Collectively, our team of dedicated professionals has decades of experience working with clients to create unique and targeted thought leadership. We work in a collegial way with our sponsors, listening carefully to their marketing needs and crafting solutions that meet their goals cost-effectively over the short and long term.
Our capabilities include:
The Vantage Research team has worked with hundreds of clients to develop a communications strategy that will achieve a range of marketing objectives. This begins with a discussion of the target audience (both internal and external), the communications objectives and the multifaceted ways to achieve these objectives.
We are active listeners who approach each thought leadership program with a fresh perspective. Our team has consulted with clients over the past 20 years and each time has objectively assessed the client’s goals and advised on how best to achieve them. For example, a financial services network asked us to create a one-year thought leadership program for its members that would present fresh insights into talent management within a tight budget. We presented a range of interlocking deliverables including flash surveys, reports, blogs and benchmarking tools that made the most of the insights gathered from the research.
“Show, don’t tell,” is our motto. Our writers and editors generally follow the six rules of good writing espoused by George Orwell. These rules include the injunction never to use a long word where a short one will do and never use a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Busy executives will read reports that are thought-provoking and lucid; this is the objective of our writing.
Vantage Research’s current areas of focus include:
Thought leadership created in the past by the Vantage Research team has covered every major field of business and geography, from capital markets in Japan to sustainable food systems in developing countries to AI transformation in manufacturing. Industry coverage includes: technology, financial services, manufacturing, consumer goods, energy, life sciences, infrastructure, defense & international security, agrifood, and the public sector. Topics include: digital transformation, sustainability, food security, risk & cybersecurity, compliance, supply chains, and gender & diversity.
Thanks to the Internet, the world is everybody’s oyster, but it takes an inquisitive, trained researcher to find the pearl. Our team has spent entire careers looking things up, long before Google was launched in 1996. We have developed research methodologies that incorporate both new and time-honored datasets, information and primary insights to frame issues and trends. The resulting research and information support companies, government and development initiatives in understanding the potential impacts, risks and opportunities for their operations and objectives.
Is your thought leadership program breaking new ground? The way to find out is to conduct white-space analysis. We offer this service as a standard part of our engagement package, because we believe that without it, we run the risk of repeating what others have said. This would make us thought followers, not thought leaders. We not only avoid saying what others say, but our research will add value to an issue by presenting new data or unlocking a new understanding of trends, issues, challenges, and opportunities.
The kernel of a successful thought leadership program is a unique and compelling hypothesis. The best way to design it is to collaborate with the sponsor on first choosing a topic, then conducting white-space analysis. Once we have agreed on the subject matter, we discuss with the client the editorial objective in terms of a question: once the report is published, what is the ideal headline regarding the research you would like to see in the media? Based on this, we can then design a robust hypothesis that will yield thought-provoking results, irrespective of whether the evidence is found to support or contradict the hypothesis.
Vantage Research works with the sponsor and the steering committee to select interview targets. The interviewees might be members of the steering committee, or executives known to the committee or the editorial team. The main objective is to interview people who are thought leaders on the topic. The purpose of the interviews is to enrich the report with insights and telling anecdotes that illustrate the findings of the survey and provide context. An online questionnaire provides quantitative data; the interviews yield qualitative information and analysis.
Armed with white-space analysis, the research hypothesis and desk research, Vantage Research develops a five- or 15-minute online questionnaire intended to test the hypothesis and provide data that will explore the topic in detail. The aim is to collect a trove of multi-faceted information, normally based on a survey of senior executives, that can be ‘sliced and diced’ in several ways to yield a thought-provoking analysis of the topic. Questionnaires are always forward-looking so that readers will learn how executives see future trends. Our research thus explores not only the current situation, but provides an evidence base that will inform forward planning.
To forecast the future of business, Vantage Research calls on a network of creative people who are highly trained in a range of economic assessments. Our team has experience building micro-and macroeconomic models designed to show where trends are heading and what steps companies should take to make the most of the opportunities likely to arise. To satisfy thought-leadership quality demands, our team has the skills to dig for data in obscure places and then connect the dots in ways that help readers understand topics from a new perspective. Collecting data and compiling indicators, indices or other forms of integrated assessments enables us to make comparisons, whether the subject is countries, sectors, companies, or demographic groups.
Our team consists of people who have spent years analyzing data and developing insights that will be remembered by readers long after publication. Vantage Research uses time-tested statistical methodologies to analyze data from many different perspectives. Examples include: Profiles of fraudsters, based on hundreds of case studies; executives’ economic expectations derived from a large database of survey replies; productivity performance improvements derived from data of 15,000 companies.
Collecting and analyzing data loses some of its value if it is not presented in an eye-catching way. Vantage Research goes to great lengths to ensure that information is visualized with great clarity. Our team has experience presenting data dynamically as well as in static contexts, thus catching the attention of users on social media and on mobile formats.
Writing a press release is an art. It takes journalist-writers at Vantage Research to know what will grab the attention of a news editor. Every project of published thought leadership begins with this question: “What is the ideal headline you would like to see in the media?”
No thought leadership campaign is complete without a social media component. Our team has extensive experience crafting blogs, tweets, infographics, podcasts, slideshares, LinkedIn carousel advertisements and more.
Thought leadership has a limited shelf life if it is not designed to engage the audience and hold its attention. We work with our clients to design a thought leadership program that will continue to have resonance beyond the first sound bites. Benchmarking, for example, provides an opportunity to continue the discussion around survey results and comparisons with peer groups. Indices are an ideal way to revisit a topic periodically.