Dolphins in the Tuna Net: Protecting MR from Marketing Regulation
Posted by Vovici Blog on Tue, Jan 11, 2011
Recently I had a chance to interview Duane Berlin of Lev & Berlin, P.C. about his views on the need for the marketing research industry to police itself. Duane is the general counsel of CASRO, and is—as I am—a member of the CASRO task force on social media research. The following views are his alone and not those of the committee, which is still deliberating.
An analogy that Duane has popularized over the years is that self-regulation is essential so that “the dolphins don’t get caught in the tuna net.” It would be easy for market research to be inadvertently caught up in the regulation of marketing. “When we think about the larger perspective,” said Duane, “with all the regulation that might be coming down, with lots of activities from the federal government, including social media marketing guides, as an industry we have to look at and think about every marketing regulation.”
To police ourselves, we have “to determine whether recommended guidelines or mandatory standards are warranted, and are they doable in a rational way? Can they be formulated in a way that demonstrates to government regulators that we are taking care of business on our own in the research community? That has been the CASRO strategy in relation to telephone, online, panels, everything, and it has been successful so far.”
“Not only are we the dolphins,” Duane continued, “but you don’t have to worry about us dolphins! We have the best practice. It’s like Hebrew National’s slogan: ‘we answer to a higher authority ’; we answer to a higher authority than the FTC has created for the marketing industry.”
“The good thing about my practice is I get to work at the association level and the policy level but also get to work with companies on a day-to-day basis. What goes to the top of the list in the day-to-day world is not compliance, not maintaining the highest level of practice: what is at the top of the list is addressing new opportunities to increase business, to do what the clients are pushing for and what their peers are pushing for.
“This rich data collection methodology of social media research gets hotter and hotter as it’s what clients want and what research firms are seeing their peers do. They are certainly being diligent in terms of looking for good solutions, but any business person—all things being equal—follows the path of least resistance to get as much done through technology as they can. That trend is everywhere.
“So many folks at the operational level just want to find a technology solution that is good and cheap and get the most out of it. It’s natural to lose focus on methodology and the wealth of the research practitioner’s tool box that has been developed over decades. Then bring into good ethical practice – the latter being the hardest to get into people’s conscience when they are trying to make a buck. We all have to keep banging away at those concepts.
“Ethics are not ‘pie in the sky’ ivory towers. Ethics are going to be critical to keep market research professional.” In fact, Duane argued, ethics will enable us to get the most out of social media data collection over time. “It is a rich hunting ground right at the beginning, but if we don’t keep applying ethical practices there is a danger that we could create a bubble. If clients and researchers only have half the story, if someone makes a decision based on poor analysis, well, we don’t want kill it before it is born.
“Let’s just take one problem or issue, the first of many issues: when your net is so wide, going back to fishing, and you come across verbatims, what do we turn over to clients? Anything a pharmaceutical company learns from public or nonpublic sources must be reported. Imagine social media data collection for a drug maker, and they get some information about an adverse event caused by one of their products. We then have the issue, how do we sort through those conversations and who makes the decision about an adverse event? It has to be someone with a clinical background; not a researcher. Do we then turn over the verbatims?” Traditionally data survey research has not identified participants. “In order to fill that very clear legal obligation of adverse events, do we limit our clients’ use of the verbatims through the contract? Do we say they can’t use those verbatims for direct marketing?
“The other hallmark of what is critical for the survival of professional researchers’ development of this methodology is to maintain the strict separation between marketing and market research. Otherwise we lose our professional objectivity for producing something that is reliable, verifiable and scientifically accurate. And we become the tuna and are fair game for the regulators.”
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