The Future Place Blog

Are e-ethnography and netnography the same thing?

I quite often hear the terms e-ethnography and netnography as being used for the same phenomena, but do they always mean the same thing?

I wonder whether netnography relates to just the Internet, whereas e-ethnography also includes using mobile phones to capture aspects of people's lives, such as the way MESH Planning us it?

Are there other phrases that are also being used in this space?

The role of Twitter in market research?

A new discussion on this aspect of NewMR is taking place on LinkedIn here. If you want to hear what some of the leaders in the field are saying, read about some great resources, and if you are a member of LinkedIn why not join the discussion.

One leading player in this are is Nigel Legg and he has an interesting post on Twitter lists on his blog.

Is this the best blog about online MR?

I was asked on Friday to list a few blogs that somebody new to the latest news in online research, should follow. My number one choice was Vovici's Jeffrey Henning, see his blog here.

Jeffrey's special attribute is the sheer volume of his blogging. At the recent ESOMAR Online Conference in Chicago Jeffrey captured the key elements AND data from most of the presenations as they happened, and posted about them a few minutes later.

So, that was my first recommendation. What would yours have been?

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).

ESOMAR publish my Online Conference Report - online

ESOMAR asked me write a report on their recent Online Conference in Chicago. I delivered the report to them Monday morning and it is up on their website today, just a day later, nicely formatted, and with photos. Well done ESOMAR.

I will be interested to see whether the other attendees agree with my take. In particular, do they agree that 2010 will be all about Listening?

ESOMAR Online Conference gets off to a great start

I am lucky enough to attend quite a few conferences, especially online and New MR ones. One result of this is that it is less common for me to see really interesting/exciting stuff. However, the first day of the ESOMAR Online Conference in Chicago has been an exception, with several good papers and a couple of really good sessions.

I think special mention needs to be made about three of the papers presented by younger researchers. Volker Bilgram of HYVE in Germany gave us a great co-creation case study, based on Swarovski. Josephine Hanson presented a very nice case study of how GfK has been exploring the role of bloggers, and producing a segmentation of motivations.

The stars of the day were probably Anneliese Verhaeghe from InSites (the Belgian agency that seems to be turning up everywhere) and Emilie van den Berge from RTL in the Netherlands. However, there X Factor story did raise scary images of Svengali and Trilby in my mind.

Perhaps the most informative session, and one that abounded with Opportunities and Threats was Tom Anderson's session with Facebook and LinkedIn. Could the initiative in our industry be moving to the social networks?

The main theme of the day was listening - which will probably the main theme of 2010.

The future of online panels

The current edition of Research World (the ESOMAR monthly magazine) has a very interesting range of articles (plus one by me). However, there is one which seems peculiarly off-beam, namely the one by Philip Garland  about possible reforms to the provision of quantitative sample.

Garland does highlight some real problems, in particular the problem that the supply of people willing to take part in surveys is declining. He also highlights that the consequence of this could be a reduction in the ability of quantitative research to help businesses make decisions.

However, I feel there is much in the article which misses the point. I have written this blog because I think there are many people who share Garland’s analysis. I feel there are too many people pulling in the wrong direction, and this is my go at pushing things in what I think is the right direction.

Garland’s last paragraph starts with “Survey research data is something we can’t afford to live without.”  I think this is simply wrong. I love survey data and it has contributed to the money I have earned over the last thirty years. However, if we did not have survey data we would survive, we would find other ways of improving decisions. We might, for example, adopt a predictive markets approach (like the Iowa Electronic Markets), we might mine the information from blogs, we might have large scale conversations via communities, or we might be even more creative and come up with twenty new solutions.

Garland believes that legislators might seek to protect the interests of those who provide surveys. Speaking as somebody who has spent the last 26 years as an elected politician, I find that very, very unlikely. Yes, I think politicians will attempt to leave a niche whereby they can obtain information useful to them, but if they can get votes by restricting commercial or social research, they would do it like a shot.

Garland talks about regulating the activities of survey companies to protect the pool of potential respondents. The problem is that this will simply accelerate the shift of business towards non-research panels, brand panels, and large-scale Tremor like panels. If we limit research companies we aid our competitors and potentially make life worse for respondents.

Garland highlights the phenomenon that the price of scarce resources normally increases, but he feels that this has not happened in the research business. I think this is exactly what has happened. The incentives paid to respondents, especially hard-to-reach respondents, has increased. What has decreased is the total cost of surveying people, because of the shift from random selection, face-to-face surveys to self-completion online surveys via panels. In the old model an interviewer might re-visit the same house many times to secure an interview, now we simply send an email to a larger sample. Quantitative research has changed, over the last ten years, from one where the cost of the interviews was the major driver of the project’s price to the end client, to one where the field cost has become increasingly marginal.

Garland feels that market research agencies act as monosponies, i.e. as monopoly buyers, driving the price of the poor sample suppliers down. The problem with this perception is that market research agencies are not the consumers of research. Clients approach multiple agencies, some of whom will buy from a range of sample suppliers and others who will have in-house or established partners. The largest agencies probably have quite a bit of leverage, but I doubt that agencies are often in a monopoly buyer position.

