Reporter's Notebook
BREAKING NEWS: Researchers caught 'conducting research'
Here’s a good example of all that can sometimes be bad in journalism. Picking up on the recent controversy in the UK over the use of young people to promote junk food via word-of-mouth marketing campaigns, the Australian Daily Telegraph has this shocking report, revealing that “children as young as eight are being paid to test new snacks, fast food, lollies and fizzy drinks”.
The story goes:
“Food makers are among those recruiting guinea pigs for feedback on products, flavours, advertising, packaging and portion sizes. The youngest are paid about $30 to $40 by market research firms for chats lasting up to 90 minutes.”
Despite the implications and the use of perjorative terms like “guinea pigs”, the Telegraph’s story is grasping at straws.
The piece features extensive quotes from Australian Market and Social Research Society vice president Matt Balogh who explains that, yes, businesses who make products targeted at children do carry out surveys and taste tests before product launches, but that researchers are banned from quizzing children under 14 without the blessing of parents or guardians and that most agencies seek consent for anyone under 18.
Balogh makes a robust defence of the research industry, its role and the importance of parental choice in whether children can take part in such projects – which, from my perspective, undermines the Telegraph’s attempt to generate outrage in its readers. That may prove little comfort to researchers in the long run, however.
Consumer groups have long railed against the ‘damaging’ influence marketing has on what children eat, drink and play with, and it would be a cause for much concern were research to start being seen as part of the problem.
Perhaps the industry needs to start developing the argument that research can help to stem the proliferation of unhealthy food and drink products. It’s not really research per se, but initatives like the McDonald’s Mums Panel have led to healthier options appearing on fast-food menus.
WOM expert is lukewarm on MyStarbucksIdea
I’ve just come across a blog post (thanks to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association) which serves as an interesting follow-up to a story we carried almost two years ago: Starbucks’ attempts to use social media to crowdsource ideas to help revitalise its business.
The MyStarbucksIdea.com website has so far generated more than 80,000 ideas, of which over 50 have been implemented. “Sounds great. Sounds impactful,” writes Brand Autopsy’s John Moore. But wait a minute, he says.
Drilling down, Moore claims that only six of the 53 ideas genuinely came straight from the minds of consumers. The rest are “ideas Starbucks already had in motion… ideas Starbucks incorrectly takes credit for implementing… and employee ideas”. And of the six customer ideas, Moore states that none can be said to have significantly affected the business.
I’ll be interested to hear your take on whether Starbucks’ social media experiment can be considered a failure, in the light of Moore’s analysis. I suppose the answer really depends on whether ongoing consumer dialogue and small incremental change to a business are enough to justify a social media strategy, or whether you think such interactions should bring about massive tangible upheavals.
Starbucks may well be guilty of over-egging its achievements – but name me a commercial outfit that can plead innocent to that charge. And anyway, perhaps Moore is focused on the wrong metrics. The numbers from MyStarbucksIdea might be lacklustre, but otherwise the business seems to have achieved its aim of recovery.
Encouraging co-creation between research and respondents
Getting consumers to co-create products and advertising campaigns is gaining traction – but what about co-creation in a research setting? Can respondents play a bigger role in the design and development of research tools, techniques and projects themselves?
InSites Consulting blogged today about a new quality control initiative they’ve put in place that aims to make sure translations in multi-country surveys are up to scratch.
The company is recruiting small groups of panel members in certain countries to check that questionnaires are properly translated, that questions are formulated correctly and that the range of possible answers are appropriate for the market in question.
It’s nothing that a professional translations company couldn’t do, but it seems a neat way of expanding on the respondent experience to make them feel like a more integral part of the research process.
InSites calls these translation-checkers ‘The Watsons’, named after the sidekick of the fictional Victorian detective Sherlock Holmes – neatly summed up in a Wikipedia entry as the perfect foil for Holmes: “The ordinary man against the brilliant, emotionally-detached analytical machine”.
Sam Berteloot, InSites’ panel research director, explained in a conversation earlier today how the company also calls on the ordinary men and women of its panels to give feedback on new survey devices before they are introduced.
“The co-creation of surveys and tools with ‘real participants’ is crucial, as clients and research agencies might be biased due to their involvement,” says the company.
