In conjunction with the American Marketing Association’s Attitude and Behavioral Marketing Research Conference in January, I moderated a lively and good-humored roundtable discussion with seven research industry members. The participants responded to questions on a variety of topics, including the changing role of research, the effect of downsizing, declining respondent cooperation rates, the impact of the Internet, and the increasing globalization of business.


The participants were:

  • Elyse Gammer, vice president, Dennis and Company, Inc., a Stamford, Conn., research firm, and president of the Marketing Research Association (MRA), Rocky Hill, Conn.
  • Pat Goodrich, director, Marketing Research Division, American Marketing Association (AMA), Chicago.
  • Barbara Hisiger, director of research, AT&T Labs, Murray Hill, N.J., and vice president, Marketing Research Division, American Marketing Association.
  • Mike Lotti, director, business research, consumer imaging, Eastman Kodak Co., Rochester, N.Y.
  • Wayne McCullough, director, marketing research and analysis, Banc One Corp., Columbus, Ohio.
  • Betsy Peterson, executive director, Marketing Research Association.
  • Juergen Schwoerer, director general, European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR), Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The following is an edited version of the two-hour discussion. Special thanks to Jamie Born, the AMA’s director of public relations, for assembling the panel.

- Joseph Rydholm/QMRR editor

QMRR: What factors have had the greatest impact on marketing research in recent years?

Betsy Peterson: Several of us just attended a Research Industry Leaders Forum and the focus there over the past few years has been determining what the major issues facing the industry are. They include: declining respondent cooperation, legislative threats, a shortage of trained researchers, and the impact of technology, specifically the Internet and other applications.

Wayne McCullough: I think downsizing has caused a fundamental change to marketing research. When staff reductions came about in the late ’80s and early ’90s they were across the board. Most companies didn’t say, ‘We need to save this function and that function.’ The research function suffered as a result. With all this turmoil, many expert market researchers went out and started their own firms. The flow of intellectual capital started outward. The problem we’ve had more recently is that many [client] firms started to recognize that that outflow of personnel took with it a core body of knowledge, a core competency of market intelligence. And now they’re starting to recognize the need to bring it back.

Barbara Hisiger: The evolution or revolution of skills and training has actually incorporated more fields like psychology and sociology into what we call marketing research. One of the issues is the question of how we attract the right kind of people to the industry. And what do we call ourselves? Are we just market researchers or are we behavioral analysts? How do we distinguish this broad field?

Wayne McCullough: The point you’re making is extremely important and one that the AMA and the MRA and other associations are dealing with and that is the idea of certification. One of the things that occurred as a result of the downsizing of research in many categories is that we had lots of other people within firms who said, ‘I will now manage marketing research,’ even though they have no real skill or competence. They tended to rely on those external firms to get the work done and bring it back. But the assimilation of that core knowledge and intelligence wasn’t happening. Lots of people think they can do market research when in fact it was the external firms that are doing it.

Barbara Hisiger: It’s a matter of defining the needs of the industry. We need to involve the industry in defining the skill set.

Elyse Gammer: I think there’s also been an ancillary effect at the end-user level, which is that as marketing research has become diluted within the company, the value of it and the resources used to derive the benefits and apply the information has been scattered. There’s not someone steering the ship or it’s not the right person steering the ship. It’s the person who said, ‘I can do market research’ and then they went to the helm.

Mike Lotti: There are a lot of folks that are trained in marketing research techniques but not in when or why to use them.

Wayne McCullough: I know I brought up the C word [certification] but let me make it clear that I’m not saying that we should or must have it. I want to assert the principle that Barbara was articulating: We need to take a look at what we do and how we do it. If you’re selling real estate you have to take an exam. If you’re a medical doctor or a lawyer you have to do the same thing. Should the same apply to a marketing researcher?

Mike Lotti: Possessing the necessary toolbox goes beyond just choosing a technique. You have to know how to define a problem, develop a researchable hypothesis and bring back information which bears on the decision to be made. We have people trained in techniques but sometimes we’re not as good at diagnoses.

Betsy Peterson: Isn’t that why it takes so long for researchers to be really productive? It’s trial and error now.

Mike Lotti: Today a lot of the learning is done by observation and learning on the job and that’s exactly what worries me. People may not have the opportunity to learn in the current setting, with constrained personnel resources.

