OPINION21 March 2012

Guess who works in market research?

What can you learn about market research from playing Guess Who?

The classic board game was the starting point for a study looking at perceptions of people who work in research, results of which were presented by Mark Hirst and Naomi Stoll of Opinion Leader at the MRS Annual Conference today.

The issue of talent in research is a big one. Yesterday, Kantar’s Eric Salama picked out “recruiting the best talent” as the top thing the industry has to focus on to ready itself for the future.

Hirst and Stoll asked recent entrants to the research business which of the characters in Guess Who? most resembles a market researcher. Most of the respondents agreed that their initial image of a researcher was something like the balding, bespectacled, geeky Tom (as opposed to, for instance, the more youthful Frans or the cosmopolitan-looking Maria).

However, they also said that their experience in the industry had taught them that most researchers look nothing like that. In fact, there is no single image that fits the range of different people working in the industry.

Most of the young people whom Hirst and Stoll spoke to described having found their way into research pretty much by accident, and the same was true of today’s conference delegates: a straw poll confirmed that only about a quarter of the audience had sought out careers in research, while an overwhelming majority had fallen into it.

So if the people coming into research never expected to end up here, and come with false expectations of what a career in research entails, what does that mean for the industry?

Not all of today’s audience accepted the idea that the research business has an image problem – or that any kind of drive to raise its profile would make any difference. In fact, in these tough economic times, many agencies receive more CVs from promising grads than they know what to do with.

Ben Toombs of TNS-BMRB argued that “falling into” your career shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing. After all, research needs people with open minds and broad experience of life and business. Steve Phillips of Spring Research agreed, saying that anyone who has wanted to be a researcher since they were small is probably “a bit weird”.

Chloe Fowler of Razor Research said the talent challenge is less about people starting out in research, and more about what happens further down the line. She sees an exodus of senior people who’ve been in the industry for eight or nine years and start to find that if they want to progress further, things are expected of them that they never signed up for.

But there was agreement on one point. When the audience were asked if they loved their jobs in research, almost all the hands in the room shot up.

@RESEARCH LIVE

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