The streets of San Francisco were certainly action-packed during my late October visit to attend the annual IIR Market Research Event. Contract squabbles had caused 14 of the larger hotels in town to lock out their service workers and as a result, the blocks around Union Square echoed with the angry call-and-response chants of workers as they paced in solidarity in front of their erstwhile places of employment.

Things were certainly calmer - and just as collegial, in a way - in the conference rooms and meeting areas in the Hotel Nikko, one of the few Union Square hotels without a labor problem and host of this year’s IIR conference.

Attendance at the four-day conference was way up, appearing by my unscientific count to have almost doubled from the previous year, and enthusiasm was palpable - with good reason. Senior Conference Producer Heather Kalish and the IIR event staff assembled an impressive and wide-ranging lineup of presenters and topics, giving attendees the chance to learn from peers at firms like Microsoft, Intel, Kraft Canada, General Motors, Best Buy and PepsiCo. There was almost too much to see!

Tuesday’s opening schedule featured day-long concurrent tracks on online research, ethnography, usability and segmentation. Intel’s John Sherry gave a fascinating look into the kind of far-forward exploration that ethnographic research is leading at his firm. Taking a cue from C.K. Prahalad’s book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, Sherry and others on his team have searched on a truly global scale for ways to use technology to improve the lives of workers. We’re not talking about high-priced equipment here. Rather, it’s seemingly mundane things like the cell phone that allows a maid in Morocco to field calls from prospective employers rather than go begging for work door-to-door, or the computer terminal in the dusty Indian village that gives citizens a direct link to distant government offices. These and other examples Sherry cited showed that there are myriad ways for small things to make a big difference.

The ethnographers at Intel have also looked at the issues of aging and infirmity, with an eye toward developing technologies that might make the lives of the aged and their caregivers easier. Obviously, the more technology expands, the more markets there are for the chips and components Intel makes, so Intel isn’t doing this work as a public service. But in a world where businesses can often be extremely shortsighted in their product creation efforts, it was interesting to see the work of a firm looking far and wide to develop new markets and exciting to see that ethnographic research is playing a key role in a socially worthwhile pursuit.

Tuesday afternoon I jumped over to the online research track to hear Diane Hessan of Communispace moderate a panel of clients who have used her firm to set up online communities with targeted groups of customers. In a textbook example of how ideally suited online research can be to certain applications, Ann Burcz of General Motors talked about GM’s success with its online community of drivers with disabilities. These drivers, who range from the permanently disabled to those with hip and joint problems, all face difficulties getting into and out of their vehicles and the GM Mobility unit has been exploring ways to design vehicles and features that make their driving experience easier. Gathering these respondents for conventional research might be quite difficult, but the online approach allows them to participate at their convenience and has netted GM good information and goodwill - Burcz said the disabled drivers were bursting to share information and are very happy that an automaker has taken the time to listen.

Other highlights:

  • As part of its wide-ranging use of research, Yahoo! asked a group of self-confessed Web addicts to endure an extended period of Internet deprivation. Michelle Madansky, vice president of corporate and sales research at Yahoo!, showed some hilarious snippets from the video diaries each of the subjects kept. As the Web-less days stretched on and on they became more and more anxious. One poor soul even confessed he was looking forward to spam!
  • Fred John of MasterCard delivered a thought-provoking look at what’s wrong with the research buyer/provider relationship. Not surprisingly, one of the chief causes of difficulty is money. On the client side, research departments feel pressure to keep costs down from the people who pay the bills for their expenditures. The check-writers view research as a commodity and constantly push for the lowest possible price, John said.

On the provider side, following their M&A binges, the larger, acquisitive firms are laden with debt and new costs as they work to digest the smaller companies they have consumed. With a mandate to cut costs and boost sales, their senior-level people are pressured to spend more of their time selling rather than doing research. Thus they end up handing work off to junior employees, who, though well-meaning, clearly aren’t as skilled as their bosses. (John’s mention of the junior researchers’ “cheerful incompetence” drew a smattering of knowing laughs from the audience.)

What’s the way out of this death spiral? Researchers on both sides, whom John likened to Romeo and Juliet going against the wishes of their warring families, must forge a partnership (a term he acknowledged is overused), using wide-open communication and a “we’re in this together” approach to maximize and demonstrate efficiencies, with the goal of helping each other ward off the damaging influences of their respective comptrollers.

  • As vital and substantive as many of the presentations were, they paled next to Richard Burkholder’s Thursday luncheon speech. Burkholder, international bureau chief of the Gallup Poll, took a rapt audience through the process of fielding the 2003 Gallup Poll of Baghdad. He outlined the hard work, the risks and the cross-cultural cooperation that was necessary to field a statistically valid study in a war-torn city.

At times, in the throes of a stressful work day, the outcomes of the business decisions we all struggle with appear to reach life-or-death status. Hearing about a nation facing true danger and mortality on a daily basis was a sobering dose of perspective.