The Future Place Blog

Great Parody of Wikipedia

I particularly liked the sting in the tail about Encycolpedia Britanica.

Longevity league tables

With all the fuss about health reform, and discussion about whose health system is the best, I had a look at the CIA World Fact Book for some comparative data.

For Brits the bad news is that we are ranked 36th, well behind our neighbour France which was ranked 9th, and behind English speaking Austalia(7th) and Canada (8th), the US came in somewhat behind at 50.

The top five were: Macau, Andorra, Japan, Singapore, and San Marino. Three in Asia, two in Europe, it looks more like the way people live rather than ethnicity.

An exciting month coming up

On Thursday I will be flying off to Australia for what will be the start of an exciting month of meetings and conferences. For two weeks I will be in Australia, during which time I will be running three presentation workshops, one new media workshop, and about ten presentations to corporations on the benefits of using new media as part of their research programmes. My last event in Australia will be as keynote speaker to the Australian Marketing Institute’s Government Marketing Conference in Melbourne.

After the AMI conference I will rush back to the UK to help organise our first rugby match of the season, but I probably won’t play as I am running the Robin Hood Half Marathon the day after. After the run I am off to Montreux in Switzerland for the ESOMAR Congress where I will be running a Master Class in the use of communities for market research, and I am really looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones.

In the weeks after Congress I already have a number of client meetings set up and I will be producing two webinars with Virtual Surveys.

I will try to Tweet my way through this month, and will hopefully learn at least as much as I share.

Although the schedule above looks fun, I do need to finish 2 papers, 5 presentations, and a magazine article (for Research World) before next Monday, as well as a stack of marketing science projects that need dealing with over the next three days.

The death of the landline?

Great article in the Economist about the growing number of mobile only households. Massive implications for the future of both CATI and mobile research.

How we should determine our compassion?

At the moment the airwaves are full of comment and recrimination about the Scottish Government’s decision to allow the Libyan terrorist Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who was convicted of being responsible for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which blew up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people, the majority of whom were US citizens.

The thrust of the Scottish Justice Minister’s cases is:

1.       Megrahi is guilty of a terrible crime, and has shown no remorse.

2.       Megrahi has been judged to be dying of prostrate cancer, and it is officially assumed that he has a few weeks left to live.

3.       Megrahi showed no compassion for all the people he killed, nor for their families.

4.       However, the Scottish system is that the standard of compassion they judge themselves by is a higher standard than that of a terrorist.

Some people do not believe that Megrahi is guilty, but the Justice Minister is not allowed to believe that, because he is the Government’s Minister. Some people believe Megrahi is not as ill as the doctors say he is, but again the Justice Minister can’t over-rule the doctors on a medical diagnosis.

The arguments against Megrahi’s release appear to fall into 3 groups:

a)      UK politicians, from other parties, who appear to see a political advantage in attacking the Justice Minister (who is a member of the Scottish National Party).

b)      People and politicians from other countries and cultures, where the concept of compassion in determining the implementation of courts’ decisions is not part of their system. In particular, the US system appears to be much more ‘Old Testament’, and is simply different to the Scottish system.

c)       People who think that we should not show compassion to somebody who has not shown compassion to his victims.

The first position is, IMHO, morally bankrupt, but all too common. The second position is completely understandable, group A does not like group B’s system.

However the third position strikes me as a logical nonsense. If we only show compassion to people who ‘deserve’ it, we will never actually show compassion. Not only that, if we set as our standard, as the same as that of the terrorist, we are just engaging in a race for the bottom.

I do not have enough information to know whether Megrahi is guilty, nor do I know he will die within a few weeks. But if we assume that both of these are true, I think that releasing him as a sick and infirm man to die at home with his family (and remember his family have done nothing wrong) makes our society a better place, and if we had insisted he had died in a cell, or in a hospital ward with a prison officer at the foot of the bed, we would have been a lesser society.

I am sure that if a friend or relative of mine had died in the bombing, I would feel different. But that is why, in a civilised society, we have people who are not personally involved to determine individual cases.

The next big thing? Or, even the next medium-sized thing?

As part of my preparation for my presentations to the AMI and ESOMAR conferences in September, I have been pulling my thoughts together about what I think will happen in the near future, and as part of that I have been talking to young people about what they are doing and seeing?

I suspect that at the moment we are in a period of relative consolidation, rather than fragmentation.

