Spinnaker was selected to research a market-leading range of precedents, print and online, to explore how the content is used in day-to-day legal practice and how it needs to be delivered to better meet the needs of the profession. The market context was tough, with declining sales and reduced subscription income so it was critical to understand in some detail how to deliver this information in a relevant, digital way – to re-align this high-value legacy content to the current and future needs of the legal market and in doing to increase online usage and revenue for the publisher.
First we conducted internal interviews and worked in an integrated way with the internal project team to fully understand the data, the publishing processes and historical market context. Second, we recruited and conducted 30 semi-structured market interviews across a range of segments, including mid-law, varied practice areas and high-profile authors. Spinnaker was able to capture users’ perceptions, preferences, needs and concerns and, most critically, identify how the content is used as part of daily workflow. This gave us consistent insights on usage, perceptions of value and brand, so we could start to bring together some ideas around future evolution of this type of content.
“Spinnaker’s research has proved absolutely vital to our business and has resulted in us developing a content strategy across a wide range of products and also touches upon how we’ll reorganise our content teams in the future. In fact, the results and subsequent plans are creating excitement across numerous teams. We are absolutely delighted with the research piece.”
The research was able to understand the relationship between print and online subscriptions – to show how the revenue landscape and the user experience needed to evolve. These research findings enabled the publisher to understand where the value lies in the content, what users need to be able to access as part of their professional roles and deliver a better digital experience. The internal organisation and processes were changed based on these research findings to deliver this content in a more exciting way for users and to re-energise the major works online.
