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The Six Winds of Change

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At the 25th anniversary celebration of the SIUE Master of Marketing Research program a few weeks ago, Ian Lewis of Cambiar discussed the winds of change affecting market research. He identified “the Six Winds” that research should pay attention to.

1. Delivering More With Less - 80% of research departments are working with less budget than two years ago (source: IR), while the global market for market research declined by 4.1% in 2009 (ESOMAR). “According to BCG,” wrote Karlene Lukovitz, “low ROI on consumer insight in part results from many companies continuing to run the function in outmoded fashion: they ask market researchers to take orders rather than to act as strategic partners generating breakthrough insights.” As a result, Ian said, researchers need to refocus resources away from what’s not needed to what is needed; forget spending 80% of the budget on tactical research: forget traditional qualitative, usage and attitude surveys, “trackers that don’t add value” and validation research. Refocus on innovation and product development, integrated market measurement, strategic research, shopper insights, in-the-moment research, ethnography, measures of emotions and ROI.
2. Do-It-Yourself – DIY surveys present opportunities and risks for market-research departments. They provide more for the money, making MR a hero with procurement, and they bring departments closer to the customer. Unfortunately, DIY surveys take time away from strategic work, shift MR from a business partner to an internal provider and create the need to institute “guard rails” to protect coworkers outside of MR who are using DIY surveys.
3. New Research Modalities – Many new modalities are unprompted: unprompted comments from social media listening posts, blog sampling and word-of-mouth tracking; unprompted responses to stimuli from biometrics, neuroscience, eye tracking and facial coding; even analysis of unprompted feelings from emotional research. Next add in technological change to research modes, from mobile surveys to mobile ethnography apps to crowdsourcing and research games. Researchers need to integrate how consumers behave naturally with data from within the company.
4. The River – Ian discussed the “River of Information” metaphor produced by the ARF Research Transformation Super Council, which concluded “There will be a fundamental shift in how we approach business decision making and influence of strategy. We move away from a project orientation toward an ongoing process of knowledge access and utilization. Value creation is catalyzed from the organic knowledge found in the flow of the river.” In the future, we will first search the information river, then decide whether a study is needed.
5. New Talent for a New Age – Researchers of the future will tell stories rather than display numbers.  There are three career paths for researchers of the future: management consultants, polymaths and specialists. Management consultants move from the tactical to the strategic, understand the business side and drive innovation and growth. Polymaths wade into the river of information to synthesize data so that they can identify insights for competitive advantage. Specialists leverage their deep analytical capabilities and use new MR tools to assist polymaths with their work.
6. The New Global Middle Class – By 2030, 93% of the world’s middle class will come from emerging economies; in the meantime, 70 million people will enter the middle class every year. The global economy is just beginning.

These are six winds blowing change through the research industry. As Ian said, quoting Joe Tripodi, the CMO of Coca Cola: “If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance a whole lot less.”