4 under 40: Panel with Emerging Leaders in Marketing Research
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Sep 29, 2010
The AMA Marketing Research Conference awarded the Marketing Research Emerging Leader Award to recognize the contributions of the next generation of leaders in the MR industry. “These are individuals who are leading change and embracing what’s next. In addition to recognizing past and present accomplishments, our hope is that this award may serve as motivation for other young leaders to push a little harder and reach a little further.” The recipients were:
- Tom H.C. Anderson – CEO, Anderson Analytics, LLC
- Tom De Ruyck – Sr. R&D Manager, InSites Consulting
- Nick Harrington – Consumer Research Manager, Procter & Gamble
- Kristin Luck – President, Decipher, Inc.
Matt Valle then moderated a panel discussion of the winners. “What qualities or skills should a next generation market researcher have?” Matt asked.
Kristin said, “There are two interesting qualities that I look for when teaching or hiring individuals: more strategic thinkers than just doers, with curiosity and creativity; with our focus as an industry on new technology, we need people with a love and background in technology.”
Tom De Ruyck likes to see it “as a combination of art and science, doing the things right while starting over again with social media techniques, reinventing the statistics behind it. On the other hand, we need art skills, how to be impactful, how to be a change agent, how to bring a message to the board room. Be a scientist and an entertainer to make research cool again! Or cool for the first time! We have to become sexier, like advertising on the one side of our industry, or consulting on the other side.”
Tom H.C. Anderson said, “It is hard to find one person with all the skills we need.”
Nick concluded, “I am less interested in the sizzle and more interested in the steak: I want more people from behavioral sciences, from the neurosciences.”
Matt next asked, “With the trend towards leveraging social media, what are the privacy concerns? I’m thinking here of Facebook with the problems they’ve had.”
Tom H.C. Anderson said, “It’s a wild, wild west, with the technology and everything changing: what will be possible in a few months. I think it’s a waste of time to worry about it now. Gen Y is worrying about it differently than other generations. We all have to watch what we say.”
Kristin said, “The biggest pushback is when people have not given permission or the data is used in ways that aren’t relevant to them. Many freaked out when Facebook started offering very targeted ads. Yet with new ethnography sites, people share pictures of the inside of their refrigerator; people are fine with sharing if they have control.”
Tom De Rucyk said, “When we asked consumers, ‘Do you care that we scrape everything you’ve written online?’ people say ‘Go ahead and do it, if you will make better products as a result’.”
Tom H.C. Anderson said, “Years ago we screen scraped a popular travelers web site and used it in a report. This led to a nine-page discussion on the forum and some people on the forum complained that they weren’t included in the report!”
Matt asked, “Speaking of listening, and implicit market research techniques, and biosensory methods, are these methods replacements or enhancements for traditional research methods?”
Nick said, “I don’t think they are replacements, Matt. They sharpen what we already do well. We are talented at predicting behavior, but our tools are blunt. 95% of what we do is subconscious, and 60% of what you did yesterday you will do today. With all that, we have little conscious access to that information, when we are on auto-pilot. We have to use tools that determine what happens to people subconsciously.”
Tom H.C. Anderson said, “If we view data as multiple rivers, with more data coming in from more sources, than ever before, we need to pay attention to more sources, meaning there will be less ad hoc research. But we need to develop better models for understanding these rivers of data.”
Tom De Ruyck talked about trackers that provide little information beyond a few numbers: “The nice things about listening techniques in natural or research communities is that things pop up that you never would have thought to ask, answers to questions that you didn’t ask.”
Nick said, “One speaker said we need to be careful about consumers lying, but I don’t think consumers lie so much as answer questions we ask that in fact are hard to answer. The onus is on us to ask questions that elicit articulate responses.”
Kristin said, “Secondary data is an augment not a replacement.”
Matt asked, “Some clients talk about bringing the deep technical research understanding back in house. What have you seen?”
Nick said, “From a client point of view, we are in an R&D function with 1,800 people working as researchers, taking consumer insights and translating them into technical solutions. We have a huge number of people with a wide range of skills: some are extremely expert in market research, some are not. Agencies need to find where we are weak and fill the gap. We need a range of products so that we can have synergy rather than replacement.”
Tom De Ruyck said, “Last week I was leading a debate in Amsterdam on this topic. Do It Yourself tools are being used by marketers who then ask the client-side department afterwards how to interpret them. It is so easy that marketers do it themselves that researchers need to be internal consultants.”
In conclusion, Matt asked, “Where is online research quality headed? Is quality something that should be governed by associations or by agencies?”
Kristin said, “I just wrote an article on how there is less talk on online quality, and Steve Gittelman and I talked at ESOMAR about the decline in discussion of it. Researchers need to set their own standards for their firms. A number of organizations have conducted sample quality studies but we don’t have a good understanding of the issues on a provider by provider basis.”
Tom H.C. Anderson said, “Quality and trust are related. I strive for Anderson Analytics to have better quality than others, and I expect other firms do the same.”
Congratulations to all four winners!