Survey Federalism: Reconstituting Market Research Departments
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Jul 02, 2010
End users within large global organizations have not formally declared their independence from the marketing research department: they have simply acted as if that department did not exist. They've conducted Do-It-Yourself surveys without the permission of Research, co-opted customer mailing lists to serve as panel and often put their own immediate MR needs above the long-term interests of the company.
Market research departments find themselves in much the same circumstance as that of the Congress of the Confederation, which governed the United States from 1777 to 1788 under the Articles of Confederation: researchers have little central authority, rely on other departments ("the States") for their funding and have no ability to enforce their policies.
This was an untenable position for the United States in the eighteenth century and is an untenable position for market research departments in the twenty-first century. While research departments might long for the day when they had a monopoly on corporate research, those days are not going to return. Unless they want to see their authority go the way of King George's in the colonies, they need to come to a new arrangement with end users in their organization.
When it comes to centralized vs. decentralized research, a hybrid approach is best: survey federalism, if you will. The ideal federal approach will grant the research department:
- A standing army. The market research department should create, maintain and field research resources to be used in common, such as a panel of customers and prospects for quantitative research, a standing online research community for qualitative research, and online reporting tools that tailor data views by department and role. As many end users as possible should be given access to these central resources to get employees as close as possible to the Voice of the Customer.
- Legislative authority. The MR department should create policies that govern how often customers can be surveyed and by what means, in order to safeguard the long-term health of customer participation in market research.
- Set weights and measures. The research department should create questionnaire templates with standard question wording and scales for other departments to use, to support internal benchmarking.
- Line-item veto. The MR department should be able to kill bad surveys before they are sent out to customers, amending them to follow best practices for panel management and questionnaire design. As part of this, the research department should provide training to users on these best practices and should mentor end users so that "Do It Yourself" surveys become "Do It Together" surveys.
- Tenth Amendment. Powers not granted to the market research department should be reserved to end users so that they can conduct additional research as needed.
How to make this new constitutional order a reality? As one noted political philosopher commented recently, "Authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force!" (Thanks, Barbie!) By offering end users new central resources that they can access and by mentoring them through the use of those resources, research departments can forge a more perfect union.
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