Brian Singh has a
post over on GreenBook that gives us his take on a recent conference where a
group of venture capitalists shared their views on the investment opportunities
in MR as it grapples with its future. I
didn’t find most of what Brian reported to be surprising; it’s pretty much the
standard stuff we are used to hearing about the “transformation of market
research.”
But the last part of Brian’s post really struck a chord with
me. He calls it “the creep factor.” I would call it the dark side of big data, and
at the moment it’s mostly playing out with mobile. At the heart of it is the
assembly of massive amounts of personal data on all of us, too much of which is
collected by offering some attractive service for free (often discounts on
popular consumer produces) as a sort of head
fake when the underlying business
model is to amass large amounts of data on individual users and then monetize
it via direct marketing. To stay out of
jail these services offer up long terms of use and privacy policies that they
know the vast majority of us never read.
For people like me, who grew up and then old in the research
profession, this weird twist on caveat
emptor is at the heart of our misgivings about much of the NewMR. Respect for respondents or participants or
research subjects or whatever you want to call them was always at the center of
everything we did. That quaint notion is
rapidly going the way of the landline telephone.
I am not so naïve that I don’t understand the need for MR
companies to evolve in response to new technologies, new modes of social interaction,
and an increasingly competitive marketplace.
My hope is that we can do so without betraying what I consider to be an
essential part of the ethical foundation of the research profession. Pete Cape once said, “We have allowed this
industry to be taken over by venture capitalists and technology geeks.” I hope he’s wrong.