Are You Prepared for the Future of Market Research?
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Jun 13, 2008
At last week's MRA Conference, one of the presentations I attended was entitled, "Are You Prepared for the Future of Market Research?" Here's a brief summary of the discussion. (Again, all quotations are from my notes.)
Doug User, Ph.D., a senior VP with Widmeyer Research & Polling, spoke about how consumer fragmentation makes it harder to find and understand target audiences. "Traditional methodologies were designed for a different culture than today. Traditional methods have become less reliable and raise issues of data quality. We need new metrics and methods: video blogs, online portals, emotional measurement, data harvesting, analysis of comments in online forums, and private online communities."
Mary Ann Packo, the CEO of Milward Brown North America, discussed the challenges for marketers, consumers and researchers, and gave her top 10 changes affecting the future of market research. For marketers, the challenge is building brands in a fast changing world; for consumers, the challenge is deciding between so many options and choices; for researchers, the challenge is - given all this - how to connect marketers and consumers. Mary Ann's top 10 changes affecting MR were:
1. Marketing's new accountability
2. Integrated marketing and media
3. The digital explosion
4. Consumers in control
5. Privacy concerns
6. Population and audience shifts
7. Next-generation consumers
8. Global evolution
9. Organizational adaptation
10. Collaboration
C. Frederick John, a senior executive with MasterCard, provided an end user's perspective on the challenges facing MR's future. He felt that the industry was on a collision course as demands and processes put pressure on researchers: time pressure and financial pressure, especially, which together reduce data quality. Acknowleding he was most likely in the minority, he believes the industry has moved to an overreliance on the Internet and that random sampling is not possible through the Internet. He is concerned that professional respondents may be demographically representative but not attitudinally representative of the target population. Fred doesn't trust third-party business-to-business panels at all, as most members are recruited from consumer panels. He is concerned that quality control is lacking at many data collection houses. He would like to see a return to the roots of the MR industry, with a greater recognition of the tradeoffs of different methodologies and with a recognition of the importance of projectability and RDD.
After the three main speakers, there was general Q&A. Following some discussion of behavioral analysis of web-site usage, one attendee said that web analytics were not enough. She had started with web analytics and had a detailed understanding of what visitors did at her organization's web site but not why they did it. She felt that in the future web analytics and survey research need to become integrated (which Vovici has done with our WhyClicked product).
Much discussion centered on how the future should not be framed as "Internet vs. CATI" but that studies should use mixed methodologies. One attendee mentioned that for her company different types of people took a paper survey versus a web survey, and that by combining both her organization developed a much richer view of respondents. Another attendee argued that where in 2005 respondents of online surveys were still early adopters compared to the U.S. population as a whole, online respondents today are the mainstream, and telephone studies no longer represent the mainstream but the laggards (as the DMS research indicates). As a result, for his firm, the laggards - the phone respondents - are not of interest to his technology clients.
Telephone sample is less representative than it was in the past, many stated. Because federal law prohibits the automatic dialing of cell phones, many CATI surveys exclude cell phone users; as a result, CATI surveys typically undersample college students and 18- through 24-year old adults.
Are you prepared for the future of market research? On Monday, I'll address this in more detail and wrap up my series of blog posts on the Marketing Research Association's Annual Conference by summing up what I've heard and what I think it means for the future.