The decade in 10: What were the industry’s biggest trends?

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Covid-19

The pandemic changed the way we worked, lived and shopped. Some changes were temporary, some were longer-lasting, but what it did was emphasise the importance of staying connected to customers and gauging the mood of the public, reinforcing the role of insight.

“Covid-19 has had such a long-lasting effect on our planet,” says Neil Mortensen, director of audiences at ITV. “Millions of individual and communal stories delivered every emotion, from hope to despair. In our small corner of the world, ITV spoke to our audiences every day. We listened and gave them an open book to talk about their lives, worries and their TV viewing.

“We fed this back through lockdown with weekly webinars to the whole plc. Something amazing happened: our inboxes were flooded with colleagues expressing thanks for our audience insights and, more importantly, comradeship. We were holding up a mirror to ourselves, connecting to the world and realising we weren’t alone.”

Jane Ostler, executive vice-president, global thought leadership at Kantar, says: “Some things have returned to ‘normal’ – for example, there has been a return to real-life marketing. The one thing that has shifted dramatically is that, with such rapid macroeconomic change, understanding consumers and interpreting insights for agile decision-making has never been more important; insight needs to provide clear guidance and predict outcomes in a fast-changing world.”

Macroeconomic and geopolitical pressures

From the election of Donald Trump to the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, the past 10 years have highlighted the role of wider macro and geopolitical trends on businesses.

“The research industry – and in particular, opinion polling – has been at the heart of understanding how people have reacted to the post-2008 environment of low growth, and the surge of populism across America, Europe and Latin America,” says Ben Page, chief executive at Ipsos. “Fiercely contested, narrow wins, based on new electoral coalitions, have challenged the accuracy of polling of all kinds. Overall, however, the research industry has kept up. In the last election in the UK, for example, despite the 2016 upset, the polls averaged only 0.6% error for each party.”

Sabine Stork, senior partner at Thinktank, says: “It’s self-evident that politics matter and have an impact on attitudes and behaviours. Just compare the differences in interest in electric vehicles across different US states, or views on climate change across the Atlantic versus here in Europe. Or how cost-of-living and energy crises will be mitigated, or otherwise, by political interventions.

“Yet qual debriefs have a tendency to cover only the fluffier end of context – that is, psychology and culture – and marketers can display a surprising lack of knowledge about what’s going on politically in their portfolio countries. This means there’s an opportunity for international researchers to fill the gap here and unearth more about how legislation, politics and economics interact with what products and brands people have access to and are interested in. Given that public life around the world is likely to remain volatile, you could argue that this kind of analysis will even prove to be indispensable.”

MISINFORMATION AND DISINFORMATION

Social media algorithms and the growth of networks have a huge impact on people’s lives, offering new ways of understanding people and conducting research. But they have also become channels for misinformation, allowing conspiracy theories and fake news to spread, and negatively impacting people’s lives and democracy as a whole.

Disintermediation

A shift towards in-house research, driven by budget pressures and facilitated by the rise in self-service technologies and quick tools offering rapid turnaround surveys, means the insights market looks different from how it did in 2013.

“The biggest change that has already happened, and is continuing to happen, is the growth of the in-housing of insights via do-it-yourself platforms,” says Ray Poynter, chief research officer at Platform One, and managing director at The Future Place. “Research I conducted in 2020 and 2021 suggests that more than 50% of research projects are now conducted internally by clients.

“The number of platforms is exploding; they are getting better at what they do and they are getting easier to use. The growth in the use of these platforms is not principally among client-side insight professions; it is among decision-makers – for example, engineers, designers, brand managers, chief marketing officers and chief operating officers. This trend is going to reshape our industry.”

This reshaping of the sector is positive, according to Ipsos’s Page. “Whole areas of what the research industry used to do have been disintermediated by the web. Entire types of study we used to do are now routinely handled by clients themselves with software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, or with software goliaths,” he says. “That is good – it has forced the industry to focus on delivering more value than simple data. The industry has also built its own SaaS solutions, and automated for itself and its clients – all of this is great in terms of freeing researchers to think about implications and recommendations rather than ‘getting stuff done’.” 

Climate crisis

This has been the decade of Greta Thunberg’s school strikes and Extinction Rebellion, but it has also been the decade of climate denial endorsed by right-wing leaders, forest fires and the hottest summers on record. Renewed urgency and heightened awareness of climate change mean the evidence can no longer be ignored.

Jane Frost, chief executive of MRS, says: “The climate crisis should be the world’s number one concern and it’s encouraging to see the promising steps our sector has made in the past decade in practices and attitudes. In particular, we’ve been pleased to see a large number of companies sign the MRS Net Zero Pledge and make the commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2026.

“However, there is still much more to do. Market research has a crucial part to play in encouraging businesses and governments to be more sustainable. To do this, we need to ensure we’re asking the right questions, identifying the problems, and providing businesses with actions to solve them. We all have a responsibility to have open, direct conversations within our wider organisations and with clients, to continue improving practices across our sector and those we work with.”

BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE

In the past decade, behavioural science has moved from academic pursuit to mainstream practice. For example, in the public policy sphere, it has been applied in the introduction of auto-enrolment workplace pensions. Within the industry, it has become part of the researcher’s toolkit.

