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.
Filed under: market research | 4 Comments
Tags: ESOMAR, new methodologies, online
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Zebra Bites by Katie Harris is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License. -
The last point seems most important to me, because it is seldom realized rsp. admitted:
Of course you have questions when you listen, otherwise you would do something else like playing golf or the like. Your advantage in not formulating them explicitly is that you can handle the output much more “freely”.
Thank you for pointing that out!
When thinking about new it sometimes helps to look backwards at old ‘new’.
After World War II clients were not asking for Focus Groups, it took innovators like Ernest Dichter to see that they was a new potential answer to problems that clients had, even though clients did not know there were solutions.
In the 1970s Gordon Brown and Maurice Millward spotted that the people paying for advertising were pretty much at the mercy of the ad men, unable to ‘rate card’ or track the impact of advertising. Along with others, they pretty much invented ad tracking, one of the major research tools over the past few years. Millward and Brown took ten years before their single office in the centre of the UK started to spread around the world.
What is the lesson? We can only introduce something truly new if it meets unmet needs. If it does not meet needs it won’t succeed, and if it meets met needs it will be at best in a price game.
Part of the ‘listening camp’ has been pointing to simply monitoring what is already being said online. Tools for tracking trends and sentiments ‘in the wild’ have a use but they are often crude because the data hose is so fat and noisy (think: Twitter). Polling and surveys still have a place at the table, albeit adjusted for new media platforms. zoomerang’s facebook app comes to mind as one focused tool.