Last fall, research firm GfK and MR event producer the Institute for International Research released their joint study The Future of Insights, which drew on researchers’ responses to questions surrounding three aspects of the profession: organizational challenges; current and future sources of data for insight creation; and gaps in the industry.
Far from being out of touch and slow to embrace change – charges that are often made against the industry by observers – the over-700 researchers who responded to the survey (315 on the client side and 394 suppliers) seemed to have very realistic views of the situation before them.
To the question “What is/will be the most important insight creation data source?” both now and two years out, the respondents in both camps were in agreement that passively-collected data will grow in importance, seemingly to the detriment of data gathered by “custom surveys in any mode.”
While passive data and online surveys are the modes of the future, only 6 percent of MR professionals indicated they currently use passive data collection and 68 percent do not believe they will be using it over the next two years. As the report notes, “Thus, while the industry is ambitious in its desire to evolve with the consumer and tap into the score of behavioral data left behind by an increasingly plugged-in society, the ability to implement these new methodologies is still very much lacking and the industry is still reliant on the current state of data collection.”
Based on conversations with client-side researchers and studies we have conducted here at Quirk’s for recent editions of our annual Corporate Research Report, rather than a personal inability to change on the part of client-siders, that reliance seems to come from a number of factors outside of the researcher’s direct control, namely the organizational culture in which they are working, the comfort level of their internal clients with newer methods and the still-unproven nature of some of the most cutting-edge approaches.
For a question on the topic of organizational issues they are currently facing and expect to be facing two years out, respondents were asked to allocate a total of 100 points among seven choices. (Generally there weren’t large differences along client or vendor lines in assessments of the current and future impact of any of the factors.) For client-side respondents, budget limitations garnered the most points, at 21, as the issue they are currently facing, followed by the ability to generate actionable insights against business questions (16 points), people (skill sets, training) (15 points), ability to collect data needed to answer business questions (14 points), condensed timelines (13 points), ability to combine multiple data sources (13 points) and, in a distant last-place finish with eight points, regulatory or privacy concerns.
From a list of seven options, a combined total of 27 percent of client and supplier respondents singled out “integrating information from different sources to tell a story” as the imperative causing the biggest gap in the industry today, followed by “data quality” (17 percent) and “speed of insight generation to impact business decisions” (16 percent).
Know what needs to be done
As these study findings show, researchers are aware of their situations. They have a keen sense of the factors affecting their ability to succeed and they know what needs to be done. But real change doesn’t happen overnight – it takes diligence and effort. While some observers would like the industry to change course like a speedboat, to me a more apt nautical metaphor might be an oil tanker – slow to turn but a formidable force once it gets going in the right direction.