By Finn Raben & Laurent Flores
During my evolution and development as a working researcher, it was a fundamental requirement that when providing a client with research results, the findings be presented as possible actions (or solutions), in the context of the business challenge that prompted the research in the first place. This was considered good research practice!
Nowadays, I notice that increasingly such actionable information is being referred to as “insight” or “consumer intelligence”, and “research” is referred to in a slightly more derogatory tone.
Really?
Isn’t such actionable information, insight or consumer intelligence, always based on the compilation of relevant data, objective analysis using appropriate rigour, and translation of the results obtained into the commercial context? Isn’t this research?
Yes, methodologies have changed; yes, data sources have evolved, and yes, rigour needs to be fit for purpose, but the demand for relevant data, analysed and interpreted in a contextual manner, and presented as a series of potential business solutions is what good researchers do and becomes even more important in this age of data abundance.
A good “data scientist” will need to be a good statistician and a good consumer intelligence person is likely to be a good researcher…let us not devalue the term research, rather let us take back full ownership of the term and celebrate it! Let us garner respect for the tools, techniques and competences that are part of our research armory.
To mis-quote Dylan Thomas:
Do not go gentle into that good night…..rage, rage against the dying of the light
Rage against the dilution of what this profession has been doing excellently for the last 80 years; rage against those whose lack of professionalism does our reputations no good and rage against those who have claimed that research is “dead” or redundant!
This is not to understate the size of the challenge that lies ahead: the misrepresentation of opinion polls by the media can confuse citizens about what constitutes professional research; programmes such as The Apprentice that ask their contestants to do “research”, which comprises short, unstructured and often misguided interviews on the street with a handful of people, clearly devalue our profession’s expertise.
And when you consider that organisations that might deal solely with digital advertising are now proclaiming to lead the debate on digital research, is it any wonder that people are confused about our professional standing?
By analogy, veterinarians can conduct surgical operations but if you have a heart murmur and need a valve replacement, would you be comfortable if a veterinarian were to conduct the operation? This is not to devalue what vets do, but rather to set the professional discipline and expertise of research in the right context!
So, whether you are in the business of “consumer guidance”, “insights” or “market intelligence”, remember that these are all disciplines that are grounded in research. Do not shy away from the term; do not undervalue the term, and do not let someone else take ownership of it.
The value of research has always been well known, but now it seems to be becoming less clear and open to debate. So do shout loud about it, do share the benefits of it, and do extol its wonders to the next generation and the general public. That way, our future and that of our profession will remain positive.
Finn Raben is Director General of ESOMAR.
Laurent Flores is ESOMAR President.
4 comments
Finn, Laurent – great post. Question: is your call to arms really about defending the word “research”? Or is it about coming to terms with a sea-shift in terms of:
i) data availbility (all around us and increasing thanks to digital)
ii) ownership (increasing “bypassing possibilities” of the Insights, sorry Research Department, DIY tools etc. )
iii) Zeitgeist of “doing” (start-ups = do first, learn through that) rather than “investigating” (academic, slow, perfectionist)?
If we are struggling with a sense of being undervalued, threatened even, we certainly aren’t alone – digital seems to be disrupting so many industries it’s breathtaking.
Perhaps we are to blame for not having strongly risen to the challenge of making our industry particularly visible and attractive in a positive and sustainable way to eg relevant undergraduate audiences? Perhaps there are masses of successful efforts I’m not aware of – so please correct me if so.
If we are looking left and right at other professions with which to compare ourselves without becoming rather glum, I don’t think the veterinary or medical professions are necessarily good ones – these are certified professions, like accountancy, and are ring-fenced, rightly so. I’d suggest looking elsewhere for inspiration about what we (individually, collectively) could do to improve our profile – classical music in the UK is perhaps an interesting analogy.
Classical music is often derided as elitist, expensive, irrelevant; marketing in the UK has been pretty effective over the past 10 years in popularising classical music. I have no figures (anyone help there?) however, the BBC’s The Choir (first aired in 2006, still going…..) seems to have succeeded in capturing the imagination of a much wider audience through TV than had been historically the case.
Or take a sub-segment of classical music: the popularity of early choral music in the UK – surely a niche category – has come on in leaps and bounds over the past 20 years thanks to imaginative, consistent marketing by the likes of John Eliot Gardiner, Peter Philips and Harry Christopher, to name just a few.
My take out: MR (insights, consumer intelligence) needs to capture the imagination of key audiences (eg students, younger marketing professionals) differently – and respect that we need to go with the flow of the Zeitgeist….so: embrace key tenets of easiness, fun, rewarding, meaningful, and not overly indulge our inward-looking urges, methodological obsessions that leave many rather unmoved.
Since I joined this industry, research has been a dirty word. But words have the meaning we give them. Rather than changing and floundering around for other words, I totally agree that we need to make the word research mean what it should – inspiring insights, rigorously grounded in context, clearly communicated and with direct and measurable actions. We need to do this by branding ourselves better – both as individual companies and as a whole industry. Well branded companies have clear meaning and benefits, they are confident and consultative and they are able to charge a premium for the added value they provide.
A timely and interesting article. There does seem to be a lot of research bashing at the moment, particularly in the start-up, innovation, business design community. These same people, however, and often in the same breath, preach human-centred design, user-centred development and co-creation. Well, if that’s doesn’t require research, I don’t know what does! We researchers need to take care that we are part of this. Who else has the experience, the know-how and the tools to deliver the data which any human-centered approach requires? As a seasoned qualitative researcher, I know I would definately fail at programming the next big app, and it makes me nervous to watch software developers interviewing “users”, devoloping personas and basing decisions on the outcomes. However, when you sit down with them and explain the difference between asking questions and carrying out a qualitative depth-interview, they are often open to learn and to delegate the data collection to an expert. We should ask ourselves whether the community implementing Design Thinking etc. are actually even aware of the existence of good research and good researchers and what they can deliver. Do we need to speak up here? What do other Esomar members think?
A big HURRAH for Laurent and Finn for this call to arms! Many of us in the industry were trained by people – George Gallup, Budd Wilson, Jay Wilson, Phil Barnard, John Goodyear, Tim Bowles (the list goes on and on) – who would be highly confused by this debate around the value of research vs data vs insights. We were taught to speak up on our conclusions and recommendations for business solutions precisely because we had grounded the research we had done in rigour and context, using the right tools to frame the right questions. It’s no different today – as I said in one of my recent editorials, the landscape may have changed but the essential structure (the topography of research) remains the same.