Is New MR taking quantitative budgets to deliver qualitative benefits

The advent of online qualitative research has been predicted and announced for over a decade now. First with moderated email groups, then online focus groups, then bulletin board groups, and more recently video enabled online focus groups and virtual world focus groups. Whilst all of these efforts have been interesting and have generated some noteworthy results, none established themselves as a major part of the toolkit of market research.

At long last, all that may be changing. Online qualitative may finally be arriving, as part of a larger change to both society and research.

Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia changed the world and dragged almost one-in-four of the world’s population online, with current users numbering approximately 1.6 billion. The next phase of this massively disruptive change is being led by innovations such as twitter, iPhone, and Google Latitude.

The first wave of the Internet gave people the chance to connect to central services, as online banking, search engines, and news. The second wave, Web 2.0, was to give people the chance to connect with each other and to create their own content. The latest wave is all about being connected all the time, in a way that almost forgets that the Internet is method that makes it happen. In the words of Iggy Pintado, in his book Connection Generation, we are becoming “Super Connectors”, whilst Mark Earls, author of Herd, describes us as the “Super Social Ape”.

The consequence for research is that we are finding that we need to be involved in the lives of consumers. We are learning to have ongoing conversations with customers. These conversations engage people as they live, not by asking people to try to recall their history or by asking them to ‘project’ into hypothetical futures, but by experiencing things with them.

This new paradigm for research, immersed in people’s lives, is what I am referring to as New MR. The leading examples of this New MR, at the moment, come from online research communities. These communities bring marketers, customers, and researchers together in an ongoing conversation.

Head of Synovate, Adrian Chedore, has described communities as the fastest growing aspect of market research, and the reason for his deal with Vision Critical. However, unlike online data collection, online communities are a true category destroyer. Communities compete for quantitative research budgets, but deliver qualitative research benefits. Communities transform the researcher from the ‘hidden observer’ to an active participant, co-creating value with both the brand and the customers.

At the leading edge, communities are collaborating with their members, encouraging them to become crowd-sourced researchers. The exciting part about e-ethnography is the way that the process of observation and analysis is shared between the researcher and the members.

I suspect the next few years are going to be like a game of musical chairs as companies move their projects from one mindset to another, for example from a brand tracker to monitoring blogs, and a cust sat from quant to an online community, focusing on discussions about real experiences.

Comments

[Rob Burton]

Hi
My problem with all this talk about online qualitative research and e-ethnography is we all seem to be missing the most important bits which is human behaviour. So can some one please tell me how do we replace or recognise for example, when I test a printed product in a focus group - in this particular case a university prospectus - the focus group respondents smell the booklet, they sniff the quality of the paperor the ink and from that gauge the quality, they finger it to test the paper, they make micro expressions, they react to the other people in the group, they seek opinion, they flick through the pages, often back to front and do a myriad other little bits of behaviour - how do we capture that via the internet? How do I know when I show art work for example that the monitors at the other end are showing the right colours. It worries me.

[ubu.roi]

@kevin m

You are not merely observing, but participating. And no, you are not more participating than the others are, but that doesn't mean you don't affect the conversation.

The question is: so what? Anthropology embraces and makes good use of the researcher's actively shaping the dialogue. Anthropology IS dialogue and the researcher's is part of the research. No, it's not objective and statistically representative. It's something else. Learn what it's good for, and it will serve you well.

[kevin mclean]

@Rick Frank I am not sure if the observer effect applies in the same way online though? If you were taking part in a bulletin board/online community as a researcher, surely you are no more observing the others than they are 'observing' each other?

[Emiel van Wegen]

Thank you Ray, for a very interesting post. I guess we're moving away from using the term "Market Research 2.0". I like "New MR", but I am still looking for the best term to describe this paradigm shift.

To me it's a bit like Bill Clinton's centrism (a.k.a. the "third way") Clinton's Third Way was advocating a mix of some left-wing and right-wing policies. To me that's what we need: the third-way of research: a mixture of qualitative and quantitative.

Positioning it like this - as another new and third method next to qual and quan - it may help us overcome the fears of the more traditional orientated researchers who are afraid it may cannibalise their research.

It will be another method of market research, leveraging the strengths of both methods combined with the benefits of the available technology.

Anyhow, thanks for this enlightening post: it actually inspired me to write a possible sequel on my own blog :-)

Cheers

[Rick Frank]

Hmmm. The thing about any any anthropological/ethnographical activities is that they are affected (like physics) by the observer effect. Your presence alters the dynamics of the situation which affects the results. Is anyone talking about this?