Note the use of the word ‘participants’ – which ties in with some comments I spied elsewhere this morning. Matt Foley of online community developer PluggedIN blogged about his wish to do away with the term ‘respondent’ and the slightly negative connotations it carries.
A valid point, perhaps – but I’d say to worry less about what you call your survey takers, and think more about how to make them real participants in the research process.
Will the 'perfect' researcher remain out of reach?
Forrester analyst Reineke Reitsma has posted an interesting blog on the qualities that companies look for when hiring researchers.
She notes how aside from a rigorous understanding of the intricacies of research, researchers are now by and large expected to be excellent communicators, able to distill insights and business recommendations from reams of data and present them in sparky and captivating ways.
Reitsma writes:
“One would assume that when communication skills have become such an important element of the job, market researchers would change their hiring requirements. However, a study conducted early 2009 in Forrester’s market research panel shows that the majority of market researchers don’t care much about applicants’ writing, story telling or presentation skills.”
Sure enough, writing and presentation skills come way down the list, behind research knowledge, an understanding of business issues and sector knowledge.
Reitsma asks whether one year on the situation has changed – but should it have? Of course, communication skills are an important attribute for any good researcher, but surely they should be secondary to the knowledge you need to have to assess, analyse and understand consumers, sectors and society.
Besides, can any researcher embody all that is required of the job. As in journalism, where you have writers and editors – one to do the leg work, the other to maximise the impact of the written word – should the research role not be split between ‘insight gatherers’ and ‘insight communicators’.
Both jobs would require a mix of research knowledge, business nous and communications abilities, but while the ‘gatherers’ skill set is more weighted to the research end of things, the ‘communicators’ excel at, well, the communicating part.
As a professional ‘communicator’, I hope I’ve managed to get my point across.
App development hell
We’d hoped to have got our hands on Siamack Salari’s iPhone-based ethnographic toolkit by now, but word reaches us that development troubles abound.
Salari lists some of the many problems he’s encountered in getting the software up and running and out into the wild over at his Ethnosnacker blog.
A mix of budgetary and technical issues seem to have slowed development down - and he’s still got the notoriously torturous Apple App Approval process to go through.
Our original story back in mid-October (see here) suggested the app was just weeks away. It seems we still have a little longer to wait.
Best of luck with it, Siamack.
Gunning for market research
Those creatives are at it again - regaling us with another tale of how artistic bravery and uniqueness of vision prevailed over market research studies intent on forcing a company to play it safe; to stick with the tried and tested and balk at the new.
It’s a tale heard many times, but delivered on this occasion by Infinity Ward, developers of one of the best selling video games of all time, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
With sales topping 14 million units a sequel was all but guaranteed - but it might not have been this way had market research had its say, according to studio boss Vince Zampella.
With Modern Warfare 2 due to be launched next month, Zampella gave an interview to Official Playstation Magazine explaining how Infinity Ward had to fight publisher Activision to allow them to move the Call of Duty series to a modern setting, when market research showed consumers wanted the games to remain in the World War Two time period.
“Activision did not want Modern Warfare,” said Zampella. “They thought working on a modern game was risky and [thought], ‘oh my god you can’t do that, it’s crazy!’ They were doing market research to show us we were wrong the whole time.”
In our jobs we come across stories like this far too often; they are essentially rehashes of the old Henry Ford quote about faster horses, which readers should be more than familiar with.
The thing is, in this instance, Activision’s market research wasn’t wrong – the next installment of the Call of Duty franchise after Modern Warfare was World At War, which returned to the World War Two setting and again sold bucketloads.
No-one should dispute that taking risks can lead to unprecedented success, and likewise researchers would not argue that market research does not set out to minimise risk. But more often than not, risk taking ends in failure, and decisions based on market research have led to many a successful product launch.
It’s just a shame that those stories of successful creative gambles are more widely told than those of insight-driven triumphs.
Between an MROC and a hard place
Flicking through Forrester’s latest report on online communities yesterday, it occurred to me that the term ‘market research online community’ (or MROC) has gained some traction in this nascent area.
