OPINION21 September 2011

Changing with the times

The Netherlands no longer has a market research association. Instead it has a Centre for Information Based Decision Making and Marketing Research. Should other associations follow suit?

The Netherlands no longer has a market research association. Instead it has a Center for Information Based Decision Making and Marketing Research. Wim van Slooten and Pieter Paul Verheggen explained at Esomar Congress yesterday why the MOA chose to change its name.

Although the industry body is holding on to its abbreviated name, the new full name is designed to reflect the breadth of activities it wants to support.

Amid the economic downturn in 2009, agencies were facing big falls in revenue on top of all the other challenges facing the industry, and Verheggen says, “it was very clear to us that within the sector something must be done to prevent us becoming the sector that missed the boat”.

So the MOA set in motion a programme to respond. It organised a series of meetings of researchers, surveying research clients, and running a two-day ‘think tank’ in 2010 with professionals from fields related to research, including IT, consulting and social media.

This helped them to identify a number of trends that would affect the industry’s future, including an explosion of data, the emergence of new information providers who don’t see themselves as market researchers (and who can be difficult for clients to find), and privacy issues.

Verheggen and Van Slooten characterised ‘classic’ information providers as distant, objective, representative, boring and difficult. ‘New’ information providers, by contrast, are close, subjective, relevant, exciting, easy, fast and fun.

The MOA decided it would benefit both groups to embrace the new players, offering them protection, support and a platform to become more visible to clients. The first step was to change the organisation’s name, “to show that what we call the research industry has a place for new companies”. The new title is designed to put the focus on the purpose of its members’ work rather than how they do it – but it still explicitly covers market research.

The association is working on a new behavioural code, which will be based on research into the range of services offered by new players. “The current codes of conduct of MR are not sufficiently applicable to the new context,” said Verheggen. “We must rethink what we are doing.” The organisation then plans to work on an updated self-regulatory framework, followed by a campaign of communication and promotion.

Niels Schillewaert of InSites Consulting welcomed the initiative, saying: “The Dutch are thought leaders and a lot of [other] local organisations should take notice.”

GfK’s Mike Cooke, who chaired the session, said: “We’re not so much living in an age of change, it’s more a change of age. We’re at a point in market research where we’re struggling to define our own industry. The industry is founded on respect for privacy, self-regulation and an ethical structure that’s at the heart of everything we do. We define ourselves by that ethical structure. But how do we make ourselves relevant? How do we make that ethical structure relevant for this new age?”

Cooke said the MOA had responded in a positive way to the challenges facing the industry. “That is not, I think, true of some of the market research societies in this world,” he said.

0 Comments