Elina Halonen
MRS BIG/CPS conference in Brighton, UK, May 22-23 2014
Walking down to the seafront in Brighton, I was extremely curious about this conference – I’ve been to a few, but none that have been framed as a murder mystery. The MRS BIG/CPG conference had been advertised as the first ever “whodunit” conference, and I was keen to see if the novel format would deliver on its promise.
The day started off with a session of “big business gone bad” with case studies on reputation management and research. The most interesting talk in this session was by Simon Strutt from The Marketing Works on understanding a brand’s shadow: drawing on Jungian psychology, he explained how brands can also have a dark side, just like the human psyche. This “shadow” is often obvious to the outside world however hard we, or a brand, tries to suppress it and if we don’t understand it – everyone else can see it, but its denial can make the brand seem untrustworthy and hamper brand potential. To make the shadow visible, it may be useful to speak to lapsed customers as they’re most likely to be able to articulate it clearly. However, integrating the shadow can also bring benefits for the brand and make it seem more trustworthy – for example, Pot Noodle has even made fun of its reputation by calling itself “the slag of all snacks”.
Moving on from brand and category shadows, in the next session we plunged into shining a light into the shadows of our own industry and thinking about the future of market research with Mike Jackson from Shaping Tomorrow. After presenting a rather challenging picture of the changes happening around us (Big Data, the rise of analytics and DIY research, a focus from asking to observing, from collection to analysis – to mention a few), we brainstormed in teams to come up with our own predictions of the future which for discussion on the second day of the conference.
Saving the best to last, the absolute highlight of the day was the interactive closing session presented by Jon Puleston from GMI. Picking examples of his own extensive exploration of the potential of predictive science in market research, Jon took the delegates through a quiz of trying to predict the results of his findings. While market researcher in me desperately wanted to believe in the power of asