International Research Award 2021 - case studies from winners and finalists
26 April 2022

To celebrate International Market Research Day (IMRD) 2022, MRS has made case studies from the International Research award 2021 available, free to access.

MRS members have exclusive access to 10 years of MRS Awards case studies here.

International Research

Winner

Essity, AMV BBDO & The Outsiders

Closing The Gender Pain Gap

As part of the #Painstories project, Libresse/Bodyform/AMV BDDO commissioned The Outsiders to conduct a global qualitative research study to explore women’s subjective experiences of reproductive pain conditions, especially endometriosis. The first objective was to gather women’s metaphorical descriptions of their pain to help create a verbal and visual pain dictionary; the second was to create a ‘Pain Report’ for publication, deeply exploring women’s pain, the surrounding taboos, journeys to diagnosis, and how a more open culture with more meaningful language around pain could help everyone live better lives.

Research was conducted in eleven markets, using an innovative three stage-approach, comprising desk research, expert interviews, and interviews with women. The project presented two key challenges: first, discussions around sexual pain are taboo in all countries, so we had to work sensitively and creatively in terms of recruitment and moderation; secondly, we had to conduct culturally sensitive analysis to separate universal from cultural findings regarding women’s descriptions of pain.

The Pain Dictionary and Report were launched in March 2021 and have been very positively received by women across the globe. The #Painstories campaign has already won two awards and the film has been viewed over 100 million times on social media.

Click here to view the full paper.

Highly Commended

Opinium
British Council
Electoral Psychology
Observatory (EPO)
London School of Economics

Going beyond face value: understanding how citizens can support international cooperation

People like the idea of international cooperation to take on the big issues facing the world. But as soon as the details emerge, they fragment, with democratic governments reluctant to ask citizens to concede or make sacrifices for fear of electoral backlash.

The Big Conversation is an attempt by the British Council, Opinium, and the Electoral Psychology Observatory at the LSE to go beyond the easy, reassuring but insufficient answers people give, and to understand deeper, more complex and subconscious values that shape the conditions for international cooperation.

Using a unique quantitative and qualitative approach covering 7 countries, we explored 2 modules relating to Covid-19 and to climate change using a combination of implicit value priorities questions, visual prompts to measure value differences and commonalities beyond language, and tension scales to force hierarchisation between competing values.

The impact has been to offer new methodological tools for understanding how we move from values in theory to values in practice when it comes to effective international cooperation. This project brought together over 100 major organisations from 43 countries across 6 continents and has transformed how the British Council approaches these issues.

Click here to view the full paper.

Finalist

2CV & ITESO

Better Health Mexico: A programme aiming to address the drivers of obesity

Changing behaviour is difficult. This is never more obvious than in the health domain, where everything from our physical to our socio-cultural environment seems designed to facilitate unhealthy habits.

Obesity is a big issue in the UK, but it is even bigger and arguably more complicated in Mexico.

2CV, with critical input from an international interdisciplinary expert panel were commissioned by DAI (under the FCDO funded Better Health Programme Mexico^[1]) to pilot the use of behavioural science research methodologies to inform the development of a public health communications intervention to reduce obesity rates in two municipalities in Jalisco, both of which suffer economic deprivation.

In our submission, we demonstrate:

• How we galvanized and collaborated with an interdisciplinary expert panel
• A new way of working that went beyond research to intervention design
• The benefits of a theoretical framework in facilitating shared goals and specificity
• Continual methodological innovation in response to Covid-19 challenges.

Whilst this programme is ongoing, the success of the pilot is intended to be used as a proof of concept to undertake similar approaches for similar activities in other contexts. We are currently creating a toolkit to facilitate replication of our approach.

[1] The Better Health Programme Mexico (BHPMx) is part of the U.K. Global Prosperity Fund Better Health Programme, established in 2015 as a cross-government Prosperity Fund. It was overseen by the National Security Council but closed on 31 March 2021 (in the middle of this research) and prosperity programming was transferred to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office

Click here to view the full paper.

Finalist

Yonder

FCDO Climate Action Segmention

The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FDCO) commissioned Yonder to conduct a global segmentation to achieve a deeper understanding around the drivers and motivations towards climate change and build a robust insight led communications strategy aimed at creating tangible behavioural change on a global basis.

Yonder conducted quantitative research in 6 countries, followed by a segmentation, an innovative approach bringing segments to life across markets, and carefully selected advanced analytics to enhance the comms and messaging toolkit deliverables. The programme represented a unique and innovative solution by:

• Social media analysis to identify nuances in climate change language/priorities
• Sophisticated international scale normalisation techniques to tackle differing response styles and remove any bias
• Innovative mini-qual interviews delivered in a highly gamified online survey environment with AI linguistic analysis
• Creating two trackable index scores which helped prioritise segments to target
• TURF analysis to ensure FCDO are using the optimal combination climate messages which would have the maximum potential impact on behaviour change

The research revolutionised FCDO’s global climate action campaign strategies and for the first time delivered international posts and comms teams with a rich toolkit to deliver powerful micro-targeted messaging across audiences to influence behaviour and create real world impact.

Click here to view the full paper

Important note: The MRS Awards judging is a rigorous process that demands a level of information that cannot be included in these published case studies. Much of the evidence used during the judging process remains client confidential and some case studies have been redacted considerably.

MRS members have exclusive access to 10 years of MRS Awards case studies here.