What is NewMR?

Last week a new group was formed in LinkedIn to try and help co-create the future of Market Research, something which some of us think of as NewMR, you can find the group here. The group has been set up as a ‘task and finish’ exercise. We are taking a topic, working on it, reporting it, and moving on to another task.

During the first week we tackled the most basic, and perhaps the most difficult questions, namely “What is NewMR”, you can see the discussion here.

The discussion elicited 22 contributions from some of the leading thinkers in the NewMR space. Here is my summary of the discussion and my conclusions, but don’t take my word for it, you can check the discussion for yourselves.

What is NOT NewMR?

One of the tasks we set ourselves in defining NewMR was to define ‘What is not NewMR?’

Dan Alexander-Head raised the point that NewMR is NOT the old command and control and not Adult-Child approach we have used in the past. This means it is not using ‘our’ questionnaire which ‘they’ have to complete.

However, we should note that this implies real difficulties for many of the traditional marketing science techniques, such as factor analysis and cluster analysis, which require complete, or nearly complete, data sets.

Steve Wills drew on recent thinking about the brain, and books such as Jonah Lehrer’s book ‘The Decisive Moment’ to suggest that NewMR is much less left brain, and more right brain (readers may also want to look at Daniel Pink’s ‘Whole New Mind’.

Henrik Hall highlighted the recent ESOMAR membership survey as a good example of something that is NOT NewMR (and I have seen similar concerns in other discussion groups). As well as being long and boring, it did not come across as being driven by members’ agendas.

For me old MR is the assumption that the researcher/client combination knows enough about the consumers to ask a detailed questionnaire. Old MR often assumes that the customer experience can be framed within a single research instrument.

Paul Child took Henrik’s point further and generalised it. NewMR is not about clients/researchers controlling the whole process. We shouldn’t seek to dictate what customers can and can’t talk about.

What is NewMR?

The following points emerged as part of the answer to the question what is NewMR?

Boundaries?

There seems to be a consensus that NewMR blurs and goes beyond the boundaries of what we do at the moment. This point was made by Dan Alexander-Head and was echoed by many others. However, Steve Wills highlights the risks embodied in this blurring of boundaries. Our current strength is as experts, and in creating NewMR we do not want to lose the ability to bring something unique to the table.

Steve Cierpicki highlighted one of the boundaries that needs to go is the way that many researchers shun the world of sales and marketing. Researchers need to recognise and enjoy the fact they are part of the marketing function. Researchers (in the commercial sector) are not social scientists or academics. We do research to help the bottom line. If we take Piyul Mukherjee’s call for a more ethical approach, the core of what we do could be re-framed to say that we improve companies’ bottom lines in the long term (and assuming that long term benefits will accrue disproportionately to the ethical).

Conversations

NewMR is about conversations. It is about conversations between the brand and the customer, the researcher and the brand, the researcher and the customer, between the customer and the customer, and between all three. Paul Child used the phrase “… spending time with people not numbers & drawing brave conclusions.”

Not just qual or quant

John Pawle highlighted the way that the barriers between qual and quant are being challenged by social media, blog mining, and large scale observational work.

With NewMR techniques we sometimes have enormous quantities of comments, one paper in ESOMAR’s recent Online Conference in Chicago talked about analysing 200,000 Tweets from a Twitter project (more on this next week). What do we mean by those sorts of numbers? Is it qual, because we are looking for meaning? Is it quant because we are dealing with large numbers? Or is it something new? I think we have new approaches and analogies to find in this area.

Outcomes not Methods

Steve Cierpicki raised the issue that traditionally Market Research has defined itself in terms of the techniques it uses, rather than the outcomes that clients need. Peter Harris calls for NewMR to be reverse engineered, starting with what clients really need and working out how to produce it, rather than starting with what we do well and proposing to apply that.

Nick Coates asked what we meant by New? The suggestion appears to be that we should not assume that anything we have previously done is right. We should start fresh and find the best answers, which on a case by case basis may or may not be the same as the old methods, but if it is the same it is because it has been justified anew.

Fiona Blades sets a great target for how output focused NewMR should be when she says “We need to ensure that the wider marketing community can't get enough of NewMR.”

Giving clients answers to questions they have not asked

Piyul Mukherjee raised the need for NewMR to identify trends and demands amongst consumers and citizens and to tell brands about these issues.

The Cs

Jennie Beattie raised the issue of the Cs, and suggested Collaboration, Conversation, and Co-creation. I would add Ceding Control to this list.

Motherhood and Apple Pie

There was also a tendency amongst the discussants to lump almost everything they liked into the category NewMR. We probably need to be a bit harder on ourselves going forward. Perhaps discussing the difference be MyMR and NewMR?

Big Philosophical and Practical Issues

Here are some thoughts that have come out of the discussion

Piyul Mukherjee provided a link to a great article by Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody). This led Steve Wills to highlight a specific phrase in Shirky’s article, where he says “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” Steve then mused “So companies do need to understand customers' behaviour and decisions but do they need MR? Maybe we should think the unthinkable!”

Paul Child highlighted the problem of marrying NewMR with the sorts of briefs we tend to get from clients. If we propose methods that cede control, that introduce risk, and which may not go in exactly the direction the client wants, we are likely to have a few wonderful successes and many ‘no thanks’. A similar point is made by John Pawle about the increasing marginalisation of research buyers within their own organisations. I think this comes back to Fiona Blades that we need to be so exciting that marketers, planners, strategists, and even CEOs are calling for NewMR (but they probably won’t know we call it NewMR).

Stephen Cribbett pointed out that our current conversation is amongst a group of people who used to do Old MR, with all of us trying to work out what NewMR should be. Are there people out there, with no history or baggage of Old MR who are already inventing and doing what we shall one day call NewMR? Can we find out more about what they are doing?

Dan Foreman makes the very important point that NewMR seems to be where the conversation is, but Old MR is where most of the money is. NewMR has to generate profits if it is to be meaningful.

Ongoing thoughts

I think this has been a great first discussion. However, it is clear that if we are to get NewMR to be something that generates what Nick Coates called a Copernican Revolution, we need to be generate benefits and profits. Benefits and profits to our clients. Profits to our profession (and ideally benefits). And, benefits to customers (or why else will they co-operate).

Comments

[Anna Cliffe, Head of Insight Brahm]

I think there are some people doing new MR already ... online media planners. They're using data created by how people behave online (Search, analytics, web buzz etc) to understand behaviour online, and to predict it. I know this isn't exactly co-creation / collaboration territory, but it is ceding control ... and it is an entirely new form of data based on conversations and actions. There isn't the same baggage about 'asking the right questions' and there's much less focus on demographics, interestingly. Behaviour is the key.

[twitter.com/parthajha]

Boundary blurring is right. One recent model has been interesting. Interacting with an agency which delivers insights ->hypotheses-> experiments -> design prototypes / solutions->feedback etc. Allow MR/Insights to impact at all levels and lead both conceptual as well as execution thinking. An IDEO avatar of MR where it takes over the business problem and enters the heart of decision making.