Editor's note: Reg Baker is executive director, Market Research Institute International, and Jeffrey Henning is president, Researchscape International. 

Ray Poynter and Sue York at NewMR recently ran a survey designed to answer the questions, “How much training do market researchers receive, and is it enough?” They interviewed just over 1,100 researchers (corporate and supplier-side) in 59 different countries. A full report is available at http://bit.ly/NewMR18. 

Before looking at those results, let’s stop and consider three features of the current environment that are especially relevant for corporate researchers. 

First, we researchers seem to take a sort of perverse pride in the fact that most of us “fell into” this line of work with little by way of formal preparation. In the U.S., at least, there are a few undergraduate programs in market research and around half a dozen graduate programs that turn out perhaps 100 or so Master’s-level graduates each year. Professional associations in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Australia all run certification programs with varying levels of participation by their members, themselves a subset of those working in the field. The safe bet is that most of us learned by doing (rather than through formal education) with some level of on-the-job, just-in-time training focused on a specific set of job responsibilities rather than setting a strong foundation of established principles. Many corporate researchers ended up in research after starting in another department in their firm (most often the marketing department but sometimes customer service or sales).

Second, we are living through a period of dramatic changes in methods and sources. The world was once pretty simple. With a mix of surveys and focus groups, there was no insight that could not be discovered, no business problem that could not be solved. Today’s world is very different, with data from social media, corporate Web sites, frequent-buyer programs, online communities and more. With all these sources comes the challenge to make choices – hopefully informed choices – about the best ways to study a business problem and help management make whatever decision it needs to make. Being successful in this world requires a broad understanding of methods rather than a singular focus on a particular skill.

Third, the role of corporate researchers is evolving away from the operational to either the tactical or strategic, depending on the organization. In an operational role, corporate researchers managed external suppliers to deliver insights. Three innovation waves of the last 15 years – online survey tools, social media analysis and big data – have mostly migrated in-house, disintermediating external suppliers. In some organizations, this means the corporate researcher is fulfilling a tactical role, doing more of the direct work themselves, with external suppliers now technology providers. But, in others, the synthesis of multiple data streams is now the strategic function that corporate researchers fulfill. 

Not encouraging

Taken together, these trends suggest a strong need for fundamental and ongoing education and training, partly to just get people who are new to the field up to speed but also to ensure people are aware of the latest developments and the opportunities they offer for more useful insight. From this perspective, the results of the NewMR survey are not encouraging:

Two out of every five researchers report receiving less than six hours of training a year. The report also notes that the demographic group receiving the least amount of training are in the 35-45 age group, many of whom we would expect to be emerging leaders within their organizations and therefore drivers of change, a trend that Poynter and York characterize as “worrying.” While not directly covered by this admirably concise survey, budgets for corporate researchers – in our experience – tend to be lean and lacking a line-item for training and education. 

When asked whether they were receiving too much, too little or about the right amount of training, survey participants were roughly split 50/50 between “about right” and “too little.” Among those receiving less than six hours per year, 17 percent thought that was “about right” and 58 percent “too little.” 

The most often cited training format for those who had received some training in the past year was Webinars (60 percent), closely followed by in-person on-site (54 percent), in-person off-site (49 percent) and online (28 percent).

These results are not especially surprising, and in fact echo those of similar studies. Consider, for example, the 2015 Future of Research Report1 from Cambiar, which looked at how market researchers learn. To characterize it as informal understates the problem. Too much training is still on-the-job, where people learn how to do one thing the way their particular organization does it. This typically is supplemented with Webinars by suppliers promoting their offerings, conference presentations that too often are thinly veiled sales pitches, bloggers for whom every new technology is a disruption about to render everything we know about research irrelevant and an industry culture that values cheap and fast above all else. In its conclusion, the Cambiar report characterized the widespread lack of formal training for researchers on both the client and supplier sides as “frightening.”

