Cambiar Consulting

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

Friend or Foe?

Winds of Change Series

by Beth Rounds, Partner

DIY (Do-It-Yourself) is certainly a hot topic these days with frequent announcements about new start-ups and product offerings.  Just this week, two more companies announced DIY solutions for online qualitative and panel management.  While early entrants, Survey Monkey and Zoomerang, defined the space, the DIY category has grown well beyond “quick and easy” feedback tools.   In fact, Cambiar estimates DIY end user spending to be $700-$800M worldwide, when you combine all license revenues from easy feedback, EFM/Enterprise, data analysis, qualitative and custom panel software.  Even if you take the non-MR license base (HR, event, education customers) out of the picture, it is still a substantial and growing area of our industry.

What’s driving corporate users towards DIY solutions?  Let’s look at some underlying facts:

Fact #1: Doing More with Less forces introspection and innovation. To understand this, we need to remember that doing more with less means corporate researchers are being asked to be more strategic and more consultative, while budgets or information needs are not necessarily down. This is good news for researchers that offer high value services, whether internal to the organization or as a research supplier.   At the same time, companies are turning to DIY for (a) non-value-add methods (most often for straightforward work, such as idea/copy testing or CSat) and, (b) interacting with their customers or consumers via an online panel.  Once built, they can interact with the communities and panels themselves, or they can rely on their suppliers to do so for them – sometimes both are done in the same company at the same time.   For corporate insights executives, it’s all about making trade-offs and strategic choices as to where they are going spend their resources.

Fact #2: MR Technology has come a long way – baby! If you’ve been to any Market Research conference in the last two-three years, chances are you noticed a real change in the exhibit hall. Joining the regular exhibitors like online panel providers, traditional software firms (IBM/SPSS, Confirmit, CfMC) and a small set of full service companies, are a whole new set of service providers that offer self-service or assisted serve options—most of these founded as SaaS software providers. Companies such as Revelation, Global Park, Vision Critical, GutCheck, MarketSight, Medallia, Survey Analytics, Evolve 24, Survey Writer, Nunwood’s Fizz, among others have sprung up in the past 5-10 years. Most, if not all, are enjoying higher growth rates despite the recession.   Their solutions are highly intuitive and rich in functionality.  Even the “low end” tools, such as Zoomerang and Survey Gizmo offer amazing features for the hands-on user. I suggest you take a look–you will be amazed.

Fact #3: DIY has gone way beyond a standalone tool to being integrated into the way we work. It’s pretty obvious that the younger generation of MR professional (for fun check out Beloit College Mindset list) is very comfortable with survey and reporting software, social media and mobile applications.  “Hands on” is more of the rule vs the exception with this group and will only increase in acceptance going forward.

What conclusions and implications can we draw from these trends?

1.      DIY technology can deliver  faster and better ways to gather and analyze information. It can also enhance respondent engagement, giving consumers more opportunities for deeper involvement, dialogue and co-creation.    Yet technology is just a tool and we desperately need to adapt our skills to this new environment.  A new type of researcher will evolve (see Ian Lewis’ latest blog) to include data synthesizing and storytelling.  If you need help in this area – Ian Lewis would be happy to share his insights on the topic.

2. The old adage “garbage in – garbage out” still holds true whether you are doing the work yourself or working with a research company.  Of course, if you do the work yourself, you have no one else to blame for any ‘garbage out’!!  There are also different ways to improve the process.  At TMRE, both Microsoft and 3M talked about Marketing – not MR – conducting DIY surveys.  Obvious risks are disintermediation of MR and bad quality research.  Microsoft MR spent a lot of time developing “guard rails” to protect against bad research.  3M MR took over conducting the research, providing a highly cost effective DIY solution managed by the MR dept.   For a supplier, offering a DIY capability that includes a guard rails component to help ensure quality could be attractive.

