The real state of MR: Voices from the frontline
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. To view the full session recording click here.
During the Quirk’s Event – Virtual Global, a panel of researchers with diverse backgrounds discussed the state of the marketing research and insights industry today.
Sponsored by discover.ai, this session brought up concerns like overwhelming amount of tools and discussed topics like what makes a good research partner.
Sophie Wright, managing director at Discover.ai, moderated the discussion. Richard Bates, Head of RTD Category Expansion at Suntory Beverage and Food, Sioned Winfield, founder of BrainAlly Strategy, Neil Douthwaite, associate director at Syren and Yasmin Dufournet, consumer insight director at Salomon provided interesting insights into the industry from both the client and agency sides.
Session transcript
Marlen Ramirez
Hi everyone, and welcome to the session, “The real state of MR: Voices from the frontline.”
I'm Quirk's News and Content Editor, Marlen Ramirez.
Before we get started, let's quickly go over the ways you can participate in today's discussion. You can use the chat tab to interact with other attendees during the session, and you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions for presenters during the session.
Our session is brought to you by discovery.ai. Enjoy the presentation!
Sophie Wright
Hello. Thank you all for coming. I'm Sophie. I'm here with Neil, Richard, Sioned and Yasmin. I'll let them introduce themselves properly in a moment.
We're all here to participate in a discussion about the state of our industry today. We're bringing some different experiences and perspectives together to have a sparky discussion about the real state of market research today.
Now, to set us off personally, I think the market research industry is at a major turning point and inflection point. There's always a context to these things.
I think the context for us is that we're in a time of real upheaval, environmental upheaval, political upheaval, economic upheaval and into all that comes with AI as well. So, massive technological change that we're living through. Something of a perfect storm in my opinion.
So, I think this is a really great moment to pause, reflect and have this conversation.
Let me turn to all of you.
Can I ask you briefly to introduce yourselves? And at the same time as you introduce yourselves, what I want you to do is just jump into the first question and that question's all about getting a picture in words of how you feel about the state of the market research industry today.
We've been asking people to give us their three words, and we've been getting all sorts of different responses. But to give you a bit of a flavor, we've heard words like turbulent, flux, transitionary, nervy, bolshie, dynamic, exciting. So, some quite different takes on this.
Let me go to Yasmin. What would be your three words, Yasmin? And introduce yourself as well, please.
Yasmin Dufournet
Thank you, Sophie.
My name is Yasmin. My background is strategic consultancy, but at the moment I'm heading up insight at Salomon.
Salomon is, if you don’t know it, it's an outdoor skiing brand based in Annecy, France.
My first word, the first word that sprung to mind was democratic, simply because there are so many more platforms now. There are so many different ways to analyze. It's cheap, it's quick.
I think probably when we all started in research, it was very much you launch a piece of research and then you spend six weeks in the field and then you come back and you take a month to analyze. Then half a year later you're presenting results. I think that's probably over now.
We're looking at something which is open to everybody. It's short, it's snappy. You can get the research and the insights in very, very quickly. And it really is open to a lot more people than just the insight department now.
So, I think democratic would be my first word.
Sophie Wright
So, lots of change, lots of new tools, lots of possibilities. Okay, that's good. Yeah.
Yasmin Dufournet
I mean, I would also say I think the flip side of that would be disjointed.
You mentioned being at an intersection and everything is changing. I think we are feeling that from a client-side. We've got agencies who are really trying to keep pace with everything. They're talking to us in whizzy language about this and that, and this is what's going to happen and we can do this and your segmentation can now take a week.
Then you have a sort of mid-tier, if you like, that I think are slowly and surely sort of straddling across what was and what will be.
Then, I think, you have a lower tier that are just sort of slightly outdated and overwhelmed by what's happening.
So, I do think things are disjointed. I think they're disjointed in the agency world, but also probably in terms of insight professionals as well. Because the organization in itself with this idea of democracy and everyone could do research, it means that it is very easy for research to be split all over the place.
So, everyone's bringing in insights and everyone's bringing in things to say about the consumer, and that's quite difficult. It's difficult to find the truth. It's difficult to find a common voice. It's difficult to find who the consumer really is amongst all of that stuff that's coming in. So, I do think things are disjointed as well at the moment.