The feedback that I am getting is that the core features being used by the ‘young’ set are:

• Spotify
• Twitter (a phenomenon spreading from old people to younger people, how weird is that)
• Facebook (with MySpace and Bebo losing ground heavily) – hardly new
• MSN and Facebook messaging, with other messaging systems losing ground, again not what anybody would call new
• Collaborative gaming

In terms of devices, the key thing seems to be the shift away from music players towards using the phone (and even more movies on phones), growth in the use of netbooks, and for those who drive an almost total dependence on Sat Navs.

'Play on demand' seems pretty big, but for many of them in the UK this means putting something like ‘Mock the Week’ on iPlayer, which again is hardly something ‘new’.

In terms of transactions, the big players seem to be getting even more established, from Amazon to ticketmaster.

What are your observations?

What do you think the ‘next thing’ will be?

Do you think the 'next thing' will come from the youth, in the way social networks did, or from older users in the way iPlayer and Twitter did?

What do you think the key points of the last 10 years were?

In September, I am a keynote speaker at the Australian Marketing Institute’s ‘Government Marketing and Communications Conference’, in Melbourne.

The title of my session is ‘A Decade of Change. No, not the last one, the next one!’, which sets out my vision of the accelerating change for the next decade, which I think will dwarf the amazing changes we have seen over the last ten years.

In order to help convey the way the world is changing, I am producing a simple handout that looks at the last ten years, from 1999, to highlight just how quickly the world is changing. My current, rough draft, list of key events and dates is set out below, and I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. Note, the list has a slight Western and Australian bias, but should otherwise be representative.

