Deep Thoughts on ESOMAR
I just got back from my first-ever ESOMAR Congress, and it lived up to its theme of “Research Reloaded”. My top-three takeaways:
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We can stop obsessing over the process, and focus on impact. This resonated through several topics. For example, it's OK to use "gamified" questions even though they might cause some bias, if they get us "better" answers. Or, here's a thought: Maybe getting perfectly representative samples doesn't matter after all. And it's now the clients who are telling us this! Related, maybe faster is more important than perfect...This means web instead of mail. Mobile instead of fixed point. Shorter decks instead of lists of tables.
The challenge, of course, is proving out the efficacy of new approaches, when we no longer have the comfort of believing in the purity of the process. David Bakken, who won an award for the best overall paper in 2010 (across ALL the Esomar conferences, which was awarded just last night), once offered a rationale for believing in the outcome of a model - if you agree with all of the assumptions, and you believe the logic, then you need to agree with the outcome. Then again, that was 3 or 4 years ago, before he wrote his prize winning paper, "Only the Paranoid Survive".
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Change really is here, and this time it's really going to happen. We've seen lots of head fakes and false starts in the last 10 years, but this time it seems real. Our clients are finally starting to shift their dollar/euro spend. Two years ago, I was asked to submit my "edgy" opinion on the future of market research. I basically argued that in 5 years, we would start to see Big Change. That it would creep on us at first, clients would test the waters slowly, but then it would hit like an avalanche. In the client roundtable (with P&G, Volkswagen, Reckitt Benckiser, and General Mills represented) we were told point blank that they're done playing around. The avalanche is about to hit - the atmosphere in that session was electric. Our clients just threw down the gauntlet.
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Market research is cool again. There is a LOT to do, and no one knows all the answers. There's room for anyone from any background to make a difference - you don't need to publish a dissertation in JMR. Sometimes, all you need is the creativity and courage to ask a question slightly differently. Or put together a graph in a unique way. Or think of a new source of data. That doesn't mean high level modeling is dead (indeed, the paper that won the award for most impactful was a massive integrated multi-level and multi-study planning model for real estate in Australia). But change is going to come from many directions, and almost certainly will require skills and knowledge from outside the field we now call "marketing research".
