Take Me to the River: MR & the River of Information
Posted by Vovici Blog on Mon, Apr 18, 2011
At the 25th anniversary celebration of the SIUE Master of Marketing Research program on Friday, Ian Lewis of Cambiar painted a vision of MR in 2021. His inspiration was work he had done with the Engagement and Talent Committee of the Research Transformation Initiative at the Advertising Research Foundation, along with Kim Dedeker, chairman of Kantar Americas. Kim had suggested the central metaphor reshaping market research was the “river of information”. As the committee wrote in the March issue of the Journal of Advertising Research:
The fundamental premise is that research in 2021 will represent a continuous, organic flow of knowledge—a “river” of information. Today, maybe 80 percent of marketing issues are addressed by conducting a market-research project. By 2021, we think that leading edge companies—probably led by consumer packaged goods and technologically driven enterprises—will look for answers to 80 percent of their marketing issues by “fishing the river” of information.
Value creation will be catalyzed from the organic knowledge housed in the tributaries that feed the river—those points of confluence where tributaries meet; the river itself; and the larger reservoir of knowledge that the rivers flow into. Companies will have invested heavily in information-base development and mining tools, customizing their own rivers that will include both internal and external information (and not just data: ethnographies and videos will all be tributaries flowing into their information river). And these are the enterprises that likely will have self-serve capabilities that enable marketers to get solutions for most of their issues.
This realignment will change the intermediary role of today’s marketing research/consumer insight professional. In the new world, knowledge will exist before the business question is formed.
As we move from data scarcity to data abundance, the focus of market research must change from projects to process. As an example, Ian pointed out that we’ve seen this with the shift from ad hoc focus groups to standing MROCs (to which I would add: the shift from ad hoc surveys to managing house panels for surveys).
Ian described some of the tributaries that will flow into this new river of information:
- User-generated content across the Web.
- Social-network conversations.
- Observational data from store video cameras and RFID tracking.
- Clickstream data from web browsing.
- Mobile data about consumers’ current locations.
- An “Internet of Things” communicating information directly from products consumers are using.
Researchers can also actively shape the information they are collecting through:
- Market Research Online Communities.
- Online crowdsourcing.
- Field experimentation (testing new-business concepts on small fractions of web site visitors).
While the different tributaries can be used in isolation, these information streams will be even more powerful when they can tie information together at the individual level, analyzing the social network updates of a consumer in the context of their location, past purchases and behavior.
To succeed in this new world, “the researcher of the future will be an accomplished navigator of the unpredictable waters in this complex river system.”