Wayne McCullough: The question for the larger category of researchers is, at what point can you say, ‘I’m an expert researcher?’ I think the point that Mike was making was that the good ones learn along the way and I think that we need to do a better job of giving them those experiences. We need a way to anoint someone who has achieved a certain level of experience. Credentialing is what we need to achieve.

Barbara Hisiger: To attract people to the profession, we need to do a better job of marketing ourselves. We deal with marketing in our jobs every day and yet we don’t do a very good job of positioning or marketing our profession.

Wayne McCullough: One of the damning statements about our industry is that we talked about that very subject at the last two conferences...

Betsy Peterson: …and we’ve talked about how we talked about it!

Pat Goodrich: I think there is a crying need for some sort of industry definition of the skills that are necessary to be a researcher, whether it’s through certification or not. And I think we’ve made some initial steps toward that. There are Masters programs that would like to graduate 60 people a year. We certainly can’t rely solely on them as a source of new researchers but while we struggle to define what a researcher is we have to also work at attracting people to the industry and when we attract them, let them know that there is an established set of things they have to do to illustrate competency.

Juergen Schwoerer: Nowadays geographical and industry boundaries are blurring. We can and we should set up education programs but even once we have people who have the basic set of skills our industry will not automatically flourish. That’s because this boundary-blurring will continue and people who aren’t researchers will continue to believe that they can conduct research.

I think it is equally important at the university and business school level to open the minds of today’s and tomorrow’s decision makers to the profit opportunities that lie in applying intelligence to their business. We must make sure that lessons on the value of research get into their curricula. Because you can train researchers until you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t have any clients who think it’s worthwhile you may be out of business.

Betsy Peterson: We also have to define a clear career path. Can we currently say to somebody coming into the profession here are two or three career paths you can follow and be pretty certain it will happen?

Mike Lotti: One of the things we have to do is prove the value of research. We have to learn to think in terms of economic value delivery.

Wayne McCullough: I think you’re raising a very good question of how can we sell the value of what’s delivered. [At the client level] we need to make sure that we have someone who devotes a portion of their time to the selling proposition and making sure that people within the firm understand the value of research. It is an ongoing process of making sure that people understand the value that is derived, so when it comes time during budget cycles to determine the investment the company will make in marketing research you can demonstrate its value, its return on investment.

Mike Lotti: When management approaches marketing questions like, ‘Should I do this promotion?’ or ‘Will I profit from this price action?’ the decision is made with attention to the financial return. With market research, the revenue impact is less tangible. We need to make the impact of research on decisions which affect the bottom line more concrete. Then, management will be more willing to invest in the larger projects.

QMRR: Has all of this upheaval forever changed the role of research?

Juergen Schwoerer: To be credible, to sit at the table, requires a researcher to have a larger set of skills than we have been traditionally working on and also requires a larger view of what other input goes into decision making. While we are doing all this work on education, etc., we should be sure to look also at other disciplines within the company like competitive intelligence, not with disdain, but to learn from what they do.

Barbara Hisiger: There are some people who will be adept at being an analyst. They shouldn’t necessarily be at the table. The researcher/strategist who sits at the table knows that industry, that product and that project. He or she almost has to possess the skill sets of every other person at that table, including the product manager, project manager, the business strategist, competitive analyst. In some sense, they are the business cop who says either ‘Yes, we should do this’ or ‘No, we shouldn’t.’

Wayne McCullough: What we’re proposing is something like a chief intelligence officer. In a sense the CIO doesn’t have to have all those skills but the key is to have the right lieutenants who can break out that information.

Barbara Hisiger: At least they understand the business strategies so when the product champion says, ‘I don’t care what happens, I’m bringing my product to market’ the researcher can say, ‘Your product duplicates a product that already exists, all you’re going to do is eat our own lunch.’ It’s our job to say that it won’t work.

Juergen Schwoerer: It’s definitely one of our jobs but it’s not our only job. We should also be a driving force for new businesses, new ideas. There are instances where you have to say no. But if that happens too many times the credibility of being a proposing force is weakened. We should focus on how we can come up with new ideas instead of merely opposing ones that are brought up. I think risk taking is part of that. There must be a willingness to stick your neck out and say, ‘I recommend we do this.’ It’s being part of the team that actually manages businesses.