I still haven’t figured out if I’m supposed to be saying ‘em ar oh see’ or ‘emroc’, or if there’s some transatlantic divide, like with tomato and tomato. But Forrester has warmly embraced the term, billing its report as the ‘Q3 2009 Global MROC Survey’.
One man who won’t be pleased is Mike Hall of online community firm Verve. When I met him a few weeks back he was telling me all about how brand communities work, and kept hammering home the point that they are in the control of their members, not their sponsors. I asked him what he thought of the term ‘market research online community’.
“It’s complete rubbish,” he said. “It’s part of the confusion that’s going on. They are not research communities. You can have a community and only use it for research, that still doesn’t make it a research community. It’s an online brand community which you’ve chosen to use for research.”
Hall makes an important point – people don’t join communities to take part in research, they join communities to pursue a relationship with the brand and with others who wish to do the same thing. Surely that’s what defines what the community is ‘for’?
But others say it isn’t so simple. FreshMinds has recently restructured its communities business to draw an even clearer distinction between online communities used for research, and those used for marketing and other purposes. Sister firm FreshNetworks is carrying on running the non-research communities, while the research ones are moving to become part of FreshMinds’ online division. The change was partly influenced by the MRS’s new rules on the use of client incentives, which affect how research can be conducted in branded environments.
When I put Hall’s argument about MROCs to James Turner of FreshMinds, he replied that he was taking his cues from clients – who generally want to use a community for one thing or another. Anyway, he said, the kinds of clients interested in using communities for research are generally quite different from those interested in using them for brand building or marketing.
So, while there might be no such thing as an MROC in principle, in practice it’s a handy term.
Forrester’s MROC report illustrated just how young this area is – we could have run a headline yesterday saying that one third of companies are using or considering using MROCs in the next 12 months – but we could equally have run one saying that a third of companies don’t even know what they are.
As the market matures and takes shape, the words we use to describe it are bound to shift and change. We’ll be balancing a healthy suspicion of jargon and faddy language with an awareness that having a widely accepted name for something saves everyone a lot of hassle and confusion.
Research is an industry awash with irritating buzzwords, and they live or die not just by their precision or usefulness, but by the vagaries of fashion. ‘Web 2.0’ has, thankfully, pretty much petered out, while the more descriptive ‘social media’ seems to be putting down roots. Maybe in a few years time we won’t hear people talking about MROCs anymore, just as you don’t hear people today talking about surfing the information superhighway or listening to the wireless.
UPDATE 13/10/09: We had Mike’s surname wrong when this was first posted - Page not Hall. Mike Page is someone else entirely. Apologies to all for that. I’ve corrected it (and the comments also) to show the correct name — RB
The DIY dilemma
Yesterday we carried news of the launch of a DIY on-demand research service called AskYourTargetMarket.com. Reader Steve Taylor was far from impressed, however.
“It’s a DIY service with low worth sample which will probably stop even more people turning to research professionals to commission quality research,” he said. “Why Research thinks it’s worth publicising this is beyond me.”
You can judge for yourself the worth of the service here – which leaves me to explain why we felt it was worth covering such a story.
The answer is simple: as Steve says, services such as AskYourTargetMarket could “stop even more people turning to research professionals to commission quality research”.
A key part of our job is to report on opportunities, threats and challenges that the research industry faces, and the rising numbers of DIY survey tools and services surely fits one of those descriptions - but which? That is the real question the industry needs to ask.
The growing interest in DIY surveys proves there’s demand out there for low-cost research. Given the state of the economy and the pressure on marketing budgets its natural that research agencies would perceive this as a threat. But surely there’s an opportunity here also.
Big corporates are unlikely to embrace tools such as AskYourTargetMarket - customers of such services are more likely to be the small and medium-sized business who can’t afford to pay professional agency fees for research. Of course, a bad experience with DIY surveys could put them off using research for life. The flipside, though, is that SMEs who use DIY tools to help them build a successful business could eventually become customers of professional survey firms.
A final thought: if agencies are concerned about the quality of existing DIY tools, is there not a call for them to develop their own entry-level, affordable research option? Or should the industry continue to extol the virtues of using research to inform business decisions, but with an added caveat: only if you can afford to do it?
