More work to do
Editor's note: Alex Hunter is commercial director at Spark. He can be reached at alex@sparkmr.com.
Market research has revolutionized how companies can get closer to their customers. However, changes such as the sustainability movement, the global pandemic and the big-health agenda affect the way we gather and deliver these crucial insights. As a result, common types of market research have been forced to evolve and improve.
So, what have we seen over the past 10 years?
Improvements
Sustainability. Across the last decade, we have collectively stopped printing vast reams of paper for our surveys. COVID-19 has finally put the last nail in that coffin, as we move not only to digital research methods but also flexible working, which has taken thousands of cars off the road and ensured that the paperless office must become a reality.
When I first started in research, I remember taking huge boxes of paper surveys out into the field on the train. We’d print them off, staple them and inevitably go back over each one with correction fluid to correct mistakes found last-minute. It was a scene many readers may recognize, thick with the smell of toner and the sound of the printer and staplers. The data team and researchers would argue over whether the tick was more in box four or five or why they’d routed to question 10 despite it being impossible to answer for a buyer of fish rather than cheese.
When I look back at it now I’m amazed we persevered, but of course, it was all we knew. The last vestiges of that world have been solidly swept away by the pandemic. Much of this is for the better, with more efficient tools and techniques replacing what had formerly felt comfortable. I still favor face-to-face research in all its forms, because there isn’t much better than being able to really see the facial expressions of people, plus their physical responses, but the positives generally outweigh the negatives.
The positives are surely a massively reduced carbon footprint across the whole industry despite the huge growth we have been through.
Efficiency. Hand in hand with sustainability probably goes efficiency and hand in hand with efficiency also comes speed. We can complete research far faster than ever before, using fewer resources and arriving at the answer at the speed of doing business. The challenge of this is that there is now an expectation of speed in everything.
With automation and artificial intelligence growing, it will be interesting to see how the industry changes and develops and what it might end up morphing into.
What we clearly need more of though is agility and the desire from all corners of the industry to answer quite specific questions at speed, which can be modular and build to help us answer bigger questions. However, this is going to take better partnerships between stakeholders and researchers to work collaboratively to solve problems.
Effectiveness. My first agency boss, when she wasn’t kicking me under the table for my faux pas at client meetings, was drumming into me the fact that if it wasn’t actionable insight then it shouldn’t be on a page. I remember when she first caught this bug and, to a degree, it changed everything in the industry. It shifted the risk away from the person asking the question to the person answering it.
In the earliest days of market research, the research department was responsible for carrying out the work diligently and quite scientifically with the goal being the answering of the question. If the question was answered but the answer was of no use whatsoever, the job was still done. Now every project must arrive at an answer upon which some action can be taken. It’s no longer useful to come up with answers that are already known, nor answers that don’t challenge the status quo. For this, we are clearly infinitely better at driving change.
Human-centricity. Market research has moved up the food chain in importance in the eyes of business leaders. What was once an offshoot of advertising is now found across any touchpoint with the marketing or sales processes. We have become the glue that holds many different businesses’ needs together and it shows.
Where it could go even further is in taking the learnings from our academic colleagues and starting to develop them into what it means to be human, why we do the things we do and what we can learn. We all know already that 40-minute surveys about latex gloves are not going to result in anything close to human insight, so why do we keep doing it?
Innovation. We’re awesome at innovation, probably because we filter so many brilliant minds every day that small pieces of that brilliance keep chipping little bits off and adding bits on. Any research agency that doesn’t have innovation at its core is probably not speaking to enough people in their day. Where we’ve really added something special though is the embracing of digital and really making it work. This has often come from outside the industry but increasingly I see some fantastic work from inside the industry. Some businesses which immediately come to mind are Zappi, Voxpopme and DisplayR, who I think we should be proud of as an industry, as they are really research-centric businesses with tech innovation at their heart that have gone out to solve a real problem and delivered on it. Where I take issue is bandwagon-jumping but perhaps that is something to save for another day.
What I think we need to keep doing is looking for those real issues with a true human connection that will come to define our industry. We need to be the glue between the real world of human experience and the needs of businesses in understanding it. Where technology and innovation can truly really help is removing administrative barriers, cost barriers and error or fraud.
What has to come sooner
Mental health. I’m convinced that the nature that draws many of us to research in the first place, and makes us excellent investigators, also leads many of us to suffer with our mental health. Not only this but the relentless nature of our work can exacerbate it.
My view is that our attachment to perfectionism is at the heart of our problems. Researchers find it difficult to let a project go before they can truly see it as perfect. I have always told them that perfection is unobtainable and if they forever seek it, they will forever be disappointed.
We do need to have the conversation about whether we, as an industry, need to do more to protect young researchers.
Diversity. We still don’t have enough representation of minority groups across our industry, which is leading to a lack of understanding of viewpoints that are far from the center, especially in our qualitative research work. Where racial diversity is getting better with active voices promoting it, there are few people from working-class backgrounds, which results in systemic issues that are not being tackled.
I’d like to see agencies being much more comfortable recruiting from those who didn’t go to university, since empathy, tenacity and curiosity alone would stand most researchers in perfectly good stead to start their careers in the industry.
Without this diversity, we risk missing the ability to truly connect with voices across the spectrum of our target markets and continue to unintentionally marginalize groups with our recommendations to businesses.
Specialism. There is a degree to which our drive at efficiency has lost some specialism along the way. The other day I overheard a quant-leading researcher explain to a junior that it was much easier for a “quantie” to understand qual than a “quallie” to understand quant. I couldn’t disagree more. It’s easy to be mediocre at everything but true specialists should be cherished and exalted.
We must support the ability for specialisms to grow, especially within fledgling in-house teams who are being pressured implicitly and explicitly to deliver everything from a small team.
Tools and resources are undoubtedly rounding off the edges of our lack of experience in some areas but assuming that everyone who can moderate a group can also write a questionnaire should be challenged by us all. The skills aren’t all interchangeable.
Data, data, data. There is no business in any industry that isn’t now swimming in data. The market research industry is continuing to add to this lake but not yet offering too many effective solutions to deal with the problem.
Insight aggregator tools are not being embedded in ways that internal teams would like and reports are often still getting filed away as a job well done and never revisited. So much investment is being tied up in projects which are then having limited capability to make real change.
Furthermore, it is equally important to consider data privacy to protect consumers as large amounts of data continue to become readily available in real-time.
Reductionism. In the fast-moving world of actionable insight, it is easy for us to reduce everything down to four slides, despite months of work and thousands of humans putting effort in. While research stakeholders will never thank us for losing a story in 146 slides of PowerPoint, they might also thank us for bringing the interesting, the inspiring and the engaging just for the sake of it.
Only the other day a client got excited by an offhand comment about a drinker in a pub and it sparked to life a whole conversation and hypothesis chain which might never have happened had we kept it to ourselves. There is no harm in delivering a bit extra if it adds to the story, even if it isn’t deemed actionable.