Research 2011 conference blog
The colour of research
Researchers were invited to show off their best infographics at the Research 2011 conference, with delegates given the opportunity to vote for their favourite.
And the winner was Keen As Mustard, a b2b marketing agency that works with several market research firms.
(Click the image for a larger version.)
Mustard managing director Lucy Davison said: “When called upon to review or design visual identities the team at Mustard review and map the market.
“With this in mind, this colour map of the top 30 UK research agencies’ brands was presented to a client to visually communicate a vast amount of data on competitors and allow them to identify the ‘colour gap’ in the market for themselves during the development of their visual identity.
“Who would have thought UK research agencies were so colourful? If we’d done it 20 years ago we imagine it would have been overwhelmingly navy blue.”
The infographic was based on data from the Marketing Magazine MR League Tables.
Update: Brass, the agency that curated the infographics showcase, points readers to this website, which has pictures of all the entries. Enjoy.
SurveyMonkey makes its case
Taking to the stage yesterday afternoon in a session on online research was Philip Garland, chief methodologist for SurveyMonkey.
“I was surprised to find out they had a chief methodologist,” said session chair Martin Oxley. He said he meant it as a compliment, but the room took it to be an amusing dig at the DIY survey software developer.
Garland shrugged it off. He said he knows SurveyMonkey has a bad reputation among certain sections of the research industry. He asked the room to raise their hands if they thought – now or ever – that SurveyMonkey was “a bad word”. A majority raised their hands.
In recent years people have started to be bombarded with surveys, many of them of dubious quality. With the rise in surveys has come a corresponding decline in response rates.
SurveyMonkey and other DIY software suppliers have been blamed for this state of affairs, Garland said, as their arrival on the scene coincided with the rise in survey invites.
But addressing delegates, he said: “You of all people should know that correlation is not causation.”
Garland’s pitch to the audience was that the research industry should drop their hostility to SurveyMonkey. The people taking the company’s surveys are just like anyone else, he said, and to prove it they ran their own studies of presidential approval and economic confidence to compare to Gallup’s numbers. SurveyMonkey’s raw, unweighted data seemed acceptably close in comparison on most occasions.
The company also has sheer weight of numbers on its side. SurveyMonkey did 600 million completes last year, Garland said – a staggering number.
And the nominees are...
The Research 2011 conference awards shortlist has just been announced.
Best Paper
For the best formal written paper presented at conference and published in the conference proceedings.
- Phil Barden:
The appliance of neuroscience
- Rachel Lawes:
Rebranding Charmin: A case study in semiotics
- Joel Williams:
Survey methods in an age of austerity: Driving value in survey design
Best Presenter
This is given for the best presentation during the conference.
- Bob Cook for:
Direct Impact: A new role for research in managing influence
- Philip Garland for:
Sampling v. scale in the internet age
- Rachel Lawes for:
Rebranding Charmin: A case study in semiotics
Best Newcomer
This is given to a younger person who has never presented at the Research Annual Conference before.
- Ella Fryer-Smith for the presentation of her paper:
The value of the visual: Using the public’s visual experience to improve local places
- Gavin Holt for his paper:
Bringing ideas to life
- Neil Wholey for his contribution to the session:
The client/agency summit
- Anna Wills for her paper:
Harnessing the power of the people: Getting people talking about TalkTalk
Best Session
This is an all-encompassing award that acknowledges how a session can inform, entertain and inspire.
- Futurology Interview
- Neuroscience
- Online Research
Best workshop
This award is judged on the interactivity, practicality, originality and management of the workshop.
- Ayisha de Lanerolle for:
Survey research will be dead by 2020
- Tom Ewing and Nick Gadsby for:
Nerdtopia!
- John Griffiths and Joanna Chrzanowska for:
Join the great global crowdsourcing experiment
Best overall contribution to conference
This award can be made for any contribution which has really added value to the conference experience.
- Simon Chadwick for conceiving, developing and chairing the Client/Agency Summit
- Tom Ewing for his presentation and management of the Nerdtopia workshop and his participation in other sessions through the conference
- Nick Southgate for chairing Behavioural Economics
The winners will be announced – and the awards presented – at the annual Research Awards dinner in London on the evening of Monday 12 December.
Survey research will be dead by 2020 – discuss
Will survey research still be with us in 2020? There’s little hope of researchers agreeing on an answer to that question any time before about 2019, but there was a healthy airing of views on the matter in a workshop session at Research 2011 yesterday.
