Research World October 2010
David Murphy talks to Didier Truchot, chairman and CEO of Ipsos
The marketing and communications industries are undergoing rapid change with the rise of online and social media. Is the market research industry doing enough to move with the times?
I’m not sure that we are doing enough, but I believe the industry is interested in and committed to using these new information sources to gain a better view of consumers’ behaviour and mindset.
We as an industry have moved a lot of data collection activity to online panels. In North America, Ipsos is making three-quarters of its revenue from online data collection systems. But when you switch surveys from CATI to online, you’re still asking questions in order to get answers.
Thanks to social media platforms, we are living in a different world now. You are not just interviewing people, but also you have people interacting with each other. This means you get a new set of qualitative and quantitative information that tends to be very insightful regarding how people think about a specific subject and how they react to any kind of marketing initiative. It’s an interesting way to produce new insight and information, and you can then connect this with sets of information you have gained through other methodologies and create something very useful and effective for clients.
Do you think the insights you get when you monitor real people talking to each other are more honest because they are not consciously in a market research situation?
That assumes that people are always honest when they talk to each other! What I would say is that for each new source of information, you need to connect the dots and be sure that what you are getting makes sense.
When we are working with a specific client on a specific project we have a lot of existing information about the brand that has been gathered over the last few years, so our researchers know a lot about brands and products; they have the ability to understand in a deep way what is going on and to report on that, and to work with clients who have their own sources of information.
What about the future of online research?
We are trying to use the most relevant and efficient way to collect information, so now most of what we do in North America is online, and in Europe it’s close to 25-30%. We are also starting to use mobile devices to connect with people and to do that in a way which can get better and faster information.
There are some privacy issues involved in getting information from mobile, so it’s not as easy as it seems, but if you assume that we do have permission, then one of the main areas of interest is to know where people are and what they are doing, and to interview them accordingly. But it also gives you a way to access people who are probably more comfortable answering questions using a mobile device than via any other tool. This is great for market research, because it gives us another option to access people, to understand their behaviour, and to connect this to what we already know about them.
We use mobile in two ways. One is totally passive, where we just collect information about what people are doing or saying without any moderation or relationship with them. And then, the more active way of asking questions, or moderating a group of people, just as we have been doing for the last 30 years. It’s the same with social media. You can just listen and watch what people are saying and doing or you can create a platform where people will interact with each other and with you about certain subjects.
As all these new media emerge, is the traditional market research interview dead?
The traditional interview at home is decreasing, even if there are still some cases where you need to use this method, such as for some government research. But even with all this new media, newspapers are still there; TV channels are still there. There is a lot of new media, so you have fragmentation. But fragmentation is useful, because it means we have more channels to communicate with people, and more ways to interact with them and this gives us a better understanding of what they do and why.
What skill sets are needed in order to offer clients a 21st century, holistic market research service?
We need people who have a better knowledge of how to manage technology than before, and we also need more market researchers, who understand how they can use these technologies. But more importantly, because now we have more sources of information and clients willing to use them in their business processes, we need not just good statisticians and researchers, but also people who can communicate and talk to clients in their language about what we have learned about consumers, and how this can be used for their benefit.
The market has been very volatile over the past year. How do you see the outlook?
We faced an interesting recession last year, where many clients cut their marketing and market research budgets drastically, but if you look at the real numbers, you see the industry declined by no more than five to six percent. So the decline was significant, but not the end of the world. This year is much more positive than this time last year, and the need for information about consumers and citizens is still extremely important and it’s up to us to find ways to deliver good value for our services. I am optimistic because there is a huge demand for our services in developing and in developed markets, where clients need to do more with less with better control of their spending and optimisation of their marketing dollars, and we can help them with that.
How important is privacy to the market research sector?
It’s a challenge when the rules differ from one country to another. I would love to have the same rules on a worldwide basis and the fact that they are not exactly the same from one country to another creates complexity. But there have always been rules about how we can access people and ask them questions – in France for example, you cannot ask a question about ethnicity, unlike in the UK, so you just have to be knowledgeable about these things and adjust accordingly.
If you could change three things within the consumer insights and market research sector, what would they be?
The first is that we need to have a better understanding of how we can communicate better what we have learned to our clients, in terms of the language we use and how we interact with our clients in a way that gets the best out of what we do.
We need to reduce the time delay between what we do and how our clients can use that information, because there is still lot of methodology where we need three to six weeks to produce a relevant report. This is not always appreciated by clients, who want to get everything very quickly, which I fully understand.
The third is that we need to increase our ability to act consistently on a worldwide basis, because more and more large international institutions and private companies need to act on a multi-country basis, and it’s not always easy in a people business to act in a very consistent way. We are doing our best to fulfil all of these criteria, and I’m hopeful that we will succeed.
Didier Truchot is chairman and CEO of Ipsos.
