Market Research Best Practice

30 Visions for the Future

Peter Mouncey, Frank Wimmer, Peter Mouncey, Frank Wimmer

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780470065273
• eBook ISBN: 9780470687574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Market Research Best Practice is a compilation of the best discussion papers, case studies and methodologies from the ESOMAR publishing and event programme over the last decade and more. Market research is adapting to an increasingly competitive, demanding and globalised business world and, as the world's leading market research organisation, ESOMAR is providing the platform to showcase latest advances and best practice.


In the pursuit to define and illustrate 'new' market research, this book provides a unique source of ideas and practical examples of what research has to offer business and how research can influence the way results are tracked, insights are generated and ultimately decisions are made. Market Research Best Practice draws on recent successes to explore how research is evolving to meet market needs and how good research practice fits into modern business.


More than 50 authors have contributed their work to this collection - all papers were first presented at ESOMAR events and many contributions have been past ESOMAR award winners. To find out more about the ESOMAR Membership, the worldwide code of practice and the range of events and publications, visit www.esomar.org.

Part One

Facilitating Decision-Making

Chapter One

Creating Maximum Value for the Client: Developing a New Strategic Role for Market Researchers

David V. L. Smith¹

This chapter argues the case for market researchers extending their skill sets to embrace a range of business consultancy skills.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter takes the view that much of the past frustration with the output of market research centres on our failure to extend our skill set into four key areas that are critically important to improving the quality of information-based decision-making. First, there is the skill required to work more holistically with qualitative and quantitative data in order to provide a rounded picture of the complexity of many of today’s markets. Second, there are skills associated with knowing how to apply powerful business concepts and constructs in order to bring our consumer evidence alive. Third is the skill in knowing how to incorporate management hunch, intuition, flair and imagination into our data analysis. Fourth, there are the skills in knowing how to help decision-makers test the safety of evidence-based decisions by applying various decision facilitation techniques. By extending market researchers’ skills in these areas, coupled with a greater focus on communicating with decision-makers in an impactful way, we will dramatically improve the quality of the market research offer to our clients. In order to make these ideas concrete, we provide an illustrative case study example of these ideas in action. We look at a project to assess a new high technology business communications device. We conclude the chapter by arguing that extending the market research offer in this way is a ‘win-win’ for the market research industry: we can continue to offer excellence in traditional market research but will be responding to the growing need to bridge the worlds of data analysis and management intuition. In this way we can prevent the industry from becoming a low cost commodity provider of data, with other management service players picking up the responsibility for explaining how our consumer data impacts on business decisions.

The calls for market research to be engaged more actively in helping decision-makers make informed judgements has led to various research agencies extending their traditional remit over the last decade or so to include various skills more traditionally associated with business and management consultancy. But an important point to make is that agencies which have extended their traditional market research offer in this way do not see themselves as ‘top-down’ management styled consultants (‘we have seen that problem before and would like to prescribe our solution to your company’). Rather, they see themselves as essentially ‘bottom-up’- what we might call research information-based business consultants. Everything they do is founded on a detailed and research-led understanding of what consumers in different markets are trying to tell us. The core of their work remains knowing what is in the heads of consumers. This is their power. But, in addition, they offer a broad set of strategic business skills that allow critical customer-based insights to be used to maximum advantage during the decision-making process.

SETTING THE VOICE OF THE CONSUMER IN THE DECISION-MAKING CONTEXT

Market research earned its spurs during the days when most businesses were production, rather than consumer, led. In this era, individuals who could be the ‘voice of the customer’ were seen as being of enormous value. However, over the last few decades decision-makers - as their own understanding of consumers has expanded - have raised the barrier in terms of their expectations of the feedback from market researchers. So today, market research that is presented exclusively, some would say naively, from solely the consumer perspective is often no longer tolerated. Decision-makers now want market researchers to explain exactly how the consumer perspective nestles within the complex business, technological and social context that underpins most commercial decision-making. They want to integrate the consumer fully into the commercial process. Today, it is much more important than in the past for market researchers to understand the business context for which they are providing the consumer perspective. Business success is primarily down to strategic excellence rather than tactical retrieval. Therefore, it is important for market researchers to understand leading edge thinking about what makes for success, and to recognize that latent consumer need is only part of the equation. For example, rather than simply jumping on the brand bandwagon and assuming that having one is all that is needed, researchers must be equipped to explain exactly why, and more importantly how, brand building should command its share of management time and investment. The brand’s contribution as a corporate asset must be understood realistically, rather than assumed, if it is to be leveraged properly. And the wider commercial context that market researchers are expected to understand does not rest on having a good working knowledge of fundamental business concepts and a perspective on how leading edge strategic business thinking is evolving constantly. It also extends to understanding the technological context. Today, with the interconnectivity and convergence of so many different products, it is imperative for market researchers to have a full mastery of the technological environment, if they are properly to assess opportunities that might not fit with existing convention. We cannot rely on researched consumers, on their own, to be clear about what is happening around them. We have to be able to interpret their, by definition, naïve responses in an appropriate manner.

