At press time in early April, while the economy is still struggling mightily, there are a few hopeful signs of life. The news remains mostly bad but the general feeling seems to be that we’re near the bottom and ready to start crawling back up.

In our own industry, the qualitative side appears to have been hit the hardest, based on anecdotal evidence from facility owners, who reported a dearth of bookings in January and February. On the quant side, our Research Industry News section this month has several entries on firms shuttering call centers and cutting staff.

While the hard times are certainly nowhere near over, I am hopeful that better days are ahead. My guarded optimism was boosted after listening to a recent Peanut Labs Webinar on the state of the industry. Titled “2009 Market Research Update,” the presentation painted a realistic view of our current situation - no cause for joy there. But toward the end of his talk, host Simon Chadwick sketched out a view of Research 3.0, as he termed it, that left me energized.

The Webinar reported results of an online survey undertaken by research firms Peanut Labs, MRops and Cambiar which drew responses from 185 research companies, 39 data collection companies and 67 client-side researchers. Industry veteran Chadwick, who is CEO of Peanut Labs and managing partner of Cambiar (along with being editor-in-chief of ESOMAR’sResearch World magazine – when does the man find time to sleep?), also offered his own observations based on talks with clients and others in the industry. (To access the Webinar materials, click on the [downloads] tab at www.peanutlabs.com and scroll down to the Webinars section.)

Relationship-building

One overarching theme was that of relationship-building, between marketers and consumers and also between marketers and their research vendors.

As clients are looking to establish more intimate relationships with their customers, they are turning to Web communities and other online-based efforts, Chadwick said. He mentioned McKinsey studies of firms in North America and Europe that suggest high-performing companies are more likely to use approaches such as ethnography; social networks and other Web-based communities and panels; trend experts; buzz networks; blog mining and neurolinguistics.

In these tougher times, Chadwick reported that some client-side researchers are looking to maintain and even strengthen bonds they have with preferred research suppliers, feeling that they have greater negotiating leverage with them. This may lead to deeper relationships between clients and research companies and may result in an ongoing, continual supplying of insights rather than one-off projects, Chadwick said. As evidence of that, the Peanut Labs study found that over 45 percent of research companies intend, in the next 12 months, to invest in building custom panels for clients.

The problem facing researchers during tight times on both the client and provider side is that more insights and a greater impact are expected of them, all in a setting in which there are fewer dollars and resources to go around. So how do you do more with less?

Researchers at client companies reported they are doing the following:

• putting more dollars into online focus groups and one-on-ones and fewer into offline ethnography;

• moving tracking studies online;

• doing more qualitative within quantitative to add more insights;

• combining quantitative and ethnography, to maintain their position within their companies as generators of data about customers while also getting to know them better; and

• conducting more online research in-house with their own resources and panels.

Accelerating a transformation

In general, Chadwick feels that the recession is just accelerating a transformation that had already been under way for some time. As we move into the Web 2.0 environment, research is evolving from being a type of interrogation (we ask, you answer) to being more of a dialogue with respondents.

Research also now involves a lot more listening and observation. There are countless forums through which consumers can express themselves these days, from the product reviews they post online to their tweets, blog postings and chat discussions. With information available from so many different types of sources, researchers of all stripes need to train themselves to be integrators of information, Chadwick said, to mine for insights, wherever they may be, and then become storytellers to communicate those insights in ways that individual audiences will respond best to.

One slide I particularly liked showed what Chadwick called the “molecular structure of Research 3.0,” with primary research in the center and a surrounding collection of other types of data gathering or sources of data, from ethnography; secondary research; Web-based listening posts like social media, Web and CRM analytics; knowledge mining (looking back at previously-gathered data) and data mining.

In this vision, research moves from being merely about conducting surveys toward a broader approach in which a project isn’t the product of a single survey. Instead, it encompasses a number of different (and potentially disparate, I would add) sources and the emphasis goes from data collection to data synthesis.

No single researcher can be versed in all of those areas, so the industry will need to broaden its outreach when it comes to attracting new talent to the industry, Chadwick said. Along with the essential statisticians and methodologists, he talked about recruiting Renaissance men and women, video gamers, writers, data miners and others.

Bright future

This Research 3.0 vision was the part that got me jazzed and made me hopeful that research can have a bright future. Far from the stereotype of the inflexible, numbers-obsessed sticklers (you know who you are), most researchers I have met have a strong creative streak and seem to enjoy the type of problem-solving tasks that each research project throws at them.

In my two decades at the helm of this magazine I have seen the industry adapt with admirable speed to the advent of the Internet. Sure there have been some missteps but with the many and varied applications of technology (Web-based and otherwise) to the research process that are coming to light each day, it’s clear that researchers are embracing change and seeing the promise that a creative, holistic approach of the kind outlined by Chadwick can not only help make the research function more relevant to today’s businesses but can also make the field an interesting, challenging and, dare I say, fun place to work.