3. Training is now important than ever. Kudos to those companies, academic institutions and suppliers that offer research skills training – in person or via the web. A new venue – The  New MR Virtual Festival – offered an innovative, on-demand conference venue that has amazing potential for learning and sharing going forward.

4.      New and exciting opportunities exist for traditional suppliers to pair up with new technology players in order to create new offerings and business models – ones that combine value add consultative skills with new collection and delivery platforms.  If you aren’t aware of what’s out there – we can point you in the right direction.

What do you think?  Is DIY a Friend or Foe?   I vote Friend.

by Simon Chadwick, Partner

Those of us trained in market research thirty years ago entered a world that was stable, established and trusted. We were taught probability theory, sampling, questionnaire design, analysis frameworks and report writing. If we were lucky, we also received training in qualitative methods and content analysis. For us, excitement came in the form of new methodologies (conjoint analysis, volumetrics and brand personality), but the basic format of research itself did not change.

Today, we live in a very different world – an exciting world where the status quo is being challenged every day, even down to the bedrock of what research actually is. Some of this is internally driven – researchers challenging themselves to come up with new and different ways of collecting, analyzing and communicating information and insight. But, truth be told, most of it is externally driven – new types of companies entering our field, new technologies, new media. But, most of all, it is client-driven. Our industry changes fastest and most fundamentally when the needs of our clients change. As we enter the second decade of the 21^st century, those needs are changing dramatically and rapidly.

We are facing the five winds of change.

In the coming weeks, I and my colleagues will examine each of these winds and speculate as to what they mean for the profession and industry that we grew up in and came to love. What are these winds? Here’s a quick summary:

1. Doing More With Less – You might think that this is nothing new, but it is. And with a vengeance. Clients today are being pressured to be more strategic, more proactive, more impactful just as the resources that they have at their disposal are bring cut to the bone. Think of the automotive company that used to have 165 researchers and now only has 8 – and yet those 8 researchers were instrumental to their company’s survival. How do they do it? What does it mean for how they structure their work? And what does it mean for their supplier relationships?
2. Do-It-Yourself Research – Long derided, the self-serve research software packages that the research industry loves to hate are now becoming mainstream. When SurveyMonkey can raise $100 million in financing, you know something is afoot. What are they being used for? Who is using them? And why? Added to which, the very definition of DIY research is changing. Five years ago, nobody had heard of proprietary panels and market research online communities (MROC). Now they are ubiquitous and an entire industry has built up to provide them. How does that affect how we view what research is? And how do they fit into the rhythm of clients’ research needs?
3. New Modalities – Once there was the survey and the focus group. OK, that’s an oversimplification, but you know what I mean. Today, we have new modalities (or methodologies) springing up all over the place – neurosciences, biometrics, online ethnography, crowd sourcing, predictive markets, web analytics. Even research robots on Twitter. How does this affect how we view “research”? How are clients fitting these new modalities into their overall research ecosystems? What is being replaced and what is incremental?
4. The River – No, this does not refer to river sampling. This is the concept of a mighty river of information that surrounds us daily, with thousands of tributaries, swirling around us on the Internet and in social media. If we can learn how scientifically to fish in this river, maybe the insights that we need are instantaneously at hand. How does that affect traditional research? Does the survey lose its primacy as the first way to plumb consumer sentiment and information? Does it move down the food chain into more of an instrument of clarification when we don’t understand what the river is telling us? What does that mean for the industry’s portfolio of techniques? Indeed, what does it mean for the very definition of “market research”?
5. Pay For Performance – Or, to put it more gently, “Value-Based Compensation”. Coca Cola has announced publicly that it is moving to payment to research agencies based on performance – or value generated. The advertising industry had to accept this ten years ago. Is it now the turn of research? And how will performance (or value) be measured? Is this an opportunity or a threat?

Join us in the coming weeks as we investigate each of these five winds. We promise you a journey that will be fascinating, challenging…sometimes scary and yet optimistic.