I Was a Teenage Market Researcher
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Jun 15, 2010
"You're younger than I expected." Those might be the five nicest words you can hear when meeting an online friend in real life for the first time. I heard it last week at the MRA conference, from someone who knew I had been in research for over 20 years. My confession? I started young.
I was a teenage market researcher.
Still only 18 the summer after my first year of college, I worked at a temp agency, first cleaning up drywall at a construction site, then setting up a Van Heusen factory outlet store. The third job was charmed: I ended up at a small market research firm, Compete Technologies, helping with secondary research into automotive technology. By the next summer I was writing questionnaires and conducting telephone interviews; I ended up working there full time after college.
Turns out quite a few of us started as teenagers: Betty Adamou, Andrew Hayes, Esteban Kolsky, Sharon Livingston and Pat Molloy, among others. (Chime in among the comments if I forgot you!)
As for me, many wonderful things happened as a result of that summer job. I met my wife at the company, met my Perseus co-founder, and I was transferred to England for a year. And, of course, I made market research my career - something I would have never considered before that job.
I was happy when I owned Perseus to be able to return the favor: we offered dozens of teenagers and college students summer jobs - they are a great source of talent and innovation and quite a few went on to work here full time, including the developer in the office next to mine and a developer three thousand miles away. Our interns taught me about instant messaging, MP3s and social networks (before Facebook, before MySpace, before Friendster, there was LiveJournal).
One of the most popular business ideas presented at Research 2010 (in an event inspired by the UK show "Dragons' Den") was a market-research agency that would hire and train teenagers to conduct "youth-on-youth research on an ad hoc basis". It was viewed as a great social initiative as well as a source of new talent for the industry.
This summer I hope you can reach out to a temp agency to hire some students to assist you with your research projects. Most, of course, are having a tough time finding opportunities, given the high rate of teenage unemployment this year. There is plenty they can do, from secondary research to data cleaning to primary research. They can help with number crunching and preliminary data analysis. No doubt they can teach you a thing or two about social media.
You get great minds at a great price, and just may launch some new market research careers.