Elyse Gammer: To put some perspective on this, marketing research is a relatively young industry, as compared to other professions. We’re becoming more sophisticated in understanding what we need now that we’ve reached a certain point but it’s only been a profession for about 50 to 60 years.

Mike Lotti: One of the insidious effects of downsizing is that many of the senior people in corporations today don’t have time to train young analysts. When I joined Kodak, I got to work along side some real giants in the industry and learn how to do the critical research definition tasks. Nowadays we struggle in getting our supervisors to deal with our entry-level analysts because they’re so taxed doing their own projects. Corporations need a mentoring program, a program that mixes basic structural learning with the experience of working closely with a senior individual. That will help new researchers learn how to actually get research applied in the real world.

Wayne McCullough: Perhaps it would make sense to go to a number of firms like Kodak and GM and talk about how they’re structured. That would help us understand the different roles that are played by researchers at different organizations.

QMRR: What can the industry do about declining respondent cooperation rates?

Juergen Schwoerer: Comprehen-sive research has been conducted and I think there are three things that would help increase respondent cooperation. One, being honest with respondents about the time it takes to interview. Two, distinguishing research more clearly from direct marketing. Three, show the utility of marketing research. We should try to demonstrate to the public that beyond helping companies create and sell more products, research actually contributes to a number of other things in society. Once you have made that point it becomes much easier to sell that idea that your opinion counts.

Betsy Peterson: I think that the one thing that we have learned from industry studies is that there is no one answer. It’s going to take a multi-pronged approach to move the levels of acceptance.

Juergen Schwoerer: Another factor contributing to increased cooperation is to weed out the abuse of people’s time and energy that comes about when you ask them trivial questions like, Are you happier this morning than you were yesterday? We can do without that type of useless information.

Betsy Peterson: I think we’ve done a good job with journalists and legislators at getting the word out but we haven’t been reaching the general public. We did a study like the one ESOMAR did and we found the similar three things. But who is it that talks to the consumers every single day? The interviewers around the world. But we haven’t provided them with all the necessary tools just yet to help them make a difference.

Elyse Gammer: The MRA has done research on research and talked with respondents in focus groups about the interview experience and no matter what their level of education or income, they were very clear on what we were doing; it wasn’t something that was arcane or obtuse to them. All they wanted from the research process was some acknowledgment that they had contributed something and that we have shown respect for their time.

Betsy Peterson: Key factors in respondent satisfaction are the introductions, closings, and other things that we say to the respondents. We have recommended a plan and will be following up on this with CMOR [the Council for Marketing and Opinion Research]. The idea would be to put respondents and interviewers in the same room and come up with the things that respondents want to hear to make the research process meaningful and interesting for them. In addition, do we know what the core competencies for an interviewer are? Do we know how to test for that skill set or at least have an idea how to select interviewers who have strong potential to develop the competencies?

Wayne McCullough: [The discussion of interview length] brings us back to professional standards. The reason for the longer questionnaires is, of course, the product managers who want everything in there. And the expert researchers will say, ‘I know that to get the best information we need to be about x minutes maximum on this interview, so we have to start figuring out where we can cut questions out.’ But the inexperienced researcher who will say, ‘I want everything in there.’

Mike Lotti: This area [interview length] is one where the industry can help itself through basic research into the maximum length of interview by method of interview, like phone, intercept, etc. This type of information would help the client-side researcher, particularly those with less experience, to push back on requests to expand questionnaires beyond the quality limit.

Elyse Gammer: I represent a supplier and I would love to be able to say, with credibility, to a client, ‘We’re not going to get much out of [a longer interview].’ It’s to our advantage monetarily to do a longer interview—it costs more money—but we don’t want to waste our client’s research time and budget. And so you try to be responsible about interview length but at this point the client may say, ‘Well, why not? We’ve done it before.’

QMRR: What about the impact of the Internet?

Mike Lotti: I worry that as an industry we’re getting all nervous about Internet research. It’s here, it’s real and it’s going to be great for us.

Juergen Schwoerer: I think the Internet is obviously here to stay. I think it’s going to be another added tool. It is valid for a number of purposes already today, though not for generally projectable samples of the general public. We’ll need to develop some form of industry agreement on recruiting techniques to avoid using bulk E-mails and to make sure that quality standards as well as respondent privacy are respected.

