From crisis to control

Market research is failing to engage respondents. Jason Oke, director of strategic planning at Toronto-based ad agency Juniper Park, believes that the time is right to inject a fresh sense of appeal

Market research should be sitting in a place of pride at the head of the marketing table today.

With so much change in the world of brands and media and choice, it is a time when more than ever we need to be grounded in an understanding of people's evolving preferences, behaviours and needs. After all, it's a terrifying time to be a marketer: caught between shrinking budgets, increased competition, and uncertainty about the future on one hand, and relentless pressure to prove the worthiness and ROI of every decision on the other. In this darkness, market research should be bravely lighting the way forward.

And yet… the evidence would suggest that market research is struggling to meet the challenge. Headlines shout stories of "market research in crisis!" The CEO of the Advertising Research Foundation in the US has stated "over 50% of the research done at companies is wasted. They're asked to do things that, even if the research project is perfect, it won't be useful. It's covering-your-butt kind of thinking." Online research faces serious questions over its validity and reliability. And Advertising Age magazine proclaims "market researchers are as unimportant as ever… like moguls with trophy wives, marketers keep collecting them and keep ignoring them."

As a frequent consumer and observer of market research, it's hard to disagree that things need to change. While there is some brilliant innovation going on in research, much of the industry seems slow to adapt and stuck in the past. This situation runs the risk of damaging research's value and credibility at a time when it is most needed. So it's worth asking how did this happen? And how can we get out of it?


Research hasn't kept up with culture
The first issue I believe market research is facing today is that is hasn't kept up with culture. Not too long ago, for the average person, giving feedback to a company was an interesting thing to do, a rare and fun opportunity to have your voice heard by a big corporation. And when researchers said "your opinion counts" we actually meant it.

But today the ability to give feedback to a company is assumed. It's a basic cost of doing business. There are entire companies that have built their business around this, like Epinions.com, a marketplace of shared product feedback, or Amazon's rating, recommendation & review systems. Companies have their own blogs, their own profiles on social networks, and actively solicit ideas from the public for new products or ad campaigns. People now have an expectation to see inside the process, participate and give feedback at a whim across any number of channels and venues. And compared to all the other fun, sexy, interesting ways to give feedback, how does most market research stack up? Most research is incredibly boring to the respondent. We submit people to long, obtuse questionnaires, ask the same question a dozen different ways, and probe on minute unimportant details ("how would you rate the cleanliness of your bank?"). Today any recruiter will tell you that response rates are dropping every year, and it gets harder and harder to find decent respondents. Well is it any wonder?

One key learning of the past few years that in order to be effective today, communications must engage and provide value to people. But why is research any different? Our unspoken assumption seems to be that because we enter respondents into a contest or pay them $50 and give them a sandwich, we think that we can use their time however we wish. But today time and energy are precious resources. In an era where people have increased control and choice over exactly how they spend those resources, and increasingly choose to avoid spending them in ways that aren't rewarding, perhaps a token $50 isn't enough anymore. The research value exchange needs to be re-examined. This is something we need to address, not just for the sake of better research, but also for the sake of our brands. In an era where people discuss the smallest minutia of packaging, advertising, customer service, and brand experiences on blogs and social networking profiles, research is a brand touch point. A Google search for "went to a focus group" returns 30,000 entries for that exact phrase. People talk about research they attended, talk about the questions asked, talk about what brand it was for, and talk about how boring it was.

Culture also shows us that people are quite happy to participate and contribute when it's relevant, fun and interesting; when there's something in it for them; when it engages and challenges them; when they get to be creative. We need to think more about the quality of the respondent experience, and better manage that flow. Doing so greatly increases the energy and quality of the responses.


Research hasn't kept up with science
The second issue which market research faces today is that is hasn't kept up with science. We've learned a lot about how the mind works over the past decade, and it's turned over a lot of assumptions.

We know through the work of Antonio Damasio, Joseph Ledoux, Timothy Wilson and others that we are poor reporters of the contents of our own minds. Many of our behaviours and preferences are unconsciously determined and difficult to consciously access. People are often unaware of their needs, wants and motivations. And even when aware of them, people are often poor at relating these internal states to others.

And yet so much of the research we do is based on asking people direct questions about themselves – questions they're only too happy to try to answer, whether valid or not. Of course the problems with this are not new – market researchers and scientists have been noting them for decades. But this just makes it all the more amazing how pervasive the act of direct questioning remains in research today.

Market research also tends to focus on respondents as individuals, and ignores the social dynamics at play. Mark Earls is doing a lot of fantastic work around this right now and his book Herd is a must-read. He convincingly argues that most, if not all, of our preferences and actions are determined by the people around us, and are constantly in flux because of it. Yet most communication & research is still based in assumptions of people thinking and shopping and behaving as individuals.

The funny thing is that for years we've implicitly admitted the power of others in qualitative groups – think about how we make people write down their answers before saying anything to avoid being 'biased' by other people's opinions. But is that any more objective or accurate? In the real world, people don't write down their answers first. They are influenced by their friends, relatives, and strangers they see consuming or discussing a product. They may dislike something at first, but grow to love it. So making someone write down their answers captures a first reaction, but why do first impressions matter if their opinion will be in flux and they may never have a final answer?

I don't want to discount the innovation that does go on in market research. There are clearly many researchers who grapple with the problems discussed here. Still, I would guess that for all the innovation that happens, it remains a small minority of the millions of dollars of market research done each day. For now, all of that brilliant work remains relegated to the sidelines and to conference papers. So why has the research industry been so slow to adapt to the changes swirling around it?

I believe it is because there is no one really left to champion research innovation. Agencies, for our part, have destroyed our credibility by crying wolf far too many times – when research goes in our favour we celebrate it, but when it goes against us we loudly point out its flaws. The big research companies are often wedded to black box methodologies and historical norms, and have a clear economic incentive to not rock the boat. Independent researchers face increasingly rushed timelines and tight budgets and know that pushing back too hard can lose a client. Client research departments have been under-funded or cut, leaving much of the actual decision making to brand managers who've often not been properly trained in research.

This probably means that, at a time when we all need research to adapt and change no one function can lead the charge. Today we all need to work together to fight for change.

The biggest hurdle is that a lot of the status quo just makes common sense. No one ever got fired for saying "we asked consumers what they wanted, and did what they told us to." That might be questionable research, but it's good insulation from blame and still makes a compelling argument in the boardroom. It's easy to take people's answers at face value. Digging for the truth is hard, requires challenging the status quo and turning over some of the industry's accepted wisdoms.

After all, human behaviour is extraordinarily complex and hard to understand. Yet it's probably human nature to prefer an easy answer to a truer but more complex one, so it takes a brave marketer or market researcher to accept and argue that point of view. But if research and marketing as a whole are to move forward, we need more of it. And perhaps someday soon, research will find itself sitting at the head of the table again.

• www.jasonoke.com

April | 2008