Seven years later, another crisis. While reflecting on my September trip to Montreal for the ESOMAR Congress, I realized that the last time I attended the organization’s annual conference was in September 2001 in Rome, mere days after the 9/11 attacks.

Back then, while I and my fellow American attendees tried to concentrate on the business at hand, I recall that every conversation, no matter which topic it started on, eventually made its way to the attacks and their aftermath.

Fast-forward to Montreal for this year’s gathering, where the talk of a world financial meltdown served as a backdrop.

In Rome, while there were countless expressions of sympathy, there was definitely a sense among our fellow conference attendees that this was something that had happened to “you Americans.” (Back then it wasn’t yet clear that Al Qaeda had more than just U.S. targets on its list.)

At Congress 2008, the talk changed from “you” to “we.” Though much of the news about the financial disaster originated out of Washington, D.C., as elected officials debated the merits of the bailout, it was clear that the problem was a global one, as markets around the world tanked and governments rushed to deal with a rash of financial institution failures.

Musing about all of this, my first thought was, being a superstitious type, that I am now afraid what might happen the next time I go to another ESOMAR Congress. The second was that the evidence mounts by the day that we truly live in a global economy.

Duh, you say, tell me something I don’t know.

I hear you. But listening to the themes touched on by the various conference presenters, set against the cultural context of the dire pronouncements coming from the newspapers I read over breakfast and the cable networks I watched in my hotel room in the evenings, the one-worldness of it all suddenly slapped me in the face. And frankly it kind of terrified me and made me glad that global marketing isn’t part of my job title. Because at the same time that the world economy is becoming one huge, inextricably-linked organism, markets and media are growing more and more fragmented.

Option anxiety

I recall decades ago jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, being asked why, as guitar synthesizers were rapidly gaining popularity, he had taken so long to finally make a record with one. He talked about the problem of option anxiety - the stress that he felt when being confronted with all of the millions of possible combinations of sonic colors and timbres and tones that electronic signal processing offered him. Things were much simpler when he could just plug in his trusty Gibson ES-175 and switch on the amp.

I imagine global brand marketers - and, really, marketers of almost any well-known product or service these days - are feeling the same kind of panic. The advent of Web-based and associated e-media (cell phones, e-mail, PDAs, etc.) and the decline of newspapers and the big three TV networks has exploded the mass media into a thousand (a million?) tiny pieces. At the same time, target markets are growing more and more fragmented and specialized. If you’d like to reach college students with your message, why bother with the cost of broadcasting a 30-second spot on a hit sitcom when you can use online ads and text messaging to narrowcast your way into the lives of your coveted consumers? The choices and possibilities are at once wonderfully and maddeningly limitless.

An endless array

The theme of the 2008 ESOMAR Congress was, simply, “Frontiers” and many of the presenters worked off/commented on/explored that concept as it applies to marketing and marketing research, some with greater success than others. We are facing a new frontier - or maybe an endless array of them, if you want to consider each new potential market or each new potential advertising and marketing medium as a frontier.

While I respect and believe in the abilities of marketing research, I’ll temper the usual “research can save the world” tone that I strike in this space and refrain from suggesting that research is the only way to figure out how to successfully explore these new vistas.

Still, facing a customer landscape dotted with question marks (What products do they want? What is the best way to reach them? What messages will they respond to?) I can’t think of too many other, better ways to start exploring new (or even familiar) territory than by using some form of research to open a dialog with the people you’d most like to market to.

That word - dialog - was one that I heard quite a bit from those on the dais. The analog in marketing is relationship marketing and while it’s certainly not realistic or even worthwhile to establish long-term, ongoing relationships with every research respondent, several of the presenters spoke of using methods that forge bonds with consumers. The hope is that by using research to get closer to your customers you not only demonstrate that you care about their needs and opinions but that you might also be able to elicit more honest, unvarnished feedback from them.

Creative minds

I’m still fearful that our world economy has become too interrelated, but listening to the enthusiastic researchers who shared their findings at the ESOMAR event at least made me feel that creative minds are at work, puzzling out solutions to evermore complex marketing and information issues. Rather than dooming us to failure, I think (I hope!) the fact that we are all in this together is what will end up ensuring our success.