While a certain amount of down-time from investments in growth after cutbacks is understandable, I am increasingly concerned that many enterprise publishers may be ill-prepared to manage a comeback to healthy sales as the economic outlook begins to brighten. The challenges to their revenues are the result of their enterprise customers having to manage the same sort of economic shocks, a situation that has left many open questions as to how these enterprises will respond to the need for improved information services once they recognize their own need to re-invest in growth. Typically it's the individual business units in an enterprise that are the first to recognize the need for investing in more and better information services in a recovering marketplace, followed by a second wave of new cost controls that shift increased spending to more centralized information budgets. But with more enterprise workers using a wider variety of technologies to serve their own information needs, it's not clear that the second-wave bounce for information subscriptions will have much upside this time around.

This argues for a much more sophisticated understanding of how people in a variety of enterprise work roles see themselves as information purchasers today. Many of the questions that need to be answered about this more dispersed and complex map of potential buyers and purchase influencers are beyond the typical hypothesis-testing that traditional market research tends to focus on in preparation for a new product lifecycle. Simple, quantifiable answers to questions about markets are important when you are focused on a specific marketing goal. But as these deer-in-the-headlights clients start to wake up, being more certain about who to speak to in a sales situation for both product needs and budgets can mean the difference between making incremental changes to products that may be ill-positioned for this new market map of purchasers and knowing when to invest deeply and rapidly in new products and services to meet their needs.

The narrative research techniques that we're pioneering with our clients seem to be very well-devised for cutting through the chaos of changing markets and making sense of complex behaviors and motivations that influence people's quest for order and action. Being able to filter unbiased stories that people tell about key complex behaviors and activities such as content purchasing, use and budgeting enables you to understand both how different extremes of possible behaviors and attitudes relate to specific types of people in a sales situation, but also allows you to drill down to the specific stories that people are telling about those situations very specifically. The techniques also allow you to identify and explore "weak signals," outlying groupings of people who have similar overall attitudes but perhaps very different stories from one another that lead to those groupings. You can to explore the "forest" of complex human behaviors associated with enterprise content buying and use prior to testing out specific responses to those behaviors.

In other words, the best way to invest in testing out ideas for new products and services may be to have better objective observation of complex behaviors before you form specific ideas to test out in a deeper way. How do you do this cost-effectively when your own budget for research has gone "deer-in-the-headlights?" Well, we think that our New Rules of Engagement: Re-Tooling Information Sales and Marketing for the New Economy subscription study may be the key for many major enterprise publishers getting in touch with enterprise workers dealing with the shocks affecting their own organizations. Primary subscribers will bet insights into stories from hundreds of enterprise workers on key topics affecting their content purchasing and use and workshops that will help them to interpret research results and to apply them to their own organizations. With "New Rules" available for your 2010 planning sessions, you'll have a far better chance of trying out the right ideas for your markets more rapidly as the economy recovers.

I hope that you do give "New Rules" a look and to consider how your organization can benefit from understanding purchasing patterns for enterprise content in a whole new light. With revenue growth at a premium, we hope that this cost-effective investment in basic understanding of your markets -and the potential gaps that may exist in your own staff's understanding of them - will help to accelerate your revenue growth sooner rather than later.

As with terrorist networks, many publishers and technology companies are dealing with rapidly shifting client behaviors, with lots of asymmetrical behavior that's difficult to analyze using tradional research methods. In traditional research, one formulates a hypothesis to test using quantitative or qualitative research techniques. In quantative studies, for example, someone interviews subjects and then filters down the results into a cohesive picture. In quantitative research, a questionnaire asks specific questions that requires people to respond to specific possible responses. These are both good techniques if you want to filter out a lot of possible answers that may not be your focus. But as good as that can be, many of the opportunities and threats that our clients face lie beyond this type of pre-determined focus.

An analogy as to why this is important was used in our client presentation today. We asked the people in the room to look at a short video of six people passing basketballs to one another, three wearing white shirts and three wearing black shirts, and to count the number of times that the people with white shirts passed the ball to one another. There was some disagreement on how many times the white shirted people passed the ball, but surprisingly several people missed another key input - a person in a black gorilla suit walked in and out of the scene during the passing. In other words, our ability to filter and to concentrate on specific goal not only may not give us exact anwers but may also ignore or focus on interesting phenomena that could be potentially important or a actually just a distraction.

Narrative research addresses this key gap in human perceptions in interpreting information about markets by enabling people to tell and to code unbiased stories about how they use or make decisions relating to products and services and then have them passed through software that relates their responses to key themes. When patterns emerge from this process, research sponsors can then refer to the original, unbiased stories and find new ways to analyze them. Instead of being "locked in" to specific biases or ideas that formed the information, you can refer back to the original unbiased stories and find new ways to interpret them individually or in aggregate. When you get enough stories to draw statistically significant conclusions, the result is an extremely powerful database that can answer different questions again and again over time on a very cost-effective basis. If you add more stories over time to that database, the results can be even more powerful, as you can begin to track changes in perceptions that you would not have been able to detect if you had had to form a specific idea ahead of time for testing via traditional research.

The net result for "New Rules" subscribers will be a rich, reusable resource of hundreds of stories from executives and implementers in enterprises telling how they use and make decisions on obtaining information services that they use to perform their jobs. In today's volatile economy, being able to hear unbiased stories from these complex and shifting decision makers and to analyze them quickly and effectively can be a critical factor in responding to the many changes in organizations that are compelling new and accelerated approaches to buying and implementing enterprise information services. Combined with the on-site workshops what we will be conducting for the core research subscribers I expect that "New Rules" will be the core element of many company's strategy planning efforts this year. I encourage you to investigate our prospectus and to see if you're ready to take advantage of this ground-breaking approach to market research that can power the marketing of your information products and services.