As part of a new client engagement, I recently had a chance to read a research study conducted by Carnegie Communications. I hadn’t seen one of their studies in several years and I was impressed. It was extremely thorough and professional. A great deal of effort was taken to ensure that the sample size was sufficient and that surveyed groups reflected the demographics of this school’s admissions population.

As I read the study, I couldn’t help but reflect upon why it hadn’t been more helpful to the school that commissioned it. I know what Carnegie would say, This happens all the time – institutions commission major expensive research reports and then the reports sit on the shelf gathering dust. It’s the nature of the business. But there are some lessons to be learned.

The survey report is long and thorough, divided into sections that examine the responses of several admissions cohorts. At the end of each section, the author provides recommendations based on the data presented. For example, if students who inquired to the school said they thought the school wasn’t strong in, say, psychology, then the report recommends that the school invest in and market its psychology program.

If you total up all these recommendations and bullet points, you get a really long list. Now here’s the basic point – there is not a great marketing campaign that was ever launched that entailed a three-page-long set of recommendations. A quantitative research report atomizes reality into discrete data points because that is fundamental to the way it gathers information. But such data points will never get you to where you want to be if your goal is a game-changing marketing strategy.

Institutions need to understand that after the research comes a separate essential step, which is strategy. And strategy is never just an automatic response to data. Marketing strategy involves a creative leap. It involves taking all your data and figuring out where you’re going to take your stand. You could liken it to what a talented general does when he receives data from the front and then in a creative leap settles on a brilliant tactic that will win the battle.

A great marketing strategy never rests simply on improving or promoting a set of features. Rather, it needs to have at its core a lifestyle component that distinguishes the service or product from competitors. Our world is too saturated with stimuli and we are too overloaded to be able to distinguish features. We need marketers to create the shortest possible path to affiliation. They do this by portraying a lifestyle that we can buy into.

Institutions need to understand this before they commission their expensive research reports. Or, actually, they don’t. If their goal is nothing more than incremental improvement, then commissioning a research report that examines audience response and generates a mechanical set of plug-and-play recommendations is sufficient. But if an institution wants to transform itself, fundamentally improve its position and alter audience perceptions, then it needs to understand that any research report, no matter how competently executed, will not be sufficient. Before commissioning the research report it needs to plan for the essential next step – taking the quantitative data and out of it constructing an effective lifestyle based strategy that cuts through the static and achieves the institution’s marketing goals.