Credit where it’s due

But how often do we talk about them publicly? Are we as an industry afraid to come out and highlight our achievements? Or are we being kept quiet in the name of ‘confidentiality’?

Two years ago, my company worked on five stages of a major award-winning campaign for a food client. It was great fun: stimulating, challenging, and we lived the brand for a number of months – from selection of the ad agency right up to last-minute groups a fortnight prior to launch. But afterwards, no one would think to ask ‘Who contributed the insight behind the campaign?’ We were not merely reporting back what we had seen and heard, we were guiding, advising and coming up with ideas to improve the final output. The agency and client spoke of how they conducted extensive consumer research to ensure the campaign’s success, but as so often happens, they did not name the research agency or the individual researchers behind the campaign.

We can all name brilliant advertising agencies, creative teams and planners – not to mention those clients who demand the very best. I’d like to see the profile of research agencies, and individuals within the business, raised to a similar stature. The research world is full of creative and talented, people who care passionately about brands and the role they play in developing them.

An element of our work is out there on shelves, on our TV screens, in our homes and in the brands we encounter every day. Surely our clients cannot be concerned about the confidentiality of every project we do? Or are we all too frightened that if we do speak up, rivals will copy our approach, or will try and poach our clients?

Whatever the reason, our low profile as an industry means we’re overlooked as a career choice by young people. I’ve recently met quite a few marketing graduates all asking how they can launch a career in advertising or brand management or marketing consultancy. They ask to come and see me hoping I know a brand or agency that can offer them an internship – not because they want to work in market research. Those careers have achieved ‘sexy’ status – market research has not. Students have no real idea that this is a creative, fun, exciting and demanding business.

But lack of awareness among graduates isn’t the only problem we face. Our own, or our clients’, reluctance to talk up the crucial role research plays in the creation of successful ads and products means we have very few good, publicly available examples we can point to when critics of research wheel out the far better documented cases of when research “gets it wrong”, à la the New Coke fiasco.

We need to correct this imbalance. It is up to us to promote our industry in collaboration with our clients, so that such ‘good news’ stories appear not only on our own websites and credentials documents, but in the wider marketing arena.