“Using behavioural science techniques and technologies to understand and interpret consumer attitudes and behaviour is vital – and, when applied to research solutions, they are hugely valuable for understanding and amplifying insights,” says Kantar’s Ostler. “Behavioural science layered with artificial intelligence applications will play an even greater role for insights in 2023.”

Flexibility in place and method of working

In 2013, Zoom was something your car did on the motorway. With enforced remote working acting as a catalyst in 2020, businesses and people have realised the benefits of operating more flexibly and that is also reflected in the way research is conducted, with in-person focus groups being adapted for online, for example. 

Sinead Jefferies, senior vice-president of customer transformation at Zappi, says: “Businesses that properly think through the people, processes and systems they use to maximise the power of in-person moments for deep human connection, solve hard problems, and equip people to work asynchronously are clearly going to have a strong advantage.”

The same must be true for how practitioners approach research, notes Jefferies. “There have always been innovators in this sector looking at finding new ways to have meaningful exchanges with research participants. This is about much more than moving an in-person focus group to an online focus group, but allowing us to achieve different goals and understand our attention-short, app-devouring audiences through both new and familiar tactics. We also need to ensure that, as we embrace these new tools, we are paying proper attention to making sure this increasingly ‘remote’ data is properly representative of the audiences we’re trying to understand.”

She adds: “Perhaps we have too often been afraid to move away from the approaches we know and trust. Now is a time to be brave – but to be brave with clear purpose.”

Immersion in a physical location is still important for some projects, however, notes Thinktank’s Stork. “There are obvious lifestyle upsides to not spending half a week travelling to and from Heathrow, and to eating a proper meal at home after your Zoom group. Plus, decisions about method have become more deliberate than they were, say, 10 years ago.

“However, we’re in danger of heading not for real flexibility of location, but merely for less direct interaction in research – and, in international research, for a less immediate understanding of place and context.

“No doubt today’s younger researchers will still acquire a good skill set and will probably excel at digital interviewing, but they will miss out on a quick Mexico City supermarket visit to see their clients’ brands displayed, and on walking around the streets of Shanghai to see how people dress. In effect, such marginal observations produce a certain 3D aspect to ‘getting’ the culture of the people interviewed, and may make the difference between a memorable research project and just another project.”

Data privacy

With the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal coming to light in 2018, an expanding regulatory sphere for data protection (namely, the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation) and growing awareness of data privacy have created unprecedented challenges for researchers and businesses alike. Ipsos’s Page says: “Ensuring consumer privacy and proper handling of personal data has resulted in a large rise in compliance teams, as GDPR and beyond becomes simple table stakes for running a business. Public awareness of privacy – and, simultaneously, public apathy about it – have risen with the digitisation of the economy in the past decade.”

Accountability

From the #MeToo movement in 2017 to the Black Lives Matter movement reaching critical mass in 2020, equality and inclusion became must-haves, not nice-to-haves. And with consumers increasingly savvy and questioning, it’s become more vital for businesses to be accountable.

“As well as measuring attitudes on racism and misogyny, and how they are evolving, 2020 saw the research industry itself – as with all business – under scrutiny, often from its own people,” says Ipsos’s Page. “Industry associations and research businesses have had intense internal conversations – and done much more on setting targets to have more diverse senior leadership and recruitment, and to make research a more inclusive business. All the evidence on effective forecasting shows that more diverse teams make better forecasts, and to stay relevant and competitive research companies have to evolve.”

Insights partners challenging the status quo

With ever more access to data, insights professionals are proving their role as more than just producers of data, and acting as strategic partners to client businesses – accelerated by the pandemic.

Zoë Ruffels, global head, vice-president of consumer and business insights and analytics at Mars Pet Care, says: “The need for strategic insight partnership is not very new. What is important in a world of abundant data is the need for insight provocateurs who can ask the tough business questions, challenge the status quo, and stimulate debate and ideas. This needs to be our role in the future, ensuring that we do not focus on the here and now, but on the what if, so what, and what’s next; the increasing need to spark future-facing ideas with a depth of insight, inspiration, and conviction.”

Frost, at MRS, says: “Research professionals have always had the capacity to be strategic partners, but it was a crisis that opened the door to the boardroom. At the outset of the pandemic, government and corporate leaders put us at the heart of organisations, leaning on our sector for guidance about their customers and the wider public.

“This reliance has continued since, and rightly so. An effective organisation requires an understanding of its target audience, something that cannot be done without insight. But we offer more than that, and a recent MRS Delphi report has presented our role as an ‘insight alchemist’, delivering evidenced outcomes that can systematically transform organisations.”

Key stats of the decade

• The UK voted to leave the European Union in June 2016 by 52% to 48%.
• In 2016, Donald Trump was voted 45th president of the US after winning the Electoral College with 304 votes compared with 227 votes for Hillary Clinton. 
• More than five million people in more than 600 marches globally protested for women’s rights in January 2017, on the first day of Donald Trump’s presidency.
• 11.7m UK jobs were furloughed through the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme in 2020-21, at a cost of £70bn.
• 2021 was the 45th consecutive year (since 1977 ) with global temperatures – at least nominally – above the 20th-century average.
• Apple became the world’s first trillion-dollar company in August 2018.
• The #MeToo hashtag spread on social media in 2017, garnering more than 19 million tweets.

This article was first published in the January 2023 issue of Impact