OPINION13 October 2011
Esomar Congress recently heard calls for researchers to get better at telling stories and to find new ways of inspiring clients. But we need to make sure the stories we tell are grounded in reality, warns Dan Kvistbo.
Yet I worry that we are in effect discursively constructing a new research paradigm that doesn’t have substantial warrant in the real world. We’ve gone from insisting on sound methodological approaches towards simply “delivering insight” or “telling compelling stories”; from efforts to maximise the representativeness of our studies, to settling for some level of “consistency” in the sample.
It’s been some five years since Kim Dedeker – then at Procter & Gamble, now Kantar – famously said that she never thought that she “was trading data quality for cost savings” when two online access panel surveys carried out a week apart “yielded different recommendations”. A few years of industry soul-searching and research-on-research followed. The end result? Rather than meeting the inherent challenge, the market research industry has broadly responded by suggesting instead that we trade “purity” for “pragmatism” (as exemplified by our colleagues at Communispace in this article).
By and large, methodology has become a “hygiene factor” that we need not discuss as long as we excel at “inspiring” our clients – a key theme at the recent Esomar Congress in Amsterdam. Indeed at that event, the chairman and the director of the newly-renamed Dutch industry organisation MOA went so far as to define the ‘qualities’ of classic market research information providers as “distan[t], objective/representative, boring, difficult and chilly”. Compare that to the ‘new’ information providers who are perceived as “proximate, subjective/relevant, exciting, easy, fast and fun”.
While I sympathise with the view that market researchers could and should do better at communicating research results, and that there is a need to embrace new methodological approaches to complement existing methods in order to remain relevant, I’d still insist that we keep challenging the foundation of any business intelligence efforts.
We must do our best to collect and curate data that will support healthy business decisions by reflecting the opinions and attitudes of populations or target groups relevant to the respective study as accurately as possible. While this may not always be easy, fast or fun, anything less is selling our industry short.
Don’t get me wrong – I like a good story as much as the next person. But market research is still in the documentary-making business. We need to make sure the stories we tell are grounded in reality.
Dan Kvistbo is director of panels and R&D at Norstat. Find him on Twitter