Cambiar Consulting

by Simon Chadwick, Managing Partner

In a sure sign of its continuing resurgence as an association of relevance in the United States, the Marketing Research Association has mounted an excellent new conference aimed at the corporate researcher. Intelligent partnering with the Market Research Executive Board (MREB) and Quirk’s meant that not only did 400 delegates turn up but that there was a slate of generally good speakers to entertain and inform them.

Among the most widely acclaimed of these were Ian Lewis of Cambiar (full disclosure – I am Cambiar’s managing partner), Chris Frank of American Express and Andrew Abela of Extreme Presentations. Lewis set the stage by reviewing the future of research in the coming decade, replete with fresh data from the Cambiar Research in the Future Study. Chief among his points that resonated with the crowd: the gap between the desired state of corporate researchers to be true thought partners in their organizations and their relative lack of doing so. Lewis charted out a number of key trends that will materially affect research in the coming years, including the corporate researcher’s’ need to deliver more with less; the rise of DIY; the organic river of knowledge that will increasingly be available to organizations outside of the norm of what we currently think of as market research; a taxonomy of the new modalities that are available to us; the rise of the global middle class; and the need to find, recruit and train new types of talent for a new age.

Frank picked up on this theme by giving very practical advice to organizations on how to make sense of the tsunami of information with which they are faced – and the key questions that need to be asked in order to do so. Abela then carried this forward by giving his audience a radical view of the research presentation  -  no more than 5 slides, no bullets, no color, no clip art. Just a laser focus on content. The perfect presentation, he said, could have nothing added nor anything deducted from it.

Of great interest in interacting with participants here was the degree to which these clients are more willing to experiment with new modalities and new ways of approaching research than are their primary suppliers, the research agencies. It seems that, in this instance, clients are once again pointing the way to change to those that service them. There is a palpable hunger among client researchers to find ways in which to be more effective, more impactful and more provocative – and much discussion on the necessary mindsets, structures and tools that would enable this to take place.

Kudos to MRA, MREB and Quirks for a valuable new addition to the conference circuit.

Coloring Outside the Lines

The Age of Creativity

By Simon Chadwick, Managing Partner

“We’re all doomed!”

“No, this is the age of Aquarius!”

These are, in a nutshell, the two opposing arguments that we hear and read at MR conferences, in the blogs and in our trade magazines. The one group would have you believe that the survey will be dead by 2020 (the title of a workshop at this year’s MRS Conference in London, Research 2011) and that researchers who don’t get that will end up like the dodo. Tom Ewing of Kantar more ghoulishly predicted that the survey (and, presumably, survey researchers) will be the “walking dead”. The other believes that this is just the start of an incredibly creative era in research and that our best years are ahead of us. Which is right?

I am naturally a “glass half full” person and so I tend to err towards the Aquarius group. But why this fuss and why now?

The answer is the plethora of new methodologies, techniques, sciences and approaches that seem to be invading the market research industry and sometimes even surrounding it with guns drawn, preparing to take down the poor old venerable survey and all the other traditional techniques that we have been using since the dawn of MR time. Neuroscience, biometrics, gaming, web analytics, text analytics – hell, anything “analytics” – crowdsourcing, netnography… you name it and it’s the next big thing in research.

Reactions to this tidal wave of innovation tend to fall into three categories:

1)    Traditional MR techniques (read the survey, focus groups, IDI’s any other methodology based in questioning people) are on their way out and unless the MR industry wakes up to this fact very fast, it will be wither and die on the vine, much like the buggy makers at the dawn of the automotive era

2)    All of this is just a fad, a rush of blood to the collective head of the industry, and after a while we will all calm down and realize that the survey is going to be just fine. Anyway, none of these methodologies can substitute for proper probability-based sampling and finely-honed questionnaires

3)    This is the new research paradigm and it’s exciting! In ten years time, research will look totally different and we will all be better off as a result.