Cause for optimism

In our own, more modest study of how researchers learn, Market Researchers and the Love of Learning, a 2017 survey of 129 researchers in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, we found some cause for optimism. For instance, when asked what they like about working in market research, these corporate researchers focused on the appeal of learning:

“Learning more about people through trends and statistics.”

“It is fun and you are constantly learning and readjusting strategies.” 

“It is a very interesting science. I like studying my company’s business and learning how it works so at some point I can get to a similar point with my own successful company.”

Now, besides learning about customers and the business they work in, what skills and techniques should they be learning?

Beyond issuing still another call for more training, we need to also consider what contemporary corporate researchers need to know and what skills they require given the business imperatives they are asked to address. In our view, three skills stand out.

The first is the ability to assess and evaluate the evidence or, as David Smith describes it, assess its “safety.” By that we mean the ability to look at how the evidence, whatever its sources, was brought together and see with a clear eye both its strengths and its weaknesses. What’s missing? What are the biases? How well does it reflect the behaviors and attitudes of the consumers the business seeks to serve? How well does it measure what it purports to measure? Where are the red flags? If there are contradictions across sources, how do we resolve them through synthesis? These skills are especially important for corporate researchers, who often have access to more data points than those on the supplier side executing somewhat standard methodologies.

The second is the ability to understand what the evidence is saying. How does it contribute to our understanding of the problem the business is trying to address? How does it fit or not fit with whatever else we know or with other data we might have? The old discipline of hypothesis formation and testing is not practiced as it once was but we still need to be systematic in how we sort through the evidence and uncover its secrets. To listen to some conference presentations, what passes as insights today were simply hypotheses that researchers were too busy to frame and emerged from a bottom-up hunt through the crosstabs rather than a top-down discovery effort.

Finally, the third skill is the ability to translate the results of our analysis into insights that are actionable. That is, to recommend clear steps the business can take that will lead to improved business results. Inspiring action requires not just identifying the actions that need to be taken but communicating them consistently and widely throughout the organization and using leadership skills to point the way.

The Boston Consulting Group has outlined four stages of insight performance, each with an accompanying training need:

  • Traditional market research skills – market research methodology and tools
  • Business contribution team – mix of methodology and tools coupled with business skills and experience
  • Strategic insight organization – integrated thinking, pattern recognition and communication
  • Strategic foresight organization – integrated thinking, with focus on leadership and communication

Emphasize the fundamentals

In all of this, we might do worse than to continue to emphasize the principles on which surveys in particular have been based, the fundamentals that ensure the validity and reliability of our research results. The insights and recommendations we deliver to our clients are only useful if they truly represent the market and measure the underlying constructs that drive consumer decision-making. Surveys may no longer be the always first-choice method but representation and accurate measurement are as important as ever. At least until something equally robust comes along.

Some would have us believe that the explosion of new methods and sources has made the fundamentals on which survey research is based obsolete. The reverse is the case. Mastering all of this still-expanding researcher toolkit is unrealistic and so one must learn to make choices that match method to the research problem, with a clear grasp of the compromises one inevitably makes to accommodate those cost and cycle-time imperatives. One needs a framework to vet all those alternatives, make good design decisions and, since perfection is forever elusive, confront the inevitable biases that are inherent in the choices we make. 

The same criteria we used for surveys 40 years ago are just as useful now when thinking about other methods and sources. These criteria can be applied to something as far afield as big data just as effectively as we have used them for surveys. The ancient Greeks believed in the unity of knowledge, the identification of first principles to explain the world around them. Perhaps there is an analogue in contemporary market research. Surveys are no longer the always first-choice method but representation and accurate measurement are as important as ever. The drive for training has often been to “stay current” but perhaps we would be better served to “stay grounded.” The ground is a firm foundation, no matter what methods and sources fall from the sky. 

Footnote

1 http://media.wix.com/ugd/e94d21_00e8506d803c4386828bea765f10d3d3.pdf