Sophie Wright
Right, okay. Really interesting. So, it's quite a pressure in a way to be in possession of the truth within an organization and to take leadership within an organization on that. That's really interesting.
Let's get a different point of view.
Neil, what do you think? Don't forget to introduce yourself.
Neil Douthwaite
Hi, I'm Neil. I'm an Associate Director at Syren.
Syren is an independent insight agency. We are a small team of very experienced, director-level researchers.
I think the word that I keep coming to when I describe the industry right now is actually tense. As you highlighted at the beginning Sophie, for the economic and global uncertainty at the moment, challenges that Yasmin's highlighted that agencies are having to face on a daily basis and then the proliferation, not just of AI, but all those tools and platforms that are available is causing the industry to really question where it's going and what it should look like, what it should represent.
So, I think as a result, I think another word I might actually use is confused as well, because when you look at the types of topics that come up in conferences, training events, the LinkedIn posts that get the most traction, it speaks to me of an industry that's really looking for answers about what the next step looks like.
Finally, I'd probably say it's innovative though on a slightly more positive note. So, I think times like this also spark innovation and change. And as an agency, certainly we shouldn't be afraid of that. It is a really good time to take stock and question your habits and your practices.
I have to say, for me, that doesn't mean necessarily jumping on every bandwagon and shiny new tool that comes out, but really questioning the tools that are out there at the moment that can make our work better, easier and more efficient as well.
Yasmin Dufournet
Yeah. Neil, sorry, I'm jumping in here, but I would totally agree with that. One of my words as well was exciting. Because it does feel like in this sort of world where everything's changing, there is everything to play for. And it's the opportunity for us to just get new skills.
Sophie Wright
Right? And all of this echoes some of what we've heard in the broader discussion.
There's this sense of being kind of on the brink of something that feels quite big, exciting, but also a bit complex, a bit imperfect and a bit kind of messy at the same time.
Neil Douthwaite
Yeah, there's a lot of change at the moment and any technological, societal shake up is going to create a lot of nervousness, speculation, but also invention.
We all look at how we can adapt and stay ahead of the game. But really it takes a cool head, I think, in all of that confusion to decide what actually matters and what will actually work and then apply it quickly and seamlessly into what we do.
Sophie Wright
Right. Okay. Brilliant. That's really clear, I think.
Sioned, what do you think?
Sioned Winfield
Yes, I'll also do the intro. Hi everyone, I'm Sioned and I'm director of BrainAlly Strategy, a brand strategy consultancy that's helping small and medium sized businesses put consumers at the heart of their growth strategies and plans.
I've recently left a strategic insights and marketing excellence role within a large food and drink multinational. Now I’m having a lot more conversations with smaller, medium-sized businesses, as I said, and seeing that many of these themes are transversal. Many of them are coming out, whether you're talking to the big boys or the smaller ones.
For me, the three words maybe to start it is that fragmentation. And Yasmin, you touched on this already, but there's just so much choice, whether that be a tool, data sources, different platforms that teams can use. It just makes it, whilst easier, as you were saying, it just causes a lot of leaders and teams to feel overwhelmed making it harder often to pull those insights together and drive for unification so that they can act on behalf of the business questions and pull together a comprehensive strategy.
Also, the second word for me was volatility.
Still maybe challenging area, not so positive just yet, but I think there's just so much change and many insights business partners have always represented the business challenges, but now they're having to project, hypothesize and foresee more than they have had to do in the past.
So, an extra skillset there that they're needing to embrace so that they're not just planning for now but also projecting and thinking what the future business realities could be and how the insights that they're discovering can solve for that situation.
Finally, from my side, the thought of being less human, both in terms of the isolation that insights partners are feeling. They haven't got the same support from agencies whilst the agencies are there, if they're using these tools and being more self-serve, that they're really struggling to maybe make sense of that whilst also having a little more of that nervousness around, ‘Is the insights representative of the human challenges that are existing in the market?’
So, I think there's more change coming in that area and where the new normal will land is still to be seen.
Sophie Wright
Really interesting. So, lots of similar refrains there.
