FEATURE3 November 2010

Research evolution and marketing revolution

Features People

Scott Megginson knows from experience that the old adage “Half my advertising works, I just don’t know which half” doesn’t cut it any more. The former PepsiCo man, now Millward Brown Canada president, talks brand and marketing research.

It’s undeniably an exciting time for PepsiCo Canada’s director of category management to be returning to research agency life as head of the Canadian business of ad research agency Millward Brown.

Tell us a bit about yourself, Scott. You came to Millward Brown from PepsiCo.
Yes, but that’s just the most recent part of my career. I describe myself as a market research lifer. I’ve spent the better part of 20 years in market research, starting at The Angus Reid Group, which was subsequently acquired by Ipsos. I began my career on the operational side, in field, moving from the phone room up through to field co-ordination. I then moved over to the account side, specialising in pharmaceutical clients, supporting companies like Glaxo Wellcome.

After eight years I had a burning desire to move into the world of branding – lured by the creative opportunity – and I moved over to what was Warner Lambert in the Adams division, as a senior researcher on brands like Trident, Halls, Clorets. It was a very dynamic company at the time which gave me some great global experience, and I worked through a couple of relaunches and repositionings.

I was there for three years, and then an amazing opportunity came up through PepsiCo Canada, who didn’t have a market research department at the time and wanted to build one. They outsourced like a number of Canadian companies have over the years – taking direction from the US and hiring third parties – but Pepsi had made the decision to bring that in-house. They wanted somebody at the table with them for strategic planning. It was an offer too good to refuse.

That position grew at PepsiCo. Like many CPG companies it is in a constant state of change and amalgamation, and soon my role incorporated Tropicana, Gatorade and Quaker products.

How did you move into category management?
I’d been at PepsiCo for six years by that stage and it was an opportunity to gain some critical experience. I don’t think a lot of people in market research, at least in Canada, have had a chance to work in sales in a large company. For me it was a great learning experience. I was on the sales leadership team, I worked directly with all the major retailers in Canada and it gave me great insight in the retail environment and what a lot of their needs are.

So, nine years in packaged goods research and two years in sales. You must have seen plenty of changes in brand and marketing research in that time?

There have been a lot of changes, but what’s really changed is the speed and availability of research – and that’s a good and a bad. On the plus side, we’re able to get information a lot quicker to make decisions. When I went to the packaged goods side from the supplier side, I realised that people can’t wait and wait for data, and decisions are going to be made regardless of whether research is ready or not. So, effective research has to be timely research, but the flipside of that is the constant struggle to maintain quality and retain the time to think.

You talk about the increasing pace and demand for research, but surely managing brands has got a lot more intensive too, what with the social media explosion. How does research help brand owners manage that and react to that?
In social media especially, the role of research is to help sort through the noise and pick out which bits are likely to have an impact on the business. Marketing dollars are more scarce now and you don’t want to waste your energy on something that looks either positive or negative if it hasn’t been validated.

In this sort of environment, then, what would a company like PepsiCo be expecting a company like Millward Brown to deliver?
It’s a very exciting time to be returning to the supplier side of the industry because there is a revolution happening in marketing now and marketing has become more and more experimental. In some ways it has been forced too, but there are more and different approaches [to marketing] that are being attempted than I have seen before. The dollars are tighter but they are being spread out in a lot of different areas. Across the board – all advertisers, not just a company like PepsiCo – their expectation of research agencies is for guidance on what’s working. We’re way beyond living in a world where it is acceptable to say, “Half my advertising works – I just don’t know which half.”

There’s greater and greater scrutiny and expectation on the return from the dollars that are spent, and I think Millward Brown is in a great position to deliver the guidance and consultancy that our clients need to know what is working and what needs to be optimised.

Does this marketing revolution require researchers to ditch a lot of the old ways of measuring ad performance? The stock criticism of companies like Millward Brown is that they are overly reliant on tried and tested methods that perhaps don’t work anymore or need to be tweaked.
Well, I disagree with that criticism. I understand what people are saying, but they tend to generalise and have a very selective view of the methodologies, how they’ve evolved and how they are employed in the market. Companies build their reputations on core competencies and methodologies – Millward Brown’s would be tracking and ad testing. But today’s Link test is not yesterday’s Link test. That’s keeping up with the times. And as we expand into these new forms of advertising and touchpoints with the consumer, that’s where the evolution needs to happen as well. Companies such as ours, who have been investing heavily in digital measurement and consultancy, are going to be well positioned to move with our clients and advertisers.

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