The ‘new’ world of market research

3Nov09

I’ve just come back from a fantastic trip to Chicago where I attended the ESOMAR Online Research 2009 conference. You can find Jeffrey Henning’s brilliant recap here (he pretty much live-blogged it – very impressive!).

Anyway, not surprisingly, there was lots of talk of ‘new’.

And it would have been easy to come away with the message that the market research industry really needs to get with the ‘new’ programme or, quite simply, it will wither away and die.

Because the new world of research is here! New methodologies. New technologies. New ways of engaging with respondents (Gasp! Did I say that? I meant ‘participants’, ‘co-creators’ or ‘collaborators’).

All well and good, but what does this actually mean?

New kinds of output?

Let’s all take a moment to think. What, as market researchers, is our purpose?

Market research is about understanding the market. At a very basic level, the end goal is to deliver information that will help our clients make relatively informed/better decisions about how to sell their products or services.

And here’s my point; the output (ie what our clients are paying for) is only ever going to be as ‘new’ as the questions they/we ask*.

Over the next few blog posts I’m going to take a look at some of the elements of ‘new’ I outlined above. Examine them closely. Explore what they mean for researchers at a practical level. Separate, if you like, the hype and theory from the actual task of delivering useful output.

Should be interesting…

: P

*If you’re in the ‘listening’ camp, ie “Oh no, no! We don’t ask questions, we just listen to the conversation!”, I’ll argue that you’re still (implicitly) asking questions when you choose to/not to include any particular content in your analysis.