Earlier this winter, the Council for Marketing and Opinion Research (CMOR) and the Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO) sponsored a conference on the issues facing the marketing research industry. In conjunction with the conference I chatted with two of the speakers, Larry Mock, manager, market research worldwide, Procter & Gamble, and William "Jay" Wilson, chairman/CEO of Roper Starch Worldwide Inc., Mamaroneck, N.Y., and CMOR board chairman.

Mock began by outlining challenges facing the marketing research industry:

  • Globalization. If companies hope to turn their brands into global entities, they must develop complex strategies to research global consumers. "Researchers now not only have to understand consumers in a particular geography but understand similarities and differences of consumers across geographies. That calls for designing standardized tools so that results can be compared across the geographies. It also places a lot of emphasis on improving the efficiency of conducting global research because in many cases that can be a cumbersome process," Mock says.
  • Interactive research: "The interactive world is adding new dimensions to research. It offers opportunities and also challenges. While we’re just at the frontier of some of the advantages that the Internet can bring us, we’re going to have to work our way through the complexities. The research companies are looking at ways to offer research users like ourselves more and better services that didn’t exist yesterday."
  • The proliferation of data: "The amount of data is increasing exponentially, and we’re going to get lost in it if we don’t develop ways to access it, store it, deliver it, analyze it, and most important of all to integrate it," Mock says.

Fourth hurdle

Each of these is a pressing matter, but they won’t matter at all if the industry doesn’t have any luck clearing the fourth hurdle: declining respondent participation rates.

"The basic value and integrity of what we do is very much a function of our ability to satisfy our respondent customers - I tend to look at them as customers. We have a lot to do as an industry to make them happy about the research process and more willing to be interviewed," Wilson says.

In its brief existence, CMOR has focused on combating state and federal legislation that threatens to directly or indirectly restrict marketing or public opinion research. And now it’s also trying to address the problem of declining respondent cooperation.

"We’ve done a lot in the legislative area and we’re very proud of the successes we’ve had in affecting legislation that, in most cases, if it were passed collectively could have put us out of business. But now we have an even bigger challenge: to turn around the attitudes that people have about the interviewing process," Wilson says.

The impact of telemarketer sugging (shorthand for "selling under the guise of research," in which the telemarketer couches the incipient sales pitch in words like "I’m calling from Company X and we’re conducting a survey of homeowners today...") can’t be underestimated. "Many consumers think that as soon as they get a phone call that there’s a sales pitch involved," Mock says. "And their quick refusal doesn’t give us enough time to get enough words in to assure them that we are indeed conducting a study."

(Fear of quick refusals must account for the rapid-fire delivery used by some of the interviewers who’ve called my house lately. As soon as I answer the phone they sputter half-intelligible syllables that seem to include their name, the research company they work for and the purpose of the call. I realize they’re trying to get out as much of their introduction as they can before I hang up or refuse but their anxious tone only adds to the feeling that I’m about to hear a pitch for beautiful, durable aluminum siding instead of a series of screening questions.)

Add to the mix answering machines, lengthy interviews and the generally busier lifestyles so many of us have and you have a bumpy road in between the researcher and a completed interview.

"We need to promote among users and providers the idea of shortening interviews, focusing on questions that are really key to the decision process and keeping the background questions to a minimum. Because we not only turn the consumer off for that interview but we turn them off for future research," Mock says.

"There’s some concern in the industry that if you step away from a very structured interview, you may damage the research results. Others feel that interviewers can’t be trained to be flexible where it’s OK to be flexible but not to be flexible where they really need to be. If we hire intelligent interviewers and train them well, they can make the judgment about where a line flexibility with the respondents can keep them hanging in there. I think we can do it without jeopardizing the comparability of one interview to another or one study to another if we do the right kind of training."

In tandem with those efforts, Mock says industry-wide guidelines and principles should be applied to every research project, and those guidelines should be communicated to the general public. "We can tell consumers, ’Good research looks like this, and you should expect that if you get called for a survey, the researcher will stay within these parameters and here’s a number to call if you have problems.’"

Show them the money

Of course, all these efforts require funding. CMOR is currently funded through contributions from research users and providers. While the Port Washington, N.Y., organization has done outstanding work on its current budget, it would be nice to have more. "What CMOR can do today with a limited budget is limited work. It’s good work but if we dramatically increase the funding, perhaps five-fold, from $600,000 to $3 million, a significantly larger amount of work can be done," Mock says.

’’We’ve done a lot to understand what our problems are," Wilson says, "and we have done some things that are helping but in order to really educate the public and start turning attitudes around we need increased funding. There’s nothing more important to the future of the research industry than the attention we give to our primary resource, our respondents."

One possible idea is a tiny tax on each interview, proceeds of which would go toward industry promotion and education efforts. Such a tax would more than pay for itself over time, Mock believes. Greater acceptance of research would enlarge the pool of willing respondents, improving the representativity of research. With more people willing to participate, fewer calls would have to be made to reach qualified respondents.

"We need to get consumers to the point where they understand the importance of research," Mock says, "where they’ve participated in studies before and they’re not left with the feeling of being beaten up. It’s short, it’s fun, they’ll do it again. "A very optimistic vision, if you want to get a little crazy about it, is that consumers will recognize the importance of research and hold it at a high enough level and also have enough fun with the process that we could call and leave a message on the answering machine to call us back and they’d do it."

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?