Now and for the future

Editor’s note: John Wittenbraker is managing director at Media, Pa., research firm GfK Brand and Communications.

Innovation, insight, action ... all concepts that seem to be on everyone’s lips in the marketing research profession. Whether it’s marketers challenging themselves to maintain their relevance and currency in the corporation or marketing research providers staking out leadership positions in the marketplace, these aspirations are driving forces in our industry.

But how do we fulfill these aspirations? What does the future of marketing and advertising research look like? What professional and organizational traits will be successful in the future? What topics or areas will be hot? What tools will be required to get to where we need to be? What developments seem to be short-lived and what do we think will have enduring value in the next five to 10 years?

To help gain insight on some of these questions, GfK, in collaboration with the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), undertook a survey of ARF members (and followers). The anonymous 10-minute interviews were conducted in February and March 2010 among 249 professionals on the ARF’s e-mail list.

How do we feel?

We live in interesting times. Large multinational research firms are growing by acquisition and organic growth, marketers are challenging their research partners to provide more value, the Internet and digital innovations continue to transform the marketplace and new research technologies are being developed and commercialized. In the face of all this change, how do we feel about our profession today and what do we think we’ll be like in the future? Respondents were asked to rate whether a variety of words or phrases describe the advertising and marketing research profession right now and whether they think the relevance of each one will increase, remain unchanged or decrease over the next five to 10 years.

The industry is at a crossroad. Respondents say that these are exciting times but also challenging times. They predict that the future of the marketing research profession will be driven more by a combination of creativity and technical capability. These insights are based on a quadrant analysis (Figure 1) where the horizontal axis reflects where respondents feel we are today and the vertical axis shows how they feel things will change over the next five to 10 years. The lower-right quadrant illustrates what could be considered Enduring Traits - characteristic of today, with little expected change in the future. While respondents feel the industry is challenged and fragmented they also find it personally fulfilling, full of opportunity, exciting and valuable to society. So even as we just now seem to be coming out of a recession, marketing research professionals feel that the industry is delivering value today and has promise for the future.

So what about the future? How will industry traits and success factors evolve by 2020? Our results show that professionals expect the industry to pivot in the coming years to be a more creative, yet more methodologically advanced, profession. First, note that none of the current hallmarks of the industry are predicted to accelerate in the next 10 years (the upper-right quadrant is empty). Nevertheless, many of the Enduring Traits in the lower-right will be more slowly dynamic, with a net difference in expected increase of 10 percent to 20 percent.

The more dramatic sea change is illustrated by the array of characteristics in the upper-left, Developing Traits quadrant. These are traits that are not strongly associated with our business today but are predicted to be more characteristic of the business in the next five to 10 years. At the top of the list is the prediction that the industry will be more methodologically advanced. This clearly reflects the growing complexity of the evolving marketing environment, the explosion of data sources available and the drive to develop ways to integrate all of this information to produce more incisive insights and drive better business decisions.

This conclusion is supported by open-end data captured in the survey. Respondents were asked to speculate about what the industry’s biggest challenge will be in the year 2020. The most common word used in their responses was “data.” When the analysis was narrowed on those verbatims that mentioned data, it was clear that the challenge is to have the requisite methodological/analytic capability to integrate large amounts of data from multiple sources and render meaningful and actionable insights (see Figure 2).

Interestingly, it’s not just better methodological and analytic capability that people feel will drive industry change. Innovation and creativity are also Developing Traits, expected to be on the rise in the future. So despite the conventional wisdom in some quarters that the marketing research profession is being slowly marginalized into a commodity, results show that the rapid increase in complexity may provide a new rush of creativity into the industry. In the end, these advances should help us improve on some of the most important challenges the industry faces, namely, being persuasive and influential in the boardroom. The profession clearly has opportunity to improve on value delivery and our respondents predicted that the research community will rise to this challenge.

Is the industry ready for this change? Does the talent pool exist that’s needed to meet this exciting opportunity? The data suggest that our success at capitalizing on this shift will depend on our ability to adapt to the skills required to drive innovation. Roughly seven out of 10 respondents felt that 1) “finding and keeping talented researchers” and “innovative thinking in market research” are both timeless challenges and 2) did not feel that it is getting any easier to find qualified people to work in advertising and marketing research.

Topics ebb and flow

With so much innovation going on in the industry, sometimes it can be a challenge to keep track of what’s hot and what’s not. Topics ebb and flow in professional and academic publications; we think about the new firms showing their wares at the ARF re:Think, IIR or ESOMAR meetings but this is mostly retrospective. What are the emerging trends? What topics are truly timeless? And what might be just passing fads?