Definitely this sense of change more widely. It's not just our industry that's changing, it's a lot that's changing, but also the industry, lots of possibilities can be overwhelming, can be distracting.
This notion of what being human brings or what's lost with a move away from that is coming up a lot in all of our wider discussions as well.
Richard, let's turn to you. We haven't heard from you. Introduce yourself and what would you say on this question?
Richard Bates
Hi, I'm Richard. I'm currently the head of Alcoholic RTD category expansion at Suntory Beverage and Food. I spent the first half of my career agency-side, and then the second half client-side leading insight and innovation teams at Suntory and companies like Samsung.
It's hard to come up with different words to what have already been said. I agree with a lot of the panelists here.
I would say though that for me, having been in the industry 25 years or more years than I care to remember, I think there's always been this state of existential angst about the industry. About where it's going, where it's been. There's always been a concern about, ‘Do we have the right level of influence? Do we sit at the table? Are we strategic enough?’ There's always been a level of concern about new techniques.
I mean, sharing my age, I remember when questionnaires were physically punched, hole punches, to calculate data. So, I'm literally a dinosaur. But I think there's always been that concern.
I'm not downplaying the level of change that things like AI are bringing and the level of transformation, and that's not downplaying any of the concerns, but I think it's almost been a permanent state of affairs within the industry. It's a constant question of, ‘Where are we going? Are we evolving in the right way? Are we serving our businesses and our clients in the right way?
But I think on a positive note, I do believe the industry will come out stronger.
Sophie Wright
Right, okay. I like that sense of perspective. Maybe it's part of the psyche of a market researcher to be in a state of perpetual questioning, an existential angst, Richard. I don’t know. But yeah, no, it's good to have that kind of pragmatism.
Okay, let's get onto the next part of the discussion.
One of the things we wanted to do was spend a bit of time focusing on what is great market research. What are some underlying truths that kind of define great market research?
So, the next question is, What does great insight look like when you find it?
I say, we've been speaking to a bunch of people with some of these questions. So some of the words we've heard already are things like revelatory, surprising and discovery.
What do you think, Yasmin? I'm going to start with you again. What do you think great insight looks like when you find it?
Yasmin Dufournet
I think there's this sort of difference between what you think great insight is and what your audience thinks great insight is, because we have this tendency to think, ‘oh god, it has to absolutely be groundbreaking and never heard of.’ And I don't necessarily think that's the case.
I'll give you an example. We're currently doing some research at the moment with JD Sports. And I just presented some results and one of the results I presented was, in some places, JD Sports is basically the only shop in the town or the village where consumers can get their 3D cues on style and fashion, et cetera, et cetera. When you present that in a place like Annecy, every other shop is a sports boutique. You've got ski resorts, mountain shops, outdoor shops, running shops, there are boutiques everywhere. That was a bit of an epiphany moment, I think, for the audience because it didn't occur to them that they may only just be one shop in town.
Sophie Wright
That's a great example. That's a great.
Yasmin Dufournet
Yeah, I find it quite interesting seeing the parallel between what we think and what we want to present and the actual reality of the people that are listening.
Sophie Wright
So, an epiphany can be something almost quite obvious in a way then, but not obvious to the audience.
Sioned Winfield
Just to jump in. I think that's where the magic or the requirement of the insights function, normally, within an organization is to sometimes say what could be quite obvious and help the team see it in a way which creates that moment of aha or inspiration. Digging into the obvious to uncover something that's going to catalyze the brand and the communication team to create something wonderful.
The very classic example here, which I'm sure we all know is Dove, for example. Where they were able to uncover something which is hiding in plain sight that people, like women, want to feel good about themselves.
But then when you uncover that insight in a way which is more real and gritty and impacting women at different ages, that's able to catalyze a campaign, a decade long campaign in real beauty and drive brand growth, innovations and brand activity as a result.
So, I think that's a great example of that, uncovering what's often obvious.
Sophie Wright
Yeah, so something about impacting real business change with commercial longevity to an insight as well.
Richard Bates
I also think there's something there about clarity and simplicity. I think good insight always has that clarity and simplicity. That means you don't have to work to understand it. Because when you use that word epiphany, it's like immediately I get it, I understand it.
