What skills does a market researcher need?

My inaugural post on this blog was on August 28, 2005.  I started the blog as a way to share information inside my company.  In those days posts were almost always true to the tagline and focused on surveys.  But times change and today the MR industry is nowhere near as focused on surveys as it was six years ago.  We now collect data in many different ways and from many different sources.  I used to believe that the training I got over 11 years working at one of the finest survey research organizations in the world (NORC at the University of Chicago) was the best possible training for a career in research.  That’s not true anymore.  At least not in MR.  So if knowing how to design and conduct high quality surveys is no longer the essential skill of a good market researcher then what skills do we need?  I think there are three.

The first is the ability to evaluate evidence.  By that I mean the ability to look at how the evidence, whatever its source(s), was brought together and see with a clear eye both its strengths and its weaknesses.  What’s missing?  What are the biases?  How well does it reflect the behaviors and attitudes of the target population?  Where are the red flags?

The second is the ability to understand what the evidence is saying.  How does it contribute to our understanding of the research problem?  How does it fit or not fit with whatever else we know or with other data we might have?  The old discipline of hypothesis formation and testing is not practiced as it once was but we still need to be systematic in how we go about analyzing evidence.

Finally, we need to be able to translate the results of our analysis into insights for our clients, that is, to recommend clear steps that if taken will lead to improved business results.   I think we have come to believe that this is as much art as it is science.

Judging from what I hear and see across the industry there is plenty of room for improvement in all three.  So I keep on bloggin’. . .