OPINION1 March 2010

Making the first connection

Welcome to this new blog, which intends to raise awareness of, and stimulate debate around, a growing body of new data and insights that is challenging the usefulness of and even the need for many of the staple research approaches that have supported the industry since its inception.

Called ‘Connect the Dots’ the blog will aim to challenge what I see as a degree of denial (or maybe just ignorance or fear) in research circles about the approaching tidal wave of behavioural, attitudinal, lifestyle and media data that today’s society is beginning to generate just by going about it’s daily business in a digitised world.

When we look back on today’s research world in the future, we may gasp at the paucity of the information we had to deal with.

In 1973, British households were spellbound by a TV ad from Cadbury’s. It featured a family of aliens, the Smash Martians, who laughed at the thought of Earth people preparing their own mashed potatoes rather than using convenience food, Smash.

In a future world flooded with data and ever-more customer-centric companies who shape strategy around customer insights, there may be similar amusement around the way we used to do market research.

Imagine having to ask people to remember what they had bought or even asking them to scan all their shopping at home. Imagine relying on only 5,000 households to press buttons to find out who was watching which TV channel. Imagine trying to join up disparate data sets through black box econometric models which few understood and no-one trusted. Imagine having to wait weeks or even months to get feedback from consumers…. the hilarity of it all!

We are on the cusp of a tidal wave of new sources of customer data that offer unprecedented new opportunities to better understand and communicate with consumers in the future, to ‘connect the dots’ and truly understand cause and effect in marketing for the very first time.

The implications of this future for the research, marketing and media worlds are profound but we must remember that the individual, whose data we are starting to analyse and understand, must be rewarded, reassured, better served and treated with respect and confidentiality if they are to continue to allow us to observe and analyse their every move.

There are many issues around this new connected, data-driven future, and this blog aims to provide a discussion point for the industry to debate them as we move into a new territory.

@RESEARCH LIVE

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