Arguably the most
interesting session at last week's WARC Online Research Conference was led by Joel Rubinson from the ARF. Over
about the last year or so he has been involved in ongoing dialogue with major
clients about their frustration with MR.
They see us as unable to paint the big picture in a compelling way that
helps them to really understand their markets and how to act in order to be
successful in them. We have become so good at distilling things down into
bloodless numbers and mathematical models that we are not seeing markets any
more as composed of human beings making very human and often idiosyncratic
buying decisions. (This from a guy who
was quick to point that that he was trained as and generally has made his
living as a modeler.)
So what is
the way out of this? For starters we
need to do more “listening” which seems to come down to finding ways to harvest
online communities, social networks, blogs and all of the other ongoing
conversations that are part of the daily noise on the Internet. As Joel likes to put it, we are looking for
the answer to “the unasked question.”
Exactly how we do this here it ought to be our top
priority as an industry.
One clear
implication is that we need a new set of skills from different disciplines if
we are to do this kind of work. There
was talk of behavioral economists, all favors of psychologists, and even
cultural anthropologists. It seems to
veer into territory that mostly European researchers have been talking a lot
about over the last few years—measuring emotions and semiotics—along with various
kinds of word of mouth measurements that were the rage in the US a couple of
years back.
The bottom
line seems to be: we have got to do this but we are still figuring out how.
The
transformation part seems to me to be a more familiar theme and must be especially
so to British ears attuned to what people like David Smith and Andy Dexter have been saying
for quite some while. Joel described the
need to consider a variety of “data feeds” bridging both traditional and new
methodologies that we then synthesize into an overall story that gives our
clients a richer and more insightful understanding of their market than
anything they might get out of a single study relying on a single
methodology. This sounded to me an awfully
lot like the “holistic” research methodology that is probably best expressed in
Smith and Fletcher’s book, The
Art and Science of Interpreting Market Research Evidence. Or perhaps I misunderstand.
Still, the
best part of this in my view is that we are finally talking about a
transformation in MR that doesn’t involve throwing out all other methods and
charging headlong into this new method as the only way to do research. We are adding to the toolkit rather than
replacing it.
In the end, the
goal remains that holy grail of MR: a seat at the table. The idealist in me sees this as part of the
admirable wish to see the research we do for our clients put to work. The cynic worries that most of us don’t
really want to be researchers at all; we want to be consultants.