Year	Event
1999	·       Population reaches 6 billion ·       Macau is transferred back to China ·       Boris Yeltsin resigns, Putin takes over ·       Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic join NATO, just ten years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall ·       Napster launched ·       Apple releases the fist iBook ·       MSN Messenger released ·       Google opens first offices in California ·       MySpace launched ·       Blackberry launched ·       Internet advertising breaks $2billion barrier
2000	·       India reaches 1 Billion population ·       Summer Olympics, Sydney Australia ·       G W Bush elected president, replacing Bill Clinton ·       Y2K did not bring computers to a standstill ·       ISS (International Space Satellite) permanently manned ·       AOL buys Time Warner ·       Threadless.com launched     ·       405 the Movie, first movies distributed via the Internet ·       65% of people in Finland have a mobile phone ·       Google Ad Words launched ·       Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell published
2001	·       9/11 Twin Towers ·       Afghanistan War begins ·       USA Patriot Act passed – step change in anti-terror laws and surveillance ·       China joins WTO (World Trade Organisation) ·       Enron files for bankruptcy ·       Netherlands first country to recognise same sex marriages ·       Wikipedia launched ·       P&G launch Tremor Panel ·       iPod launched ·       Japan launches first 3G mobile phone system
2002	·       The Euro currency issued ·       National Front (far right) Le Pen beats the socialist to take second place in the run off election, won by Jacques Chirac ·       Dutch anti-immigrant politician Pim Fortuyn assassinated ·       East Timor granted independence ·       Lula da Silva elected President of Brazil ·       ICC (International Criminal Court) established ·       US Department of Homeland Security established ·       Guantanamo Bay starts holding terror suspects ·       Airline Ansett files for bankruptcy ·       WorldCom files for bankruptcy ·       Dot.com crash reaches its lowest point ·       1 billion mobile phones in use ·       Number of fixed telephone lines per 100 people in developed markets starts falling ·       Ale Smidts coins the term Neuromarketing
2003	·       Shuttle Columbia destroyed on re-entry ·       10 million people protest at proposed Iraq War ·       Iraq War begins ·       Libya admits having nuclear bomb ·       SARs identified ·       Martha Stewart indicted on fraud charges ·       California ‘recall’ Governor Gray Davis and elect Arnold Schwarzenegger ·       Human Genome sequencedLast Concorde flight ·       Second Life launched ·       The term Web 2.0 coined ·       Wordpress and TypePad, the leading blogging platforms, launched ·       Skype launched ·       iTunes launched ·       LinkedIn launched ·       Google AdSense launched
2004	·       CIA admits Iraq did not have WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) ·       Abu Ghraib prison abuse exposed ·       Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Malta and Cyprus join the European Union – 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall ·       Tsunami disaster in South-East Asia ·       Yasser Arafat dies ·       Dutch anti-Islam film maker Theo van Gogh assassinated ·       Republic of Ireland bans smoking in all enclosed workplaces, including bars and restaurants – a starting a global trend ·       Olympics in Athens ·       The last coal mine in France closes ·       South Korea announce cloning of 30 human embryos ·       ‘Rathergate’, CBS story exposed as hoax by bloggers ·       Facebook launched ·       Chinese PC maker Lenovo buys IBM’s PC division ·       Firefox launched ·       Google’s index reaches 6 billion items
2005	·       UK passes Prevention of Terrorism Act, extending terror and surveillance ·       Pope Benedict XVI elected ·       France and Netherlands reject European Constitution ·       July 7 terror bombings in UK, from ‘home grown’ terrorists ·       Bali bombings ·       “Les émeutes de banlieues de 2005” (The suburban riots of 2005), in Paris ·       Cronulla riots in Sydney ·       Kyoto protocol comes into force, in theory ·       Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans ·       Warmest year since records began (late 1800s) ·       Most expensive year for worldwide disasters ·       Adriana Iliescu gives birth at 66 ·       Surgeons in France carry out the first human face transplant ·       Scientists announce that they have created mice with small amounts of human brain cells in an effort to make realistic models of neurological disorders. ·       More than 500 million vote in a series of American Idol (US General Election 122 million votes) ·       YouTube goes online AJAX coined to reflect Asynchronous JavaScript XML – a key ingredient in Web 2.0 pages ·       Google Maps and Google Earth goes live ·       Google Analytics launched ·       Fred Reichhel launches the ultimate question (Net Promoter Score) ·       Australia is first market where online data collection is the largest single method, soon followed by Japan ·       The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, published ·       Freakanomics, Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner
2006	·       Russia cuts natural gas to Ukraine over a price dispute ·       Fidel Castro relinquishes power ·       Saddam Hussein executed ·       Pope Benedict criticises Islam, provoking protests ·       Al Jazeera launches its English language news channel ·       Warren Buffett donates over US$30 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ·       Avian flu scare ·       Sydney has warmest day on record, 45⁰C ·       The Chinese River Dolphin or Baiji becomes extinct ·       Pluto downgraded, no longer a planet, popular protests at ‘technocrats’ ·       Blue-ray disc format released ·       Play Station 3 released ·       The Wii released ·       Time magazine’s person of the year is “You” ·       Twitter launched ·       P&G CEO AG Lafley calls on brand to 'cede control' to customers ·       First market research agency in Second Life opens ·       The Long Tail, Chris Anderson, published ·       Wikinomics, Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams, published ·       The file Inconvenient Truth highlights climate change, winning an Oscar in 2007
2007	·       Bulgaria and Romania join EU ·       Angola joins OPEC ·       Russia cuts oil supplies to Poland, German, and Ukraine in dispute with Belarus ·       Russia is once again recognized as a full-fledged superpower by the United States ·       Russia withdraws from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe ·       Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and the Moscow Patriarchate re-unite after 80 years of schism ·       Vietnam joins the WTO ·       Benazir Bhutto assassinated in Pakistan ·       H5N1 bird flu found in UK ·       Sydney turns off the lights for an hour to highlight climate change ·       A Polish immigrant to Canada, dies after being tasered five times by the Vancouver RCMP, prompting nation-wide controversy on use of the weapon. ·       Estonia becomes first country to hold general Internet elections ·       Finland switches off all of its analogue terrestrial television signals as part of the digital switchover ·       60% of homes in Finland are mobile only, i.e. no landline ·       Number of fixed lines per 100 global citizens starts falling ·       The UK's HM Revenue and Customs admits that it has misplaced 2 computer discs which contained the records of child benefit claimants data, including bank details and National Insurance numbers, in the United Kingdom, leaving up to 7.25 million households susceptible to identity theft ·       iPhone launched ·       Microsoft Vista launched ·       Halo 3 released ·       Blackberry has 8 million subscribers ·       Asus Eee PC launches the netbook format ·       Google Street View launched ·       Herd, Mark Earls, published ·       The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb, published
2008	·       Dmitry Medvedev takes office as President of Russia, Vladimir Putin become Prime Minister ·       Ireland votes to reject the Treaty of Lisbon, in the only referendum to be held by a European Union member state on the treaty ·       Russia invade Georgia ·       Barack Obama elected US President ·       Petroleum hits USD$100 for the first time ·       Rising food and fuel prices cause riots in third world ·       First run on UK bank since 1866, Northern Rock taken in Government ownership ·       Lehman Brothers go bust ·       Global financial crisis starts ·       Russia loans Iceland 4 billion Euros ·       Australian PM Kevin Rudd says sorry to stolen generation ·       Riots and repression in Tibet – China escapes sanctions or meaningful criticism ·       Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologizes to Canada's First Nations for the Canadian residential school system ·       Beijing Olympics ·       Bill Gates steps down from running Microsoft ·       Large Hadron Collider starts in CERN, and breaks ·       Claudia Castillo of Spain becomes the first person to have a successful trachea transplant using a tissue-engineered organ ·       About one-quarter of the globe now using the Internet ·       4.1 billion mobile phones in use (global population = 6.7 billion) ·       28% of Africans have a mobile phone ·       Buyology, Martin Lindstrom, published ·       Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky, published ·       We-Think, Charles Leadbeater, published ·       Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely, published
2009	·       Russia shuts off all gas supplies to Europe through Ukraine. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin publicly endorses the move and urges greater international involvement in the energy dispute. ·       Albania and Croatia join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ·       U.S. President Barack Obama signs an order to close within a year the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, but is struggling to deliver on his promise ·       Sri Lankan civil war ends (?) ·       Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announces that Iran has launched its own satellite, "Omid", into orbit on an Iranian-built rocket ·       Gunmen attack a bus carrying Sri Lankan cricketers in Lahore, Pakistan, killing eight people and injuring several others ·       Deadliest bushfires in Australian history ·       Swine flu erupts, first outbreak to be called a pandemic since 1967/8 ·       Free, Chris Anderson, published

