2020 has cast every business in a new light. While many organisations are still adapting to new ways of working, some changes are already well underway. The market research (MR) industry is no exception.
Leading MR practitioners have long argued that we need to reframe our industry’s essence. We’re no longer about gathering and distilling data, statistics, or charts. We’re about advice, insight and decision-making.
To understand our altered future, and to put the accelerated change caused by the COVID-19 pandemic into context, it’s important to look backwards and forwards.
What we call research has changed
Since MR emerged as a discipline, it has experienced continual change. The development of new methodologies, techniques and technologies fuelled this evolution. However, so too has the way we teach and learn MR skills. Keeping pace with client expectations has also challenged researchers to stay on top of – and get ahead of – the latest trends. As history has shown every major economic crisis has changed consumer behaviour, this will continue to be true.
Time to reinvent ourselves
What we deliver and what our clients demand from us has changed almost beyond recognition since the start of the Noughties, and even more so since March 2020. A recent gathering of industry experts confirmed this. And that our future is to be ‘sense makers’.
According to Vanella Jackson, CEO at Hall & Partners, we’re more than ready to make this move: “We’ve always been good at gathering and distilling data. However, we must reframe and retrain talent to do a different job if we are to deliver at speed and provide advice that gets people to do things differently.”
There’s still a huge amount of work to do if we’re to deliver the new and changed insights our clients need, at the speed they need it. If we don’t evolve faster than before, we’ll become redundant.
In my opinion, what’s critical to this evolution isn’t just technology or methodologies. It’s our ability to re-train our talent. MR is awash with exceptional people. However, we need to ensure that we are we focusing them on the right things and empowering them to deliver.
Embracing new skills
Agencies now routinely run projects well beyond the scope of traditional MR. Outputs have long been moving away from data towards insight. Many research teams have been able to embrace new research methods and technologies and transform the way they work.
However, there’s a growing need for our industry to actively recruit and train staff with the skills essential to meet the global shift towards automation, AI and analytics. There’s is an opportunity for new specialisms to join MR from marketing scientists and chatbot designers to film-makers, editors and artists.
Whatever evolutionary steps we take, we need to keep one thing firmly in focus: the goal is to help clients move away from ‘one-dimensional’ data collection towards capturing insight as a source of competitive advantage.
As Jude Nottingham, Managing Director at TLF Research, explains:
“People are looking for something more from researchers now. Clients are looking for guidance, rooted in research. Our job is to inspire people to do something. Market researchers need to deliver value by using conversations based on insight to unpick and understand issues that make a difference to a client’s business.”
The MR dream team
We know from experience that many MR organisations are already ahead of the curve here, supplying strategic business intelligence in the areas they serve – advertising effectiveness, branding, scientific advancement, investment decisions etc.
We also know, however, that Customer Experience’s explosion (CX), which addresses research from a customer-centric and marketing-focused attitude, has powered a revolution that’s increasingly transforming how companies interact with their customers and markets.
In which case, copying CX’s approach, the future of MR lies not in providing data from surveys at regular intervals. It’s in acting as agents of change, delivering business insight in a format that the boardroom can act upon.
The strategic role that MR can and should play is underlined by David Smith, Director of DVL Smith and author of The High Performance Customer Insight Professional. He stresses the importance of insight professionals being able to seize strategic business opportunities and to future-proof organisations.
The enhancement of skills will allow MR to become “managers of disruption.”
Fortunately, ambitious organisations are already pushing MR professionals to challenge the status quo and their own boundaries.
Roger Perowne, CEO at Savanta, explains:
“The new generation of agencies are technology-driven, focused and innovative. Automation has its part to play but we need people who have amazing judgement and advisory skills. And we need to recognise the importance of those skills to provide the external perspective that our clients need.”
These changing demands represent a huge opportunity for MR as we know it. Looking ahead, we need curious, insightful, challenging people to create diverse teams that deliver advice that provide real impact. We will need to recruit inspiring ‘storytellers’ alongside data scientists – enhancing our ability to translate ‘flat data’ into real-world scenarios that inform decision-making and drive action.
People drive change
The human element in research – the ability to listen and adjust appropriately to changing parameters – is going to be more important than ever. “We need to make much better use of the whole MR ecosystem. We need to work with other agencies and technology providers and reach out to different areas of the business,” according to Fiona Blades, Chief Experience Officer at MESH Experience.
MR always has aimed to deliver the insight that businesses need, but if we are to stay at the forefront of the latest business revolution, then the next step has to be the ability for its people to deliver contextual, holistic and adaptable understanding.
With so many drivers for change, the future may seem overwhelming, but we’re not talking about a major industry revolution. We’re talking about being agile so that we can keep abreast of change, innovating how we deliver insights across the board and focussing on the skills we need to deliver true business intelligence. Taking measured steps to re-position and refine the strengths and skills of our industry will enable our clients to benefit from data-driven decision-making.