I think that is always an attribute of a strong insight. That the audience gets it and they walk away thinking more, ‘What can I do about this or with this,’ rather than, ‘I don't understand this. Can you explain it to me again?'
Sophie Wright
That’s very true.
Yasmin Dufournet
Yeah, sorry. Sorry, Sophie. I was just going to say that's very true because I think it's very easy to present insight and if they don’t know what to do with it, it's just redundant.
I sometimes find that we have a tendency to present things in very complicated ways, particularly when we present trends and societal trends. So, when we present them in various bewitching kind of ways, with words and storytelling that not everybody really understands and they don't always ask what you mean by that. As a result, they walk away and think, ‘Well, that was a great performance, but I don't quite know what to do with it. I really don’t know how to link it to my strategy.’
Richard Bates
I think is particularly true when you're dealing in cross-cultural businesses or multilingual businesses. That simplicity of communication is really important.
Neil Douthwaite
I completely agree. I mean, great insight, it needs to feel intuitive even if the process of getting there really wasn't and a lot of hard work has gone behind it.
I think a slightly different angle I would take is that the most exciting insights to work on, particularly coming from an agency perspective, is when what you're working on is just one of a number of dots. Then seeing how they join together and being the group that brings all of those different strands together.
I think that's when you genuinely start to learn something new and start to inform a client in a new way. Those big questions that guide strategy and have real influence are the most satisfying to work on often.
Sioned Winfield
I had a colleague that used to talk about finding the “gold” in the information. Often if it's a several hour presentation, it's challenging.
So, whilst I agree it's not necessarily the fancy wrapping or over-engineering, there is a clear job for the function to make that sense and then frame it in a way that enables the broader team to pick up on it, to understand it. And then create that spark for it to go and do its job and kind of catalyze the brand or the business forward.
Sophie Wright
Yeah. One thing that you are making me think, as you were talking, particularly something you said, Neil, about joining dots and bringing bits together. So, one thing that also came up in the other conversations we had was about the need and also the ability for insight to make sense of big data by overlaying personal, lived experience. So those kinds of insight truths that come from talking about the lived experience or witnessing the lived experience, which I think is sort of another angle that's really important as we look at technological shift and AI and human and how these things can work together.
Okay, good. All of those are markers of great insight.
Given that we're talking here about change and being at a kind of inflection point in the industry, which of these markers of great insight do you think will endure? Will they endure and what will change?
Sioned Winfield
Yeah, but my sense is that the markers will remain similar, but the way by which we will get there will look and feel different.
As an example, using gen AI might help us get quicker to connecting those dots. Especially with one of those challenges that we spoke about up front was the amount of different sources and the overwhelm of information sitting in a fragmented way. So, hopefully the technology can help us to be faster and reduce the dwell time, getting to the insights faster.
I also think there must be a prompt out there to help move from, “This is a great fact,” to “Inspire me,” or “Inspire me in the context of this brand, this consumer, to create something actionable.” So yes, kind of positive and hopeful in that context.
Sophie Wright
Okay. So basically, we're sort of armed with new ways to get to some of the old answers. Neil, what do you think? You're nodding, what do you think?
Neil Douthwaite
Yeah, I completely agree. I think especially from an agency point of view, this comes down to asking ourselves the question, ‘What's the point of what we do? Why are we here?’
We're talking about the existential angst again.
I think we've talked around the fact that it's not just what insights you uncover, but how you communicate that new knowledge in a way that's meaningful and exciting to clients.
For me, this is where a lot of the promises about what AI, as a means of generating rather than collating insights, starts to fall down. Because right now we really need our own experience to recognize what good AI outputs look like. You have to be able to recognize the hallucinations, poor prompts or where synthetic data has simply filled the knowledge gap with pure guesswork. You can't do that without knowledge and experience.
I think that's why it's more important than ever to remember the sound principles of good research. It's about properly sourced rigorous evidence. And I think in some cases we're actually already seeing AI generated outputs produced by practitioners who don't really know or understand the sources that their insights were drawn from.
I don't want to come across as a Luddite. I do think AI has a massive role to play, but I think we're starting now to develop tools where we've got to be quite careful about bumping up against the limits of what we should feel completely comfortable with doing, and stop being dazzled by how real and accurate the outputs seem on the surface. But to really start questioning them in the same way we question human practitioners and how can we be sure that any new knowledge it's providing is real knowledge in the way that as a human, you just intuitively know from what you've done in the past.
