Does the client?agency relationship need spicing up?

For 15 years I’ve been a clientside researcher and I’ve enjoyed every minute. The job requires a unique mix of skills – you have to be nerdy enough to be passionate about data but at the same time display the commercial awareness and influencing skills to survive in the often political world of a major organisation. So why, in the middle of a recession, leave the relative safety of a regular pay cheque and set up a new agency?

The answer lies in the I word. Not insight, the other one, the one our business partners really care about: impact. It’s number one on the list of deliverables for anyone in our industry – clientside or agency. You must have an impact on business decisions and, more importantly, be recognised to have an impact, otherwise your perceived value is unlikely to be very high. Indeed, an insight isn’t really an insight unless it has impact. A survey of 40 clientside organisations by a well-known management consultant that I took part in while I was at Kimberly-Clark found that nearly two-thirds felt their insight capability needed to improve. Clearly the market research industry isn’t having as much positive impact as it could.

Research agencies alone can’t solve this issue. Many have upped their game with better understanding and serving of their clients’ needs, but the particular portfolio of tools and methodologies that they sell will always be their primary focus. However broad an agency’s offering, it can never offer the best solution to every research problem. Frequently, new research is not the answer to the particular business issue anyway – it’s about making more of what you already know, but very few agencies are set up to offer this service. In fact the service model in general doesn’t fit with the approach, capabilities or business model of big research agencies, making the provision of ‘insight consultancy’ unrealistic.

Meanwhile, things are getting even tougher for clientside insight departments. Already straining to evolve from providers of market research to ‘planning’ managers, organisations have been forced by the economic crisis to shed positions. The result: fewer people but no less work, forcing already stretched resources to revert to being data providers. “I just don’t get a chance to stop and think these days” is a common refrain.

In a nutshell, the client?agency model in research needs help. One side struggles with resource and capability, the other sells research and lacks objectivity. As a consequence numerous companies are not seeing an adequate return on their research. Our research suggests over £2 billion of research investment is wasted every year in Europe alone, and that’s a conservative estimate.

The industry needs to service client organisations in a new way. Consultancies need to extricate themselves from the constraints of providing research to offer flexible and capable support to every element of insight generation within organisations – from setting the learning agenda and research plan to generating insight and truly impacting business direction.

It’s an area the industry hasn’t yet fully explored, and options for companies that need this help are surprisingly limited. Drawing on freelance support from individual contractors is an option, but it’s often a short-term patch on the issue. Also, finding the right people that can seamlessly integrate into an existing team is difficult (in my experience on the clientside, fewer than two in ten contractors I interviewed were right for my needs).

Drawing on expertise from an external company to drive your entire insight strategy would mirror success in other disciplines – the media industry is a good example. Companies evolved from having internal media teams working direct with media owners to employing agencies with the expertise and strategic view to conduct media buying on their behalf. Indeed, this model thrives in other disciplines within marketing. Innovation, for example, is recognised as requiring particular skills that are not always available clientside, but are readily available from a wide range of marketing services agencies.

So what is the future for our industry? Will it recognise the limitations of the status quo and look for an alternative or complimentary approach? Should insight actually be outsight? If so, who is best placed to deliver it? Will the agency heavyweights see this as an extra string to their bow or a niche opportunity best left to others? Only time will tell. One thing is clear though – we can’t afford to ignore these challenges.

Morgan Arnell is a co-founder of InsightOut, alongside Justin Wright and Nick Pye. He previously worked on the clientside for companies including P&G, Kimberly-Clark and Boots.