X Marks the MR Spot: Abbreviate 'Market Research' as MRX
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sun, Aug 22, 2010
Jeffrey, it’s been a long time since you interviewed yourself. What’s on your mind?
Well, besides still missing Dave Barry's Sunday humor column five years after he discontinued it, here's what I'm thinking:
Let’s stop using MR as the abbreviation for ‘Market Research’ and start using MRX. As researchers, we’re pitching this brave new world of social media listening, and we have an acronym which has 130 other uses, making it impossible for us to easily do social media monitoring on our own industry. Do we really want to have to weed out posts about Medical Records, Management Review and Magnetic Resonance? How embarrassing!
Why X? Why not MRC or MRV or some other letter?
Well, I started tagging posts on Twitter with #MRX because spammers (focus group facilities, of all things) were using the hashtag #MR so much that real conversation was being drowned out. I thought MRX could stand for whatever you wanted: Market Research Exchange, Market Research Excellence, Market Research Excitement.
Then I realized X could be used to abbreviate the final ending of “Research” since X plays pretty loose when it comes to abbreviations. It’s used for “trans-“, “cross” and “Christ” for X sake. Surely it could be used for the final –ch of research.
Face it, X is cool. The X Factor. The Xbox. The X Games. And market research could benefit from a little X-brand coolness.
You wrote a mock Declaration of Independence for carving the #MRX community out of the #MR Twitter community. But, to use that analogy, doesn’t #MRX have native inhabitants that you’re colonizing, as it were?
This is why I don’t interview myself more often. I ask tough questions. I did see who else was using #MRX on Twitter and the two biggest uses were for the occasional Medicis Pharmaceutical Corporation stock quote or Morristown Tennessee weather report. But some tags are “write only” – people tag a post but don’t follow the community. And that seemed to be the case with #MRX. No natives, just some occasional accidental visitors to its shores.
Outside of Twitter, Acronym Finder only lists 7 meanings for MRX of which the two most popular aren’t exactly household names: Medicis Pharmaceutical Corporation again (MRX being its ticker symbol) and MRX (Mission Rehearsal Exercise, a U.S. Department of Defense acronym). Certainly the DOD has enough acronyms that they aren’t going to miss one.
Is anyone actually using MRX as an abbreviation for “market research”?
Yes, and this all happened to my surprise. It certainly wasn’t how I used MRX. When I used it, I meant “the Twitter #MRX community”. But using MRX for “research” just came naturally to people, because it was a succinct way to write a post and tag it at the same time. Typically, on Twitter, you end a post with its hashtags – integrating it into the post saves characters, which are a scarce resource when you are limited to 140 characters per tweet.
For instance, the very first use of MRX as an abbreviation for market research was when Annie Pettit of Conversition wrote, “Meet the new market researchers. And they have no #MRX experience.” That saves three characters when compared to “Meet the new market researchers. And they have no MR experience. #MRX”
Some of the other early examples: “I completely agree, my main concern is these battles lead to organisational entrenchment without taking #MRX forward”, tweeted by Colin Moyer (@Krillman), and “Strong case for #ISO accreditation and following #QMS procedures in the #MRX world? You decide http://su.pr/1cRFzU”, from @Damien_Marquez.
Well, many would argue that market research could use a little re-branding.
Adding an X is about as little a re-branding as you can do, then! And I’ll charge the industry only $500,000 for the idea – the same rate a marketing agency got for helping US Air re-brand as US Airways. “MRX: Not your father’s market research.” I’ll throw in the tagline for free.