Ayisha de Lanerolle of the Conversation Agency chaired the discussion, which involved a few dozen delegates taking turns to respond to one another’s arguments for or against.
It began with the familiar points: on one hand, people don’t know why they do what they do, so surveys can never get below the surface, and on the other hand they’re still a useful tool if used correctly, alongside all the shiny new stuff.
Kantar’s Tom Ewing responded to criticism of survey research, saying: “I agree that people don’t know why they do things - but I think that’s one of the most interesting things about people.”
Pete Cape of SSI focused on the issue of survey quality, suggesting that if the industry doesn’t up its game, survey research will run out of goodwill from respondents. “There’s nothing wrong with the respondent and everything wrong with what we do to them,” he said.
Doug Edmonds of 2CV defended surveys as a cost-effective and useful way of getting information, but warned that traditional quant research could suffer “if it doesn’t start playing with the other children in the playground. It will live if it learns to integrate with that.”
At the end of the session Discovery’s Ken Parker suggested that research agencies should put their money where their mouths are when it comes to surveys, instead of just extolling their value to clients. “How many of us [agencysiders] have actually conducted a survey on our new products before launching them?” he asked. In a room of forty people, only two hands were raised.
Lily Allen and the social media emergency
When Lily Allen tweeted a complaint about her BT broadband connection last year to her two million followers, alarm bells started to ring at the telecom provider’s headquarters.
Nicola Millard, the firm’s customer experience futurologist, saw the negative buzz this incident could create and before long BT chief Ian Livingstone was on the phone to the pop star and the situation was resolved, with BT getting some positive mentions from the songstress thrown into the mix.
Allen is typical of today’s consumer, Millard says, in that they are changing faster than the companies that serve them. They don’t trust what companies tell them, they make their minds up about products through their own online research, and when they have a complaint, social media is the first port of call.
Companies like BT need to change aspects of the way they work, Millard thinks, so they can respond quickly to incidents like the Lily Allen one, rather than shy away from getting involved with social media.
“You can’t control the dance floor, but you can go and dance,” she says.
So where does this leave research? Will MR be left out if clients start talking to their customers solely through the likes of Twitter and Facebook?
There is still very much a place for MR, Millard says, even though companies have access to a “rich vein” of information through social media channels.
But Millard warned companies to be wary of the social media “hype”. The online world is not the be all and end all, she says.
“Social media gives access to a certain type of consumer, but you need a broader picture,” she said.
Are we all zombies?
It won’t come as a surprise to those expecting the zombie apocalypse that the majority of the world spends its time wandering around with their brains in a state that requires very little, if any, mental activity.
Decode’s Phil Barden thinks that between 90-95% of activity is carried out while the brain is in ‘autopilot’, which isn’t surprising considering that serious thinking can consume up to 40% of the body’s energy.
Brains, Barden says, have evolved over the years to get by doing as little as possible, and its while they are in this autopilot state that researchers can get real insight.
Decode’s methodology is based on showing respondents images and words, such as a picture of a brand logo and the word ‘safe’, to provide an instant “gut feel” score.
But does the brain remain on autopilot when confronted by a word? Conquest’s David Penn doesn’t think so. As soon as the brain sees a word, it immediately switches to a cognitive mode that requires thought, he says.
Reappraising the 'special relationship' amid the data deluge
The landscape of the market research industry has changed vastly over the last decade or so, with one of the biggest differences being the deluge of new consumer data available. But with this influx, is there now a need for a fresh approach to the way this data is protected.
Kantar’s chief privacy officer George Pappachen thinks there is a case, as the “special relationship” the industry has always had with respondents is under pressure because of the wealth of information researchers hold about consumers.
Retail rewards cards are one of the biggest cases in point. Alistair Leathwood of FreshMinds admitted to being surprised about how much data is collected by thing like loyalty cards and how that data is shared between the research industry and, for instance, banks. He wondered: Does someone who suddenly starts buying nappies really expect to have their till data shipped off to a bank who will in turn try and sell them life insurance now that they have children?
“Consumers know there is something in it for them,” came a voice from the floor. “The challenge for market research is how to get into this new world rather than worry about historic issues like transparency and honesty.”
But do cardholders really know the extent of the data they give through their loyalty card and what it gets used for? Do they ‘get it’?
