Mike Norris, head of truth intelligence at Instinctif Partners and Truth Consulting, on why we need to prioritise upgrading research skills while investing in tech.

Insight is among the most critical services a modern PR company provides. We are pummelled with information 24/7 from a relentless global news cycle. We cannot break through that deafening clamour without a much deeper understanding of audience, market context and cultural phenomena.  

But, in the excitement around AI, we risk mistaking investment in technology with innovation in insight. This isn’t about to descend into a revisionist technophobic rant. Instead, it is a plea that we evolve new skills pathways in lock-step with our efforts to expand our tech stacks.

Most professionals now have access to media analytics platforms that can furnish us with a deluge of data. These platforms present an unbelievable opportunity to inform our work with deeper insight. However, a mere two years since the launch of Chat GPT, the excitement around new AI initiatives is drifting into indifference as the technology becomes a cost of market entry rather than a sign of fresh thinking. This poses a fundamental question about how professionals add value, particularly in area of research.  The answer isn’t just more AI tools. It’s for researchers to become better researchers, cross-pollenating their work with ideas from aligned disciplines.

Semiotics, for example, involves interpreting symbols to unlock hidden meaning. While traditional analytics might tell us that online mentions of a company are broadly positive, a semiotics approach might notice changes in linguistic or visual cues, indicating a growing misalignment in values between a brand and its customers.  An ethnographic approach can help us dive deeper into relevant audience groups’ attitudes, allowing us to better understand prevailing cultural trends. Helping our clients understand their relevance in the context of broader cultural phenomena breaks them out of their echo chambers, identifies new commercial opportunities and supports companies in developing far more relevant value propositions. Similarly, phenomenology allows us to explore people’s lived experiences, which is critical.

Particularly in B2B communications, we often forget that to effectively communicate we need to understand people as people, not just stakeholders or customers. Finally, if we look at quantitative research, the news is bursting with research documenting averages – house prices, mortgage rates, product sales data. How then can we then consider a broader spectrum of data science techniques to help clients find white spaces for content, whether that’s employing less common mathematical concepts like measures of variability to interpret market activity differently, integrating more advanced data science techniques like multiple regressions to understand the why behind the what, or layering datasets to answer more complex questions.

From banking to real estate, we’re seeing companies utilise a plethora of advanced research methodologies, understanding that it’s depth of insight that drives competitive advantage in a world where data is plentiful. That’s how the PR industry needs to think. Yes, we must invest in technology. But, we also need a human capability overhaul that draws on new ways of thinking. That is how we can maximise the technological opportunity, develop more intelligent communications strategies and, ultimately, demonstrate the true value of insight-driven communications.