Back in September with much hype and fanfare a group of 33 “industry leaders” gathered in Chicago for a “Respondent Cooperation Summit. Now I want to make clear at the outset that I didn’t attend, so everything I am about to write here is based on what I have read and heard since. I didn’t boycott, just had a scheduling conflict I could not resolve. But I must admit that after seeing a warm-up with lesser lights at the CASRO Technology Conference in June I was less than enthusiastic.
So what went on Well, as you might expect with a group of MR company execs, a sprinkling of consultants and a few high profile clients, not much of any substance. There was lots of hand wringing, a generous supply of hot air, some pointing of fingers (especially at clients for always wanting faster and cheaper), and no real solutions other than the usual platitudes about buyers and suppliers working together, industry quality standards, improving the respondent experience, blah, blah, blah. The most dramatic moment of the gathering was supplied by Kim Dedeker, VP of Market and Consumer Knowledge at P&G, who shocked attendees with her critique of online research by calling its representativeness into question and raising the spectre of professional respondents. She even pointed at one specific example at P&G where online research was just plain wrong.
Other then raising the angst level across the industry did any of this do any good? By itself, I don’t think so. But it could be one more small step toward sensitizing clients to research quality issues and there by create more receptivity to arguments about quality and value rather than just price. As I have written elsewhere, clients are beginning to tune into the quality issues that are emerging around online panels, and while the panel companies all profess an obsessive quality focus the reality is that the responsibility for ensuring quality lies with the researchers, not the panel companies.
But don’t expect any sort of massive rejection of online and a return back to telephone any time soon. The online juggernaut still has a full head of steam and the challenge is how to do it in a way that produces results that are, as Dedeker says, "replicable and predictable."