“How can they not,” said YouGov UK boss Tim Britton, “The tailored offers they get are helpful to them too. It’s beneficial to everyone, but when it gets Big Brotherish it’s time to pull back.”
Riding the winds of change
The winds of change are blowing, said Cambiar’s Simon Chadwick chairing the client/agency debate exploring the future of market research. But blowing where?
For clients like Federico Trovato, vice president of strategy, consumer and market intelligence for Philips, the company’s demand for truly valuable consumer insight is moving them away from surveys towards more observational methods.
“It’s the next frontier for market research,” Trovato said. “Asking questions is no longer providing the fundamental answers anymore.”
Nor does technical competence alone “cut it anymore”, he said. Only a few people from the Philips market research department have a traditional research background, meaning technical competence is delegated to agency partners.
The role of the in-house team, Trovato said, is to build knowledge from disparate sources and drive a consumer-focused culture throughout the business.
“We need agencies that are more able to integrate different data sources,” he said. “We need agencies to be more humble and to integrate with other agencies who have something different to bring.”
Jeffrey Hunter, General Mills’s director of iTech, consumer insight, is also looking for “something different”. He and the other client companies he comes into contact with all want the same thing.
“We’re all interested in competitive advantage and proprietary capabilities,” Hunter said. But there’s a problem. A lot of big companies source data from the same big suppliers.
“If my competitor has the same insights as me, we end up in competitive equilibrium,” he said.
There is a solution though. Big companies could start partnering with small agencies with unique technologies or approaches. These agencies could be offered financial support and investment to help them develop their approach, but in exchange they are limited in who they can work with.
“There’s a lot of merit in this type of model,” Hunter said.
Intimacy at scale
Charles Leadbeater’s end-of-day keynote provided plenty of food for thought to chew over at the Research 2011 party last night.
He’s writing a book, or at least wanting to right a book, that explores the idea of intimacy at scale, and whether it’s possible for things that are highly systematic to also be highly empathetic.
He’s drawn a diagram that plots the world and everything in it - cities, governments, companies, brands, services, etc. - in the quadrants formed between two axes. On the Y-axis you have high systems and low systems; on the X-axis you have high empathy and low empathy.
For simplicity’s sake, he used film and television to explain the concept. The critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire was placed in the bottom left quadrant - set in a rundown, corrupt Baltimore, Leadbeater used it as the perfect example of a low system/low empathy environment. Moving up to the top left, he placed ‘The Lives of Others’, a film about a Stasi agent in East Germany, exemplifying an efficient system, but a soulless one.
Down in the bottom right were the Waltons - bags of empathy, but very little system to speak of. In that quadrant, he also placed Starbucks, certainly as it was in its early formative years.
As the coffee chain has grown, Leadbeater says it’s moved horizontally into the top left quadrant, a path forged by many other companies that start out small and intimate but find it hard to retain that same level of intimacy as they scale up.
It’s arguably a route well trodden by research agencies themselves as modest, manager-owned and run business have merged or been subsumed into bigger groups, creating efficient global beasts, but ones that are often accused of lacking a personal touch.
So, asked Leadbeater: can any company hope to occupy the top right quadrant?
Facebook maybe, though Leadbeater argues that it’s a system designed to build relationships between people. The relationship between Facebook and its users is tetchy at best, and its attempts at personalisation can backfire. Leadbeater recounted how Facebook recently told him that he needed to reconnect with one of his friends as the two had lost touch. The friend in question was his wife.
Apple was another suggestion put forward, but the empathy people feel for its products is not often reciprocated. Witness the restrictions placed on iTunes content and the closed nature of its most popular platforms, the iPhone, iPod and iPad.
Indeed, what separates a high system/high empathy company from a high system/low empathy one is that the latter is more interested in their “own systems of survival”.
But how much intimacy do we really want with systems, Leadbeater asked. Truly personalised services might require us to share so much information that we lose too much privacy. And when a company knows what we want before we do, or always has an offer to meet our needs, might this also restrict our freedoms as consumers to choose our suppliers - we become locked in, as it were, by convenience.
The row over online tracking may serve as a good indicator of whether people truly want high systems with high empathy. People say they want personalised online content, but that requires web companies and advertisers to know more about a person’s interests. To date much anger has been directed at a lack of transparency over what data is collected and how it’s used. Perhaps that’s all that is needed: transparency. When a persons knows as much about the system as the system does of them then real intimacy is in reach.
