Research-Live today has a report from the South African Marketing Research Association saying that they are calling for a greater distinctin between research and marketing. In the short term, I think they are right to press for a separation, because of the exemptions for MR that can be achieved, for example greater freedom to contact people, but I fear that in the medium term the battle will be lost.
I say this, and have posted a comment on the Research-Live site, because I am not sure that we will be able to maintain a distinction between marketing and MR much longer. We might be able to prevent MR professionals being involved in marketing, but we can't stop marketing subsuming most aspects of MR.
From CRM, to immersion exercises, to online communities, to social media monitoring, and to response marketing, firms are finding that they get ever larger amounts of their insight from marketing related activities, not from standalone market research. If MR cuts itself off from this process we will be an ever decreasing sector, decreasing in share and I believe in absolute volume.
When I was a child there were lots of coal merchants in my area, but now they are very rare, because almost nobody buys coal. Kodak survived because it expanded out of the film business, Nokia prospered because it got out of the white goods business, I think MR needs to change or die. I think that in the future (maybe the near future) very few organisations will want to buy standalone, traditional market research.
As we take more ownership of our careers, the lines between silos blur...
Posted by: Panoptika | June 02, 2011 at 03:47 PM