Will the new MRS rules drive more research out of the industry?

The UK's MRS has announced that one of the key elements of their new code of conduct is a strengthened interpretation banning the use of clients' products as incentives.

The historical reason for this rule is that a client incentive can be seen as distorting the market. For example, if everybody who takes part in a hall test is given a chocolate bar as an incentive, that might reduce the market opportunity for other brands to the tune of one market bar. Similarly, a game console research that offers a prize draw to win one of ten games consoles, means that ten of the respondents end up with the client's products, do not buy the competitor products, and will probably go on to buy branded games.

More recently the MRS have been making the point that the Information Commissioner's Office has been saying that giving client incentives could count as direct marketing. The importance of this guidance is that at the moment, in the UK, market research enjoys some exemptions from the Data Protection Act, which makes our life a tad easier, and market research could lose these exemptions if we annoy the Commissioner.

However, researchers have already started to highlight concerns about this new, stronger, interpretation.

One area researchers have highlighted is customer satisfaction, where client related incentives reduce the cost of research and appear to be more 'natural' to respondents than 'independent' incentives. Indeed, some researchers worry that the new interpretation will make many studies more expensive, at a time when buyers and providers of research are struggling with falling budgets.

I worry that this rule/interpretation ignores the wishes of some respondents, falling back into the mindset that we (the researchers) make the rules, and respondents should do as they are told.

As well as some customer satisfaction research, I think this rule will drive more online research communities out of the Market Research domain. Some researchers have found that when people sign up to an ongoing branded community, for example drinkers of a specific coffee brand, what they expect as their compensation is brand related, such as visits to the factory, news about product launches and changes, a chance to try new products, and yes product related incentives. People join a branded community because they want to improve that brand, they want to be hear, they want to be respected, and they often want to be more associated with the brand. A neutral incentive, such as cash or Amazon vouchers, changes the mindset of the community members, away from collaboration to being 'paid'.

I think might experience a significant schism in the research industry in the next few years, and I think the two sides of the argument are likely to be:

1. Technocracy: People who believe that research is, and/or could be, based on scientific principles of sampling theory, of analysis, of ‘house of quality’ procedures, of being independent of the client and the respondent, and of being the unobserved, passive observer. For these people, research is something we do to people.
2. Democracy: People who believe that what happens to respondents’ data should be determined by respondents, people who believe that customers and participants should have a major (possibly the primary role) in establishing the rules about what researchers can and can’t do. For these people, research is something we do with people.

I have chosen the term schism to highlight the potential for researchers to fall out in the way that religions have in the past. I fear that people will start hurling comments such as ‘heretic’ and anti-science.

Booking now for 2010

Over the last couple of years I have been honoured to accept invitations to speak at a number of events around the globe and to run workshops in a wonderful range of places including Europe, US, China, Russia, Singapore and Australia, and I am looking forward to being in North Africa later this year. However, I also had several invitations that I was not able to fit into my schedule because they came too late.

Like most of the people on the market research workshop/speaking circuit my diary for 2010 is already filling up quite fast. If you would like to think about me (or anybody for that matter) as an invited speaker or workshop leader, it would be good to make contact over the next month or so, even for events in the second half of 2010.

Marketing Magazine article

Marketing Magazine recently published an article I wrote for them about the value of online research communities. This article is also available online.

I have had some good feedback from the printed copy, so I hope you will find it of interest.