For today’s market researchers to be taken seriously, they also need to have a perspective - a sound conceptual grasp - of how communications in our complex, chaotic, nonlinear and multimedia culture operate. They need to be at the forefront of challenging the received wisdom and leading the way in reconstructing their measurement systems to, for example, reflect the behaviour of decreasingly deferential and more streetwise, communications-aware consumers. Consumers today can read the writing on the wall - and elsewhere. Consumers now know how to pick up all the cues and clues about what brands represent. In short, it is a world that requires the researcher to take a properly holistic view of the different communication ‘touch-points’ that can impact on building brand reputations.

In sum, agencies that are extending their traditional offer to include more business consultancy skills are today attaching much more importance to understanding the wider context of the problem they are investigating. They know that ‘context explains everything’. It is all about the ‘panorama principle’. This tells us that, all other things being equal, in most investigations if there is a choice between going in for more detail or stepping back and understanding the big conceptual picture, then the latter, rather than the former, is likely to pay the greater dividends. It is the researchers’ ability to see the ‘wood for the trees’, and to stand back and see the shapes and patterns at work that differentiate the consultancy-based agency from the more traditional data-centric market research supplier. The future is becoming less about drilling down into a more and more detailed understanding of the consumer evidence alone, and more about understanding the underlying structures that explain what is happening in society, technology and within organizations.

DEVELOPING A MORE HOLISTIC APPROACH TO MARKET RESEARCH ANALYSIS

The market research discipline grew out of classic social science methodologies. This set up the expectation that market research provides something close to ‘scientifically objective’ truth, whereas in reality what we do is no more than loosely follow some of these guiding principles to achieve what we might call a ‘scientific approach’ (this, by the way, is totally respectable). In short, the harsh reality is that, at best, market research is as much an art as it is a science. But everything is confused by the pressure we face as an industry, on the one hand, to deliver data that lives up to the quality ‘gold’ standard of ‘correct’ social science methodology, but, on the other hand, to respond to the realities and pressures of the modern business information world. This tension is seen in the frustration many market researchers experience in trying to make sense of the enormous breadth that is the reality of 21st century marketing data. With a few exceptions, the current market research literature looks rather tired and outdated because it does not look holistically at both the art and science of market research. One particular peculiarity of our technical literature is that it is devoted largely to the idea of analysing a solitary dataset, on the assumption that these data have been collected in a fairly orthodox way, thereby enabling the application of classic ‘textbook’ statistical tests. This rigid adherence to, now outdated, analytical concepts about the way we handle data is very frustrating for new look market research agencies genuinely keen to help business leaders make informed evidence-based decisions. They know, of course, that most decisions are based on multiple sources of data where the information rarely meets the requirements of orthodox methodology. The challenge, therefore, is to develop rigorous frameworks that allow us to understand information in a more holistic way. Here it is important to stress that the holistic approach does not mean that we have drifted into an ‘anything goes’ way of collecting and interpreting consumer data. The holistic researcher will follow a rigorous process akin to journeying along an ‘information learning curve’. As they do so they will know that many of the data they are evaluating will be of questionable accuracy with no rigorous account of the method employed to assemble the data. None of this, though, disturbs today’s experienced analysts. They are rapidly learning how to ‘compensate’ for these methodological inadequacies in their evidence. As they journey along the information learning curve they constantly evaluate each piece of evidence by referring to other prior knowledge. Critically, today’s researchers do not suspend disbelief and assume or ‘pretend’ that the data have been collected using ‘classic’ methodologies. They are totally transparent with clients about the way they operate in today’s imperfect information world. Specifically they are committed to developing holistic analysis frameworks that help them make sense of imperfect data and resolve the mismatch between the classic purist techniques still being used, and the messy evidence with which we typically have to work. (See Smith and Fletcher, 2004 for a comprehensive review of holistic analysis frameworks.)

CAPITALIZING ON THE GROWING INTERPRETIVE POWER OF MARKET RESEARCHERS

Today’s breed of more business-consultancy-based market researchers are honest enough to state explicitly that ‘not all respondents are created equal in their ability to contribute to the survey process’. They are transparent in arguing that it is legitimate, on occasions, to ‘override’ some of the consumer evidence by setting it in the context of everything else we know - the cumulative knowledge we have acquired over the years about the survey process. There is a growing confidence in taking into account the insights we now have about how attitudes are formed, and under what conditions they can be expected to fluctuate and change. In the early days of market research there was an inevitable tendency to be very nervous about overriding the literal feedback provided by consumers. Of course, the doyens of different forms of psychoanalytical-based qualitative research were always inviting us to look more deeply into exactly what people were saying. But much mainstream market research was conducted, and interpreted, largely on the premise that it was the market researcher’s job to provide a straight reportage of the direct feedback being provided by consumers. But now, as our expertise of how people respond to surveys has grown, we are more confident in our ability to get underneath what our respondents are telling us. Therefore, it is important to pass our consumer data through various ‘knowledge filters’ (what we now know about the psychology of people’s responses to surveys and how to interpret consumer feedback in this context). These are discussed in detail in Smith and Fletcher (2004), so here we simply make the point that new look market research agencies work...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One - Facilitating Decision-Making
• Part Two - Knowledge Management
• Part Three - New Methodologies
• Part Four - Modelling
• Part Five - Facilitating Diversity
• Part Six - Best Practice Case Studies
• Index