Panel Ponds along the River of Information
Posted by Vovici Blog on Wed, May 18, 2011
Thanks to Eisenhower’s admiration of the autobahn, and his desire for an interstate highway system to rival it, I grew up on a 10-acre manmade lake. My grandfather’s farm was excavated to construct the embankment of the Interstate 80 turnpike in Ohio. The excavators must have hit a natural spring, for they came back one weekend to find their quarry was now a lake. My grandfather stocked it with fish, and decades later I could walk out of my house and fish whenever I wanted.
This was brought to mind as I thought of the ARF’s vision of market research in 2021: researchers as stewards of a “river of information” for the firms they work for. Rather than think in terms of commissioning projects to answer marketing questions, researchers of the future will oversee processes that will provide ongoing feedback as well as places to fish for additional information. In this vision, sometimes they will look to social media streams of information, but other times they will turn to ponds they’ve stocked with fish.
“Information ponds” such as house panels. Market researchers have typically thought of themselves as consumers of respondent lists – whether rented externally or generated internally by IT or other departments. Have a new survey? Get a new list. Unfortunately, eventually researchers see that the lists aren’t as good as they used to be and that response rates have declined.
If anyone in the company was a steward of mailing lists, it was the marketing department, which would be concerned about overfishing – er, oversending to the list – and which would be concerned about list quality. Marketing can no longer be the only steward of this natural resource. For purposes of survey research, list quality is now an ongoing concern of market researchers as well: they need to build a house panel and act as a steward to the company’s use of respondents for survey research. Like conservationists, researchers need to make sure that they are not oversurveying respondents and that the list quality is representative of the target markets being studied.
Yes, you can go to the river to fish. But the river is a communal resource. People dump refuse in it upstream. Factories pollute the river with social media spam, automated bots and links to blog posts shilling products. I’m not about to eat a fish caught from the Cuyahoga, and you can’t always be certain that the information you “caught” in social media nets hasn’t been polluted by competitors or market participants. Take such information as qualitative and possibly directional, but verify the representativeness of such views by fishing in well-stocked ponds that you manage and understand. House panels are an important part of the transformation of research from projects to processes and are important resources in the watershed along the “river of information”.