My own belief is that there is some truth to all three reactions – as well as much hyperbole. It is likely that the survey (and other traditional techniques) will indeed play a smaller role in the totality of consumer research, especially as we become that much more adept at fishing in the “river” of organic information that surrounds us daily. But that is not to say that the industry will not adapt – remember that the very first auto makers (of which there were hundreds) were primarily buggy makers! As it does adapt, we will fairly quickly work out which methods and techniques are indeed fads (currently neuroscience is under this spotlight) and which actually do add weaponry to our arsenal. The survey itself will not disappear – after all, it has had some fairly notable successes in its career – but perhaps the science that lies at its heart will be deployed to some of the new techniques to increase their validity and credibility. John Samuels, the veteran and incorrigible British social researcher, foresees a future that is based on probability sampling but perhaps not on direct questioning.

What is not in question is that this is indeed an era of unparalleled creativity in research. Technology has unleashed the power of research in so many ways that now things that were clunky only a few years ago (ethnography, eye tracking) are much more feasible and scalable today than they ever were; and things that were unimaginable just five years ago (web analytics) are now a powerful tool. At the hub of all this are entrepreneurs and creatives who just relish the prospect of “shaking things up”.

All power to them, I say – it makes life much more interesting and fun for us crystal ball gazers who are wondering where it is all going to end (or begin)!

Contact Simon Chadwick at simon@consultcambiar.com

P.S.  Check out:

Ian Lewis’ contribution to March JAR Editorial: The Shape of Marketing Research in 2021

Cobbler's Shoes

by Bill Guerin, Partner

Contradictions fascinate me, because if I’m able to hold the associated tension in my logically Newtonian left brain, some resolving flash of insight eventually emerges in my right brain.

We all know the story of the cobbler’s shoeless children and the related irony that sometimes those who we expect would most naturally benefit from a situation go without.  And as I think about our industry (an occupational hazard), I’m struck by some surprising ways in which clients of market research firms may be going without – and I’m also curious as to how they might feel about that.

Let me explain….

I’m currently at 30,000 feet (literally) returning to the US after conducting a 5-week series of consultative sales and account management workshops in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.  In reflecting on these recent experiences – as well as my 5 years sales consulting experience with Cambiar and work with 50+ market research firms and over 1,000 client-facing employees – I’m seriously wondering about a few apparent contradictions with market research firms:

1.   How can we routinely give exquisite advice to our clients on ways to uniquely position their brands in targeted markets, yet so many of us try to be all things to all people, struggle with defining our target markets and lack an original and compelling value proposition?

2.   What do our end clients think about us promoting to them the necessity of collecting, processing and acting on customer feedback, yet so few of us do the same with our clients?

3.   Why do we consult with our clients on optimizing their CRM platforms without doing much of the same in our business?

4.   When we know so well the economics of maintaining an existing customer versus attracting a new one in our client’s business, why do we oftentimes fall short in establishing and executing account strategies to keep and grow our clients?

5.   When we really understand the crucial importance of a strategic plan to lead and drive our client’s business – and help our clients put those plans in place – why do so few of us have similar plans to lead and drive our business?

6.   How can we be in the question-asking business, yet when we get in front of our clients and prospects we often miss opportunities to ask good, consultative questions that uncover their core needs?

7.   How can we guide an advertiser in creating a commercial that elicits a desired emotional and behavioral response, yet so often neglect to connect emotionally with our clients and prospects?

8.  When we create disciplined processes for our clients to take new products from initial concept to successful launch, why are so many of our own product development efforts fragmented and unsuccessful?

9.   When we regularly work with our clients to understand their drivers of performance and help them establish KPIs to monitor and manage their business, why do so few of us have a similar dashboard to run our own business?

These are just a few of the many contradictions I often see.  Please understand, my intent here isn’t to whine, bash, generalize or self-flagellate, but to provoke some creative thinking and dialogue around what might be possible if we consumed more of our own medicine – the advice “Physician, heal thyself” comes to mind here.

Or if we return to our friendly neighborhood cobbler, to have a thriving shoe business, perhaps we should first consider making delighted customers of our own children.

I suspect others have thoughts and perspectives to share – would love to hear them.

Contact me at bill@consultcambiar.com