Ask around the insight world right now and you will hear the same thing. Businesses are getting three quotes for almost every project, shopping brief by brief, always looking for the keenest price. It feels careful. It feels like good housekeeping. We asked Helen Blair, Group Insight Director at FIS Group, why she thinks it is quietly one of the most expensive habits in the industry.
Her starting point is that the market continues to be intensely reactive. “There are lots of people who are just reacting to stuff,” she says. “Very few are really on the front foot, and many don’t have a real insight strategy behind what they are doing.” Briefs land, teams scramble to answer them, and the whole thing repeats. In her words, a lot of people are busy doing rather than thinking and actioning the insights.
The hidden cost sits in what happens between those briefs. Insight is one of the few things a business owns that should get more valuable over time, because every project builds on the last. That only works if the knowledge stays in one place. The moment a business switches provider to save a few thousand pounds, that compounding starts again from zero.
“You lose the learnings when you flip-flop between agencies,” Helen says. “You are just catching up to where the agency already was on all of your knowledge so far.” The saving is real, but so is the reset. And it is made worse by how much the industry moves. Businesses buy other businesses, teams change, new people arrive wanting to make their mark, and the work that was done a year ago quietly slips through the gaps. She describes the frustrating version of it: a brief arrives that looks almost identical to a project from a few years earlier, the category shows that none of the original recommendations were ever acted on, and nobody can quite remember why.
That points to the deeper problem, which is not really about price at all. Too often, research is treated as a box to tick rather than something to act on. “Lots of people do research as a tick box exercise,” Helen says. The report gets delivered, everyone nods, and then the day job swallows it whole. For her, the value was never the report in the first place. It is what a business actually does with it.
This is where she has strong views about how the industry presents its work. Almost every agency, she points out, opens by walking through its methodology. “Does anyone actually want that as the first piece of the puzzle?” she asks. “No. They want to know what we found out, and what to do about it.” Nobody has time to read a hundred-page deck to find the three things that matter. The answer, in her view, is work that is strategy led and action led, delivered in a form people will actually use. As she puts it, it is not about volume. It is about how good the thing you hand over is. Part of that is knowing who is actually reading it. A product development team wants every attribute that was tested. A marketing team simply wants to know what people love and what the business can shout about. Handing both the same hundred pages serves neither of them well.
The other piece that gets lost is the industry lens. An insight partner that does not live in food and drink can tell you what consumers said, but not what you can sensibly do with it. Helen gives a simple example. Consumers might tell you a product should be saltier. Take that at face value and you would recommend more salt, ignoring the rules on high fat, salt and sugar, and the pressure retailers apply on exactly that point. Someone who knows the category would instead look at lifting another flavour to reach the same place, without loading the product with salt or sugar. Knowing what is possible, and what is not, is what turns a finding into a decision.
So what does Helen think good looks like? Not a run of disconnected projects, but a genuine partnership. Fewer, bigger, better pieces of work that cover several categories at once and reveal the larger consumer shifts a whole business can use, rather than a string of niche briefs answering one small question at a time. It is an approach her colleagues describe as sweating the asset.
It also works faster when insight and innovation sit under one roof. She describes one recent sprint that reached, in a matter of weeks, the same point an internal team elsewhere had spent eight months trying to get to. By that stage, the idea they had been polishing was already out of date and the category has moved on. “Joined up projects across both sides of the business is where the real sweet spot lands,” she says. It costs more than the cheapest quote, but it gives more back, and the difference shows up as action, because the people who need to act have been part of it the whole way.
Underneath all of it is a simple ambition. Helen wants the businesses FIS works with to be on the front foot, set up for the next few years rather than reacting to whatever landed last week, launching before their competitors instead of chasing them. That kind of position is not built one cheap brief at a time. It is built on insight that is allowed to compound.
If any of that sounds familiar, the first step is not another brief. It is a conversation about the bigger picture: what you are trying to achieve over the next few years, and how a joined-up, action-led partnership could get you there. If that is a conversation you would find useful, we would love to have it.