1. 10 RESEARCH WORLD | September 2016
One of those campaign practices is market research: in
2015, the U.S. State Department established an office to
conduct original market research in support of American
public diplomacy. R/PPR (pronounced “ripper”) Research
was launched by Tanya Ward, a career diplomat
specialising in public diplomacy, and Josh Miller, an
experienced researcher employed from the private sector.
“Creating a worldwide research capacity from nothing,
on a tight budget and a short timeline, and for users who,
for the most part, had never used market research
before–that was our mandate,” says Ward. “A very big
challenge.” Indeed–and how R/PPR Research tackled it
has valuable lessons for other researchers, in both public
and private sectors, who face similar constraints and
pressures.
delIverables, not delIberatIon
In the year since its founding, R/PPR Research has
conducted nationally representative market research
surveys in over 60 different countries and, with all that
survey data, has generated over 70 reports.
“R/PPR Research rolls out lots of products, very
quickly,” says Tanya Ward. “We aren’t like an academic
institution or a think tank that can theorise and deliberate.
We function like a market research company: lots of
clients, each of whom needs his or her deliverables
yesterday.”
That is why R/PPR Research has developed strategies
to stretch its budget and its person hours so that it can
produce as much research as possible with its limited
resources. For example, R/PPR Research works directly
with in-country data collection houses, rather than with
larger go-between firms that add additional costs to data
collection. To cut fieldwork costs further, R/PPR Research
streamlines its questionnaires, omitting any analytically
unnecessary questions, and it conducts certain surveys
jointly with the research offices of the Broadcasting Board
of Governors, the U.S. government agency that does
television and radio broadcasting to foreign audiences.
That partnership has reduced both start-up costs and the
burden of project management for both R/PPR Research
and the BBG.
“Adopting an efficient ‘business process’ isn’t very
sexy,” says Josh Miller, “but doing so has allowed us to
service many more stakeholders, much more quickly than
we otherwise could have.”
In fact, says Miller, one important lesson from R/PPR
Research’s experience is that market researchers need to
“get the ‘business process’ right.” Operational efficiency
is vital for meeting the kind of high volume, quick
turnaround schedule that a worldwide communications
campaign demands.
strategy + clarIty = usabIlIty
R/PPR Research reports are not merely descriptive, they
are also prescriptive: they do not just observe the foreign
views of the U.S., they identify tangible actions that
American diplomats can take to shape those views.
A
t every hour of every day, at least one
American embassy, somewhere in the world, is
conducting “public diplomacy”–press work, direct
messaging, and in person contact with foreign publics,
all intended to shape foreign views of the United
States. Indeed, American public diplomacy very much
resembles a modern, 24–7 image-building campaign,
employing many of the same campaign practices that
politicians, tourism destinations or big corporations
use to shape perceptions of themselves.
research
drIven
dIplomacyAmerica’s diplomats are using market research to
shape their communications to foreign publics
myrIam benlamlIh Boundaries
myriam benlamlih
is the senior research
manager of The
District Communi-
cations Group and
an advisor and
consultant to
R/PPR Research.

2. 11RESEARCH WORLD | September 2016
“pitch” itself to each of the Department’s embassies, the
entities that decide whether to use its research products.
“R/PPR Research has to market itself,” says Tanya
Ward. “Just because its research is made very usable,
doesn’t mean that our embassies will necessarily choose
to use it. So we aggressively market what we do and the
value-added that it creates for public diplomacy.”
That marketing, according to Ward, is less a sell job
for R/PPR Research, the office, than for market research,
in general. To many American diplomats, market research
is something very novel. Some even view it as
intimidatingly technical, or as having value solely for
private sector users, and of little use for public sector
communications. So R/PPR Research works hard to
change those views: it regularly touts the benefits of
using market research, in both personal, one-on-one
consultations with individual diplomats, and in
department-wide conferences, publications, and
communiques.
“We are research evangelists,” says Josh Miller.
“Evangelising market research, and acculturating our
diplomats to it, is how we convince our diplomats to use
the products we produce.”
For that reason, both Miller and Ward believe that
advocacy for market research, writ large, is just as
important as executing actual market research projects.
And that, they say, is also one additional lesson to be
learned from R/PPR Research’s experience: aggressively
evangelising research can often create demand for
research products among an otherwise ambivalent or
even skeptical client base.
“Our diplomats already know what is happening,” says
Josh Miller. “They want to know what to do about it. So
we provide actionable recommendations, real strategy.”
In each of its reports, R/PPR Research identifies good
targets and promising messages for public diplomacy,
insights it derives by applying standard analytical
techniques to the survey data. “What makes our
research–really, any market research–valuable is that it
gives guidance, it gives advice.”
“And advice that front-line communicators can easily
understand,” adds Tanya Ward. R/PPR Research reports
are purposely kept short, with key recommendations
clearly bullet pointed, and with color maps and charts as
necessary–and without equations, complex statistics,
nuanced discussion of methodology, and other research
jargon. This simple format makes R/PPR Research’s
reports easily digestible by their diplomat users who
often lack a market research background.
“We like to say that, for research, strategy plus clarity
equals usability,” says Miller, who sees that dictum as
another lesson to be learned from R/PPR Research.
“Research that gives concrete guidance and that gives it
very clearly and explicitly, is research that a client can
actually put into practice.”
research evangelIsm
American public diplomacy is a very decentralised
operation: each embassy decides how public diplomacy
is to be done in country–including whether or not market
research will be used. So even though R/PPR Research is
an office of the U.S. State Department, it still has to
A map of R/PPR
Research’s footprint:
countries in green
those in which
R/PPR Research has
conducted, or is
currently conducting,
research.