Online sampling concerns top of mind in quality debate
Ask a room-full of researches to talk about the quality issues the industry faces today, and it’s a safe bet that online sampling will be one of the main topics up for discussion.
That was the case as IJMR editor-in-chief Peter Mouncey, Mesh Planning’s Fiona Blades, Ipsos Mori’s Ben Page, Heineken UK’s Frances Dobson and Real Research’s Adam Phillips gathered for a panel debate.
Dobson kicked things off by acknowledging the benefits of online sampling, but asking whether researchers really know enough about their respondents, and that they are who they say they are.
For Phillips, the concern was about whether online samples were managed properly to be truly representative while Page wondered whether the industry was losing a skill set because researchers are simply “doing what the computer tells them” and don’t understand the basics of things such as sampling and weighting.
“Are we having a go at online just because we can” asked a voice from the floor? No, replied Dobson: “There are concerns about panels. A lot of agencies can’t answer when asked how representative their sample is.”
But Survey Sampling International chairman Simon Chadwick blasted the panel for “having a conversation routed in the past and ignoring the elephant in the room.” The time to be discussing panel quality was between 2002 and 2009, Chadwick said, and the industry should now instead be focusing more on “how we treat respondents online and the garbage we put in front of them”.
Ipsos Mori boss Ben Page acknowledged survey design as an are the industry “needed to do better in”, but he maintained that there will always be concerns and questions asked about the people that take part in online surveys while there is nobody to “go and knock on the door” to find out more about them.
Commercialising insight – agencies not included?
A trio of clients – Lego’s Gitte Kolt Rasmussen, Samsung Design Europe’s Paul De’Ath and New Look’s Oliver Lucas – took to the stage to discuss how their firms use consumer insight. Agencies in the audience may have been disappointed to find where they stand in the long term
Lego has made consumer insight a “core capability” within its business, as Rasmussen explained. “Commercialising insight means taking it away from surveys and reports and making it part of the structure… Making it part of the infrastructure means researchers need to learn new communications skills to turn this insight into action,” she said.
The situation is similar at Samsung Design Europe where over the past couple of years insight has become more of a key activity within the company. De’Ath explained: “We’re using insights to encourage senior management to invest in new technology. Taking insight and turning into something we can sell is crucial.”
Having all departments singing from the same insight-related hymn sheet is the goal the client panel were all aiming for – but there was no mention of outside agencies and the part they have to play beyond delivery of the research.
Lucas said he’s loath to risk losing collaboration between internal departments by handing too much onto agencies, while for Samsung, De’Ath cited security concerns: “You have to draw boundaries because what we have is valuable business knowledge that we don’t want to share.”
Unilever and the tale of the spy toothbrush
There’s much to love about behavioural economics. Despite being nearly 30 years old it seems fresh and exciting, its sciencey while still being fairly intuitive – and it indirectly led to the development of the spy toothbrush.
Richard Wright, Unilever’s wonderfully-titled ‘discover platform director for sensation, perception and behaviour’, talked delegates through an “intervention” the company embarked on to try to encourage people in China to brush their teeth twice a day.
Typically, when consumer goods companies want to sell more of generic product X they add an impressive-sounding new ingredient to the mix to kindle interest. But, in the case of toothpaste, simply getting people to brush in the morning and at night helps both to shift more product and deliver health benefits.
And so Unilever developed an ad depicting a father and son watching football, with the young boy copying everything the father did. It ended with both brushing their teeth – the central message being that kids will mimic your good behaviours as well as your bad habits.
And this is where the spy toothbrush comes in. Unilever wanted to know if the ad affected behaviour but needed a way to do so without the research itself influencing behaviour. To monitor when respondents brushed their teeth, without the need for direct observation or self-reporting, the company fitted accelerometers to toothbrushes that would record when the brush was in use.
It was only a minimal intervention, Wright said – one family shown the ad on two occasions with another family acting as a control group – but it did show signs of behavioural change.
Another example of behavioural economics in action came from Oliver Payne of The Hunting Dynasty and his quest to help a furniture company sell more of its cardboard desks. Corporate buyers were reluctant to buy, he said, because their purchase decisions were framed by their desire for office furniture that is hard-wearing and sturdy, something cardboard isn’t considered to be – thus creating cognitive dissonance.
