Over the past year or so, we’ve been adding a lot of ancillary materials to our benchmark reports. Our goal has consistently been to make our somewhat encyclopedic research more accessible, and get to the high points quickly, without sacrificing the important content and details we’ve also uncovered.

Now, we’re on a road to make even more changes. Along with tweaking those additional materials like the eBook, “Uncharted ” and video fast facts, we’re making some changes that get into the core of the benchmark itself: making it actionable and interesting right from the first word.

Towards that end, we’re going to put a summary of recommendations right up front, and make that the executive summary. We’ll direct you to the parts of the report that led us to those conclusions, and include hyperlinks so you don’t have to work your way through the pages.

After all, our core value is to create actionable research…so it seems odd to have the action items at the end, rather than the beginning of our report. Think of it as an inductive, rather than deductive process.

We’re also re-working the design of the eBook. Overall, we don’t feel like they’re eye-popping enough.

Along those lines, did you know we have abstracted content from our benchmarks on many platforms?

• RSR Research has a boatload of Fast Fact videos up on YouTube. You can get 2 minute snippets or the movie-length long-form findings review. So, if you’re looking for something about merchandising, just put “RSR Research Merchandising ” into the search box, and you’ll find them.
• We always put our research agenda and NRF reviews on Vimeo. A simple search on RSR Research will give you everything you were looking for
• We post a lot of content on LinkedIn, but mostly under our own names – I have a few thousand followers, partly because I also write for Forbes. So if you look for me, you can find lots of articles that I’ve shared. You can do the same with Brian and Steve. We all share them.
• We do use Facebook, but not so much – Generally, it seems that Facebook is a social, rather than a business network. While some of us are more active on Facebook than others (guilty as charged!), it’s not generally a place people go for business content. We maintain our page (Retail Systems Research, LLC), and put content up there every week or so, but the bulk of it is definitely elsewhere
• Every benchmark report also gets a press release – We can’t be everywhere physically, but we’d like our work to be everywhere, so we put out press release when we publish one. This gets a fair amount of B2B media play and abstracts written around the world
• RSR Uncharted is becoming a favorite of our followers – again, generally posted on LinkedIn and linked to on Twitter, we’ve added charts that we would have put in the report, if we’d only had the space. Truth be told, we feel our reports need to be shorter than 30 pages, ideally less than that. But that causes us to play “lifeboat ” with data that is actually interesting.

In the eleven years we’ve been around, the benchmarking world has grown up around us. Data is everywhere. Most reports are free of charge, just like ours are. We do think we’re really good at what we do, and we want you to feel the same. To do that, we’re continuing to evolve.

Please let us know what else we can do to keep our research fresh, relevant and readable for you. We want to add value to retailers’ lives. In a world of click bait, we aim to keep it real.

The first benchmark with our new design will be our upcoming Merchandising and Pricing benchmark report. Look for it in mid April. You should see a fresh eBook design at that time as well.