The most shocking comment in the article was the claim that “However, to deliver these interviews, suppliers often resorted to interviewing the same person twice or more…”. This claim that some panel companies and/or market research agencies knowingly and deliberately interviewed the same person twice (presumably without the knowledge of the end client) is truly shocking. Most people engaged in the industry are aware of the problem of duplicates in panels, and across panels, which is why technologies such as digital fingerprinting are of such interest. But, this is the first time I have seen somebody in a market research magazine say that some of the providers ‘resorted’ to doing this ‘often’. I think Mr Garland should name names, rather than leave everybody wondering which panel companies and agencies he is talking about.

My thoughts for the future?

1.       Online access panels cannot be used for random probability sampling. As we fully digest this information we will start to explore alternatives. Both alternative paradigms and alternative sources.

2.       In ten years I think we will be doing far fewer quantitative surveys with panel members. I think we will be interacting more with custom communities and finding ways of reaching people who are not on panels or communities (for example customers, Facebook, LinkedIn).

3.       I think panels will increasingly become more like ‘expert’ panels. People doing 50 to 250 surveys a year will be more knowledgeable than most researchers. We will move towards a ‘wisdom of crowds’ approach, towards people trained in the use of specific approaches, people working as citizen reporters, amateur ethnographers, and eventually coders and semioticians.

4.       I think mixed-use panels, where members engage in marketing, research, advocacy, and co-creation will become more important than research only panels.

5.       However, in ten years there will still be some research only panels, looking at market-wide phenomena, and providing high-quality research, looking very much like the best of today.

New MR – the book?

At the moment I am pulling together a book proposal for an introduction to New MR.

My line of thinking is broadly:

1. The Internet, Web 2.0, and societal changes have created a wide range of new techniques, from blog mining, to predictive markets, to online communities, to e-thnography.
2. At the same time the growth in online access panels has left most traditional assumptions about random probability sampling redundant and books such as Buyology and Predictably Irrational have cast doubt on respondents’ ability to answer traditional market research questions.
3. Although there are conference papers and informative blogs that look at these new techniques, there is no authoritative book which introduces market researchers to this new canon of knowledge.
4. The most pressing need is for an introduction that uses cases studies to illustrate the sorts of problems that these new techniques are addressing, why they are being preferred to older techniques, and how clients are using the insights generated.

As I said at the top of the post, I am currently pulling the proposal together, which means I am refining the scope of the book and looking for case studies.

My current scope is broadly:

• Why much of current market research is broken. This will probably be an appendix as not everybody will be interested. The main points are 1) the statistical assumptions are no longer true, 2) many of the questions we ask are meaningless, 3) the process often takes too long, and 4) produces results that are not sufficiently helpful.
• Using online access panels. This is not the most exciting topic, but I think that the MR industry has not yet got to grips of a world where respondents are a self-selecting group, answering 50 plus surveys a year (which means a typical panel member sees more surveys than a typical market researcher). There is some really interesting work going on in terms of engagement and quality and I think this needs pulling together.
• Social Networks and MR. The different ways that networks such as Facebook can be used by market researchers, including using them to source sample for conventional surveys.
• Twitter. There are some really interesting developments going on in this area, and more are appearing almost daily.
• Blog and Buzz mining. Why ask some of the people when you can listen to all of them? What are the benefits and shortcomings of this approach?
• Social Panels. A number of the panel companies have made major strides to make their panels more social. What are the benefits, to members, to panels, to clients, to researchers?
• DIY Research. An increasing number of research users are using tools such as Survey Monkey and Zoomerang. I think there is interest in understanding when this is a good idea and when it is not.
• E-ethnography. Most mobile phones now have cameras, in many cases capable of taking video, and researchers are increasingly using these to capture snapshots of people’s lives.
• Predictive Markets. Drawing on the writing of James Surowiecki and the example of the Iow Electronic Markets, predictive markets are being used to create research that does not depend on assumptions of random probability sampling.
• Mobile Research. With the ubiquity of mobile phones and the growth of sophisticated devices such as iPhones there has been an explosion on interest in the use of mobile phones in market research.
• Online Research Communities. I think this will be the largest section of the book, since this is the area of greatest interest in the MR industry at the moment. There are a wide range of issues to cover, small versus large, short-term versus ongoing, client-run versus agency-run, branded versus topic focused, open versus closed. This section will look at several cases studies showing the range of things that are currently being tried and implemented.

If you have any suggestions I would be really pleased to hear them.

Also, are you aware of any books already published in this area (I really don’t want to reinvent any wheels)?

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.

What’s wrong with Traditional Research?

In the last two or three years we have seen an explosion of interest in Research 2.0, e-ethnography, semiotics, and a growing concern that the traditional model of doing market research is broken.

The worries about traditional research include:

1. Falling response rates mean that assumptions about random probability sampling are unjustified.
   
2. The use of online access panels also means that models built on standard sampling theory, i.e. a sample of the population predicting the whole because of Gaussian assumptions, do not apply.
   
3. The revelations by people like Martin Lindstrom (in his book Buyology) that most customers do not know why they do things, throw real doubt on the way that many quant studies are presumed to work. This is especially true of customer sat and concept testing.
   
4. In a ‘long tail world’, consumers have too many choices to readily capture them in most surveys. Increasingly, quant surveys are like a trawler throwing out a damaged net into a small part of a large sea and hoping he will catch the most important fish, or, indeed, any fish at all.
   
5. Many clients are voicing a worry that research is too slow, too expensive, and that it usually fails to provide actionable advice.

However, I believe answer is emerging; an answer that I think is best defined as New MR. I will be writing more on New MR shortly.