Sophie Wright
Yeah, no, I think that's personally, that really resonates with me. There is sometimes this sense of, ‘Oh, look what it can do,’ without stopping you to think whether what it can do is really what you needed it to do.
Maybe a way to land this question actually in a bit more hard reality is to think about a great market research agency or client that you really love, what is it about them that makes them great? No need to mention names, but just think about who those people are or what that agency or client is bringing. Richard.
Richard Bates
Well, obviously I've worked with too many great insight leaders to mention, so I won't mention any names, but I think from my perspective, a good insight leader, whether agency or client-side has always been a good strategic partner.
I think they have the ability to help leaders, brand leaders, business leaders, decipher the signal from the noise as it's said, and to understand the particular context they're in and to help them effectively make better decisions.
I think this kind of individual has also always been unafraid to speak truth to power, to challenge the old myths and truths.
I don't think this really needs to change. I think this came to me personally through my experience when I shifted from agency-side to client-side. And what was quite, I guess, interesting for me making that jump was actually the realization that from a methodological point of view or a toolkit point of view, the actual difference between agencies wasn't as great as I perhaps had thought it had been when sat on the agency-side. We prided ourselves that we were distinctly different and I realized that actually that difference was more marginal than distinct.
And I think what really was different was the kind of challenges or problems that each insight leader or agency was really good at solving. Also, the way in which they interacted with me as a client, those were the things that really made the difference.
I was really asking myself what kind of partner would they be? Were they the right choice to tackle a particular challenge? And that sometimes meant that you used a different agency on a different challenge. You didn't always stick to the same agency.
And given what we've all been talking about like the explosion of data, the democratization, the analytical power of AI. I think what will continue to set good insight leaders apart is their ability to be that strategic partner, to be a problem solver.
And really, I think, as Neil was touching on before, to ask the right questions, to ask the questions of the data. To ask the right questions of the solution and to prompt the tools in the right way. I think that's going to be critical.
Sophie Wright
Right. So, about partnership, about help with decision-making, really interesting.
Yasmin Dufournet
I think, sorry, just to rebound on that, you used the words "good strategic partner." For me, the best agencies that I've worked with are the ones that are almost mistaken for an employee.
They absolutely know the brand implicitly and honestly, they're the best ones that I've worked with because they are perfect in the presentations, they're asking the right questions, they've got the right analysis and the right conclusions coming out. So, for me, that's really what works the best.
Neil Douthwaite
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's about collaboration for me, and when as an agency, you truly become an extension of the client's team.
On the part of clients, that means that they've got to be willing to share. They've got to be willing to talk you through and work through problems together and trust that you as an agency can help manage and communicate with their stakeholders as well. So, there's a lot of onus on the client relationship, as well, to do that.
But on the other hand, as a part of an agency, it's about investing that time into the relationship. Then basically accumulating a knowledge pool that you need to operate in that space, and then you stop having a transactional relationship, and it moves into something a lot more satisfying and productive for everyone involved.
Sioned Winfield
From my point of view, in my last role at PepsiCo, I was working mainly with digitally native research companies. A lot of that meant SaaS type of models where you weren't getting the full package, as Neil has suggested, that Syren brings. But what was important in that capacity was in-house having people who could, as I said, connect those insights together and apply them in a way that drove that actionability.
If I reflect, I know not to mention names, but in terms of discovery.ai, one of the things I always appreciated in that capacity was the ability to take that big data, so quantitative input, but then being able to extract more of that qualitative inspiration so that you are able to bring meaning to the data and then even take it to a place where it could drive that strategic relevance to drive that impact.
So, absolutely there's a role for, again, both digital and full service, but the magic is when you can bring the method and the interpretation together.
Sophie Wright
It's really interesting. We keep coming back to some very basic human skills here, right? Partnership, being an ally, helping make big decisions. This is all really human stuff. It's about relationships and empathy and having an intuition for stuff and marrying up what we've learned from our lived human experience with data and interpretation of data.
We're actually well up to the time on our discussion. Thank you.