There was frustration with the slow pace of change in the MR industry at Research 2010 this morning.

Making the case for a whole new set of research techniques, Ray Poynter said, “Basically the old stuff is a bit crap and doesn’t really work anymore.” Poynter (who predicted yesterday that surveys will be dead in twenty years) presented a taxonomy of what he calls “new MR”, incorporating buzz mining, community panels, predictive markets, and e-ethnography.

Tom Woodnutt and Richard Owen of Hall & Partners then looked at how research needs to adapt to the digital age, and kicked up a bit of a fuss by suggesting that the Market Research Society (MRS) should be renamed the Engaging Conversations Society (ECS).

In the Q&A session, Quentin Ashby of Virtual Surveys suggested that at least two of the methods mentioned in the session would be in contravention of the MRS’ new code of conduct, and asked, “I wonder if the code of conduct is actually doing us a disservice,” – a comment that was met by a “Hooray” from a colleague in the audience.

The speakers seemed to agree that the code is not keeping up with change, but Poynter suggested that the industry itself may be to blame for this. “More of us should get involved,” he said. “We get the code we deserve, perhaps.”

Paul Vittles then got up to ask the panellists why the industry is “so institutionally conservative”.

John Griffiths hazarded an answer: “Because it’s about business and monetisation, and if you’ve got a model that works, why walk away from it?”