Researchers ‘must evolve with consumers'

UK-- The research industry must learn and incorporate a new set of skills to change the way it gains insight from consumers online, according to the Advertising Research Foundation's (ARF) chief research officer Joel Rubinson.

Research attended the World Advertising Research Center's Online Research Conference 2009, where Rubinson outlined the challenges the industry faces as consumers become more and more immersed in social media.

He said: “There is a shift in how humanity is communicating which produces a continuous stream of data in people's naturally occurring conversations. Consumers are a genie that won't go back in its bottle.”

The ARF man said that he was not alone in his concerns, having heard sound bites such as “Research has lost the ability to see the bigger picture” in meetings with industry leaders like Unilever, P&G and Levi Strauss.

He quoted P&G's Kim Dedeker as saying that the research industry would be “on life support by 2012” unless it turns to methods “more in touch with the lifestyles of the consumers we seek to understand”.

Rubinson said researchers need to “hear the unexpected, observe new vocabulary appearing, listen in both the brand backyard [brand-created situations like communities] and the consumer backyard [forums, etc]”.

The key objective, he said, was to move from “consumer insights” gained from traditional research methods to “integrated insights” gained from blogs, online forums and other forms of social media that can be merged with data collected by more traditional means.

“The challenge,” he said, “is how to gain insight from social media. We need a new organisational model and new skills and approaches.”

For some of these new skills and approaches, he said the industry should look to anthropologists and behavioural scientists to provide a greater understanding of consumers, but Rubinson said the industry faces a challenge in not only finding them but persuading them to make the move into research.

Adam Phillips, managing director of Real Research, echoed his call and said the industry may find inspiration from the past, using defunct agency Mass Observations as an example.

The company, Phillips said, was formed by an anthropologist to study the working classes in the 1930s by asking people to keep a weekly diary and by observing them in pubs and holiday destinations like Blackpool.

By observing the working class in its ‘natural habitat', Mass Observations was the only polling company to predict that Winston Churchill would lose the general election immediately after World War II, according to Phillips.

Author: James Verrinder

Comments (1)

I could not agree with this perspective more. Patrick Massey and I are giving a very similar message in our paper at Research 2009. We strongly believe that the future of the research industry lies in being open to new approaches like those suggested by Joel Rubinson. Like it or not, brands need to operate in a world where computer mediate conversations and communication is a growing reality. As researchers, it is hard to resist the temptation to simply shoe-horn the techniques and perspective that we are comfortable with into a digital medium. Brand communities, online focus groups and buzz metrics are all great, incremental steps into the digital world but they all are within the researcher's comfort zone. Consequently, brand innovation will remain hard to achieve and the researchers role will remain as ‘proof of today' and not insight for the future. The mindset of the anthologist and the dweller in virtual worlds offers a new and unique perspectives that presents a great opportunity to push brand thinking. The main issue is creating an openness and willingness within brands to look at the fringes of behaviour as an indication of new cultures, new behaviours and perspective that will eventually hit the mainstream.

Liz High

Managing Director

Intrepid