Again, all very interesting. “But when you boil it down, isn’t behavioural economics just very, very good market research?” asked one delegate.
'Treat your customers like lovers'
GfK Media’s Nick North said: “A brand can improve its chances of winning our love and loyalty by treating us like a lover.”
Catherine Russell of phone and broadband provider TalkTalk shared how the company worked with Spring Research to understand customer advocacy, and the changes it made to its media strategy to better encourage positive word of mouth. Anna Wills of Spring pointed out that people don’t really talk about brands, they talk about themselves and their lives, which happen to have brands in them sometimes.
Rachel Lawes spoke about her company’s work on the rebranding of toilet paper brand Charmin after it was bought from Procter & Gamble by SCA — a tricky exercise because P&G sold the brand on the condition that the Charmin name and its well-known bear mascot would be discontinued within a few years of the sale. The challenge, said Lawes, was to “lose everything that made the brand distinct while appearing to change nothing”.
By changing its name to Cushelle and introducing a new koala mascot (carefully selected as the animal that conveyed the correct signals), the brand managed to beat expectations of a significant deterioration in brand metrics after the change, and actually managed to improve them.
Even when you’re selling toilet roll, it seems, it’s possible to win consumers’ love.
Evolving ethnography
It’s time for a change in the way the research industry uses ethnography, Truth director Mark Thorpe told the masses at Research 2011 this morning. But how?
Thorpe thinks that the industry needs to “think again about what ethnography can do for us” and start thinking of what the next stage in the evolution of the disclipline is.
He suggested that the industry should integrate ethnography with semiotics and material culture to “help tell the story”. It would be “wonderful” to bring these three approaches together, he said.
But for this to happen, Thorpe said researchers needed to start asking themselves some important questions: Should boundaries be blurred? And is there a need for organisational change to allow for this integration of disciplines?
Is social media sample 'fit for use'
Ashley Brown admits to having “concerns” over how representative the social media community is of the wider population. “Can we really rely on them?” a senior researcher recently asked the Kantar Media man, and are social media users “fit for use” in research?
Unsurprisingly, Brown’s research found that the social media landscape does not completely mirror a representative sample. 36% of users are between 15 and 24, the older generation are not engaging with the medium, the C1 category is over-represented by 10% and it seems the likes of Facebook are more popular with women than men.
But delving further into the data, Brown says there are similarities between social media users and non-users in their attitudes and choices: for instance, the media consumption habits of ABC1 males between the ages of 20 and 40.
So Brown thinks social media users do have a part to play in research, and Kantar is currently looking at weighing social media users into their national demographic sample. After all, the majority of social media users are exactly the types of respondents typically referred to as ‘hard to reach’. It would be foolish to ignore them.
Why you have to fail to win
Economist and author Tim Harford urged researchers to embrace failure in the first session of Research 2011 this morning.
The world we live in, Harford argued, is just way more complex than we realise.
“Almost anything we do in the world is an interaction with an almost impossibly complex economy we’ve created around ourselves,” he said.
As a result, so-called experts in all sorts of fields are actually very poor at making predictions about the future — not because they’re stupid, but because “the world is just too complicated for single human minds to get their heads around. It can’t be done. It’s too difficult.”
The answer, Harford believes, is trial and error — an approach that frequently yields success, but only after failure, failure and more failure.
“You solve impossible problems through trial and error,” he said. “The difficult thing is dealing with the politics and psychology of when things go wrong — as they will.”
“We hate the idea of trial and error,” said Harford. Governments are unwilling to experiment because they can’t face the prospect of failure, and voters shun “flip-floppers” in favour of those who convey an air of certainty.
Harford said what many researchers (particularly in the field of new product development) will have been thinking, but don’t want to say: that failure is just part of life. People love to take potshots at research by quoting statistics on the proportion of new products that fail, but Harford reminded us to look at the bigger picture: most new products fail because most things fail, full stop.
Welcome to the Research 2011 conference page
This year’s conference is going to be a busy one. More speakers, more sessions, more workshops and more debate. How to keep on top of it all? The Research editorial team are going to do their level best to make sure that the best nuggets of insight, interest and inspiration are brought to you, live, during the two day conference.
So bookmark this page – it’s where we’ll be bringing you tweets, blogs, reports, video and photographs from Research 2011. If you’re planning on blogging from the event, let us know and we’ll share links to your content as well.
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