Elyse Gammer: There are companies doing Internet research now and they are very aware of who they’re speaking to and they use safeguards like passwords and ID numbers to obtain information from a population that still skews male, still skews highly technical, with few females and few older people. But they’re aware of all those limitations. The Internet population is going to change rapidly.

Mike Lotti: People say that it isn’t projectable but I think under the right circumstances it’s very projectable data. Interest in research on the Internet is so high. We’ve got to learn to ride this tiger pretty quickly.

Wayne McCullough: [The data] can be projectable but it often isn’t.

Barbara Hisiger: I’m not saying that mail and telephone are perfect, but there are certain people who are not on the Internet, they’re just not, so in that sense the Internet is not representative.

Wayne McCullough: I think that’s a marvelous point and I tend to align with Barbara in the sense that, take a look at mail and phone research. We know from lots of experience their strengths and limitations and we can easily incorporate them in. There are many more unknowns about the Internet at this point, certainly in terms of the population.

QMRR: Let’s talk a little bit about the effect of globalization on marketing research.

Wayne McCullough: I think globally the issues are more diverse. Take the Internet, at the extremes you have Sweden and the U.S., and China. It will be well into the next millennium before there’s enough capability to where you can make the Internet viable in China. Understanding those limitations as you go into those various countries can help but right now the U.S. and much of western Europe are much closer in terms of those dynamics so it’s easier to collect good useful data. You have to recognize the wide variations of circumstances and the techniques that are usable across the regions.

Betsy Peterson: That would be my concern. As executive director of a major research association I get phone calls all the time [about international research]. In recent weeks they have come from small research companies who say, ‘My client wants me to do research in South America or Asia. How do I go about doing that?’ They don’t even know how to approach it and yet they’re being asked. So to me there’s a wonderful education opportunity for those of us in industry organizations to provide information to make the situation better for people who are going to be using that data when it comes back.

Juergen Schwoerer: Business is global today and research therefore has to be global. Indeed the best way to know what is happening in other places is to have access to the people who are there. One place to start is the ESOMAR directory to find firms who subscribe to internationally recognized codes of conduct.

I also think that although the discrepancy of equipment will prevail in a number of regions for awhile, at the same time it is possible to reach very narrowly defined but highly relevant targets of the population in almost every place in this world. I think the glass is really half full because I’m amazed at how you can instantly access top-notch intelligence in basically a hundred countries around the world.

QMRR: To finish up, what are your thoughts on the increase in client/research firm partnering that has resulted from downsizing?

Barbara Hisiger: Downsizing can be fine as long as consultants handle their duties responsibly, rather than adding more work, and are willing to turn work down if it’s not essential or if they know that there is previous research that can be looked at. The other danger of downsizing is that you tend to lose within the client company someone with perspective, someone who knows that we did this five years ago and it didn’t work so there’s no need to do it again.

Betsy Peterson: Many companies are providing a means for consultants to get better informed. Some companies place synopses of past research studies on their computer intranets so the research partners can tap into that database.

Pat Goodrich: I’ve heard mixed reviews on the partner issue and the success of what we’re calling partners. I have some real concerns.

Wayne McCullough: It’s a very tough position for those firms because they’re out there in the world of business and by turning down business you don’t grow. There are a number of firms who will sit down as soon as another company leaves the table and say, ‘Yes we can do that.’ So where are the incentives in the system to do the right thing? It comes back to making sure that we have a responsible person in place to arrive at the right judgments about that partnering relationship. In fact the success of those relationships can be driven by having someone knowledgeable inside selecting between more or less skilled firms.

Elyse Gammer: For those outside research firms who care about credibility and ethics, the reward incentive is a long-term relationship with the client which becomes mutually beneficial. That’s the answer.

Wayne McCullough: Expertise in selecting the vendor should not rest with the purchasing departments. They don’t understand the skill and selection criteria. They often try tipping the balance to drive down the price per interview and the vendor has to take out costs somewhere. The quality of the data suffers. It’s the skilled researcher who understands those dynamics and makes sure that it’s a win-win that optimizes the cost and the quality of the data.