‘The market research industry is lagging behind', says former Camelot CEO Dianne Thompson

In a ‘Client verdict’ session overseen by Impact and Research-Live.com editor Jane Bainbridge, Thompson said: “I do think the research industry is lagging a bit behind. The very fact that you talk about people as ‘respondents’, rather than having a dialogue with people, needs to change. The whole role of social media has sped everything up.”

Her point was reinforced by Sue Unerman, chief strategy officer at media agency MediaCom, who said: “I think the world I work in is a lot more agile.” She said that the media industry’s adaptive approach to market research – “designing things, putting them together, seeing how they work” and then tweaking them is “almost anathema to the traditional market research brief”.

For Simon Carter, executive director of marketing at Fujitsu, innovation in market research needed to centre around communication – “how we educate our sales force and account managers and whether we need to use infographics to capture the essence of a piece of insight”.

But Anthony Jones, head of insight at Royal Mail MarketReach, was quick to denounce “innovation for innovation’s sake”.

Thompson was an enthusiastic advocate for “putting different methodologies together”, and is clearly no fan of segmentation.

“Over my career I’ve probably been involved in 10-15 different major segmentation studies,” she said. “They were all very amazing and sexy because we could visualise very well. But in terms of how we could use them, they were useless. They’re great for PR and great for the brand manager to see their customer. But in terms of delivering marketing messages, they were useless.”