The survey asked respondents to rate a wide array of topics as:

Fading fast: Its days are numbered.

Trendy: Here today, but maybe gone tomorrow.

Timeless: Tried-and-true and will be around for a while.

Cutting-edge: We’ll be seeing more of this.

Respondents were also allowed to check for “Don’t know” (hard to say) and “No idea” (for those were unfamiliar with the topic).

Three main patterns of response for the topics emerged. There was a strong modal response for a variety of Timeless Topics, hallmarks of the profession that appear to have enduring relevance (Figure 3, first panel). These include (in order of permanence): brand strategy/management; customer loyalty; marketing/advertising effectiveness; innovation; cultural trends; media planning/mix analysis; CRM; shopper insights and multicultural marketing.

There are two research topics that are truly hot Emerging Trends: digital marketing and mobile marketing (Figure 3, second panel). With large shares of advertising dollars shifting from traditional to digital media, it’s not surprising to see research on digital media as a cutting-edge topic. Mobile marketing is not far behind, both in growing spend and as a hot subject for the research industry. And the blurring of the distinction between the two topics with the iPad, netbooks and emerging ideas and business models for streaming advertising across these platforms will most likely keep this area hot for the foreseeable future. However, taken in context with the dominance of the Timeless Topics above, industry professionals view these Emerging Trends to be more of a expansion, or evolution, rather than a revolution in the field.

Touchpoint effectiveness echoes the pattern of an Emerging Trend but had a weaker endorsement as Cutting-Edge compared to digital/mobile advertising. (In general, touchpoint effectiveness refers to how various channels and other modes of consumer contact - paid and unpaid - perform in communicating brand messages and impacting purchase. These might include advertising, customer service, public relations, point-of-sale, sponsorship, etc.) Overall familiarity with this topic was not as strong as for the other topics, which flattened the effect across the response options. Touchpoint impact is likely to continue to have currency as it is a component of the larger and more timeless “marketing effectiveness” topic noted above.

Finally, there are topics that we might consider Transitional Trends, seen by some as cutting-edge but viewed by others as passing trends (Figure 3, third panel). This bi-modal response was seen for “impact of social networks” and “neuroscience.” While these topics may have been hot at one time, there is some evidence that they either may appeal only to a narrow niche in the marketplace or perhaps have limited staying power. Time will tell how these transitions will resolve as these technologies are further developed in the marketplace.

Similar patterns

Digging a layer deeper, what do professionals think about the future relevance of a wide range of tools in use or in development in the research industry? Respondents were asked to rate these tools on the same Fading Fast to Cutting-Edge scale that was used for the research topics. Not surprisingly, similar patterns in the results emerged for tools.

Timeless Tools included the related media/marketing mix modeling and econometric modeling. Respondents also reported some core data collection methodologies as timeless such as online surveys, focus groups and ethnography (Figure 4, first panel).

Professionals view mobile and passive, behavioral measures of market response as Emerging Technologies (Figure 4, second panel). This includes data collection via mobile phone; passive data collection (GPS, RFID, microchip) and Web usage/tracking technologies. Interestingly, it looks like Web tracking may already be maturing into a Timeless Tool as this is the modal response for this expanding technology. This could be accelerating due to the integration of this functionality into many online services like Google and Amazon.

Not surprisingly, the market research toolbox has a number of technologies that are seen as Transitional Trends (Figure 4, third panel). Most of these tools align with the topics that were seen as transitional. Social media/Web conversation monitoring and measurement, automated text analysis (semantic/sentiment analysis) and customized online communities were seen as Cutting-Edge by some, but Trendy by others. Similarly, just as neuroscience appeared as a Transitional trend, so was neuro/biometric measurement as a tool. Either because these tools are seen as relevant only to a segment of the market or because their broad-scale applicability is yet to be proven, these tools are in a state of flux in the marketplace. They may gain currency with a demonstration of broader relevance or may be relegated to narrower application.

Finally, among the tools included in the survey, only telephone surveys proved to be in decline. While telephone interviewing will continue to be necessary for some targets and in some regions, it’s clear that the long-term viability of phone interviewing is not promising.

Quickly adapt

What does all of this mean for the marketing and advertising research community? Right now, marketing research is seen as exciting, fulfilling and full of opportunity. However, it’s clear the industry needs to be able to quickly adapt to the growing complexity of marketing in a digital world and the expansion of data streams that becoming available from it. To achieve success in the world of today and of tomorrow, it’s paramount that professionals marshal all these resources to provide marketers with a view of their own possible futures that will help them make better decisions today.