or service went to market: its contribution lives on.

Estimate your influence

How much each piece of research influenced the outcome will vary depending on the business question being addressed and where in the overall process it featured. It's useful to come up with a percentage, even if it's subjective. And don't worry if it's a very small number: that can still add up to a lot of money when the impact is measured!

Quantify the business outcomes

Get some numbers on what the research influence. That might be sales, profit, churn, new customer numbers. These numbers may already be in the public domain in awards entries or company annual reports. If not use reasonable assumptions to work them out.

Estimate the research spend

Work out roughly how much was spent on all the research feeding into the business initiative. This may be more than one project. To maintain confidentiality for both the client and suppler, we'll only publish this as a broad banding but the more accurate the figure the better the ROI measure that we produce.

Calculate the ROI

This is something the team at B>B can do for you, but if you want to work it out for yourself it's pretty simple:

multiplying the business outcome in £££ x your research influence

and divide it by your initial research investment.