The Barbarians Are At The Gate!

Over the last few weeks I have been lucky enough to attend conferences in London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Singapore. At those conferences I have seen several very good presentations, looking at new techniques, especially those looking at Web 2.0 and ethnography. However, I have also seen far too much navel-gazing, too much concentration on internal market research processes and not enough about the competitive context for the services we offer.

My main concern has been about the tendency to spend hours discussing the need to refine and tweak the way we conduct online panels, at the expense of discussing other topics. Yes, we need to keep improving our procedures, but that should be done at the technocratic level, not via conference presentations, IMHO.
My main concern is that whilst we are busy looking at our internal processes, we are not spending enough time looking at the many forces that are looking to take a share of our business, people who are looking to “eat our lunch”.

Here are a few of the forces that are beginning to re-shape the competitive context:

• Opinion Leader Panels such, as P&G’s Tremor and VocalPoint, combine market research with word of mouth marketing. The cost equation of a service that offers to both research and market your product is very different from one that simply offers research.
• Organisations such as BuzzMetrics and Cymfony are using Word of Mouth systems to measure the buzz on the net. They raise the prospect of measuring what customers are saying to each other (in forums, chat rooms, and blogs), without conducting surveys. Why ask some of us, when you can listen to all of us?.
• Brand are increasingly opening their own Web 2.0 operations, allowing marketers and NPD groups to talk directly with customers, bypassing both market research agencies and clientside insight departments.
• Social Networks, such as Facebook, are developing tools to allow marketers and NPD teams to develop polls and surveys that can reach customers for a fraction of the price of real research, and without the ‘hassle’ of experts telling them not to conduct their research according to inconvenient codes of conduct.
• Free and almost free products such as Survey Monkey are resulting in more departments, particularly in the social sector, conducting more research at the departmental level, without involving insight teams and suppliers.

In addition, to these Web 2.0 related threats; the research industry still faces the double-pronged attack management consultants and direct marketing.

Comments

[Simon]

Ray, I completely agree with you. Less should be spent looking at data collection and more on data implementation.

Client researchers and marketers are happy using poorly conceived research and unrepresentative data so long as it says something they like. Moving forward, the research needs to become more of a steward or consultant - pulling apart and then re-forming all of the available data, using his or her experience to judge on what is reasonable to assume, and then making practical suggestions to implement the findings.

In my experience, the final step is the trickiest and the one that researchers currently shy away from. They may not know the client's company as well as the client, but they should know the industry they are working in.

So, from my perspective, I would like to see less talk on methodology and more on usage - normative benchmarking, practical implementation and the like.

Best
Simon

[Tom]

Yes, I agree - huge complacency about what "2.0" actually means for research beyond fancier panels. I remember having a conversation a couple of years ago being told "wow it's awesome, consumers now are so empowered and vocal", and asking "OK, why do they need researchers then?". The USP of research for business is that it provides consumer access; the reason to participate for consumers is that it gives them a voice. "Web 2.0" potentially wipes both of these out. Not to mention that old-school research is about 10000 times more boring for people to take part in than polls, panels, forums, surveymonkey style stuff.