Assessing the price of qual-ity

Accreditation will be awarded to individual researchers who are nominated by their agencies and subsequently pass the assessment process on a Unilever-accompanied qualitative assignment. That has some interesting implications not only for research houses working with the FMCG giant, but also for qualitative researchers themselves.

In quantitative research, the large number of interviewers usually working on a project tends to dilute any quality and bias issues, and questions are tightly controlled by CATI, CAPI or routed paper questionnaires. It’s a different matter for qualitative research – a single moderator may run all of the FGDs for a project, as well as subsequently analysing and presenting the data back to the client. The level of competence of that researcher is clearly going to impact heavily on the overall project quality. So Unilever’s approach (presumably aimed at achieving better and more consistent quality) makes a lot of sense. But it also raises a number of issues.

For most agencies, the initial temptation will surely be to put only the most highly-trained (in other words, senior) qualitative researchers forward for accreditation; this seems prudent, because having any of the research team fail the accreditation process would negatively impact the agency’s reputation for quality within Unilever – and that could potentially mean a loss of business. But engaging only the more senior grades on Unilever projects will either mean an increase in price, or – more likely – an erosion of margin.

It will also leave agencies with a headache as and when their accredited quallies move agency. Firstly, it may leave them with an insufficient number of approved researchers to service their work. Secondly, it may take many months to find and recruit a Unilever-accredited replacement. Real issues will arise if several approved researchers move on and cannot be quickly replaced.

Related to this, the ‘market value’ of Unilever-accredited researchers seems likely to rise. That’s simply a function of supply and demand, amplified rather by Unilever’s substantial research spend which so many agencies vie for. Rising salaries among this small subset of the research community could also cause another headache for agencies – their contractually-binding rate-cards with Unilever may quite rapidly fail to reflect the reality of actual employee costs. So more margin pressure, then.

Clearly it remains to be seen what the overall impact of this move to accreditation will have, both on agencies and researchers. Some areas remain unclear, such as where freelancers (which most agencies relay on to at least some degree) fit into all of this. But one thing is for sure – this is positive news if you are a Unilever-approved qualitative researcher.

John Wigglesworth is a former GfK director, now running Asia Research Recruitment in Singapore