Trading off Speed and Quality
Posted by Vovici Blog on Wed, Apr 20, 2011
The 9th edition of the GreenBook® Research Industry Trends Report [pdf] (organized and edited by Lenny Murphy) was released today, describing a convenience-sampled survey of 673 research providers and clients. In reading the report by Bob Walker of Surveys & Forecasts, LLC, I’m struck by attitudes towards speed and quality:
There have always been tradeoffs between quality, cost, and speed, but we appear to have gone well past the tipping point in the marketing research field. Setting the generational and client vs. supplier-side issues aside, systemic stressors make it difficult to deliver on the promise of high-quality, high-value research. Overall, two-thirds feel that “Clients today are less able to tell the difference between high quality and mediocre research” – something that even clients agree on.
Additional concerns:
- Ever-shorter timelines are preventing the delivery of quality: nearly 60% agree that the “quality of work is becoming less important than speed of deliverables” and that short timelines means that “we cannot deliver the quality we want to”.
- Perhaps most disconcerting: only 1/3 believe that “if they have to choose, clients prefer quality over speed”.
Interestingly, 57% of research providers agree that “Clients prefer short-term insights to deep understanding of consumer markets”, yet only 48% of clients agree. Methinks clients want researchers to provide a deep understanding rapidly, which requires industry specialization.
44% said “clients see traditional primary research as an old-fashioned luxury,” presumably because of the longer time periods involved in fielding focus groups and telephone surveys.
Clearly, there is a disconnect between research providers and clients.
It’s my experience that when clients want something different than what the market is providing, it’s not the clients who change.
To survive the shift in the market, research providers will need to embrace automation and technology to serve customers faster. House panels, MROCs, and social media monitoring are all techniques that can be executed more quickly than traditional research. Those research providers that breakthrough and thrive in the changing market will be the ones that find ways to deliver high quality research quickly. For, in the end, clients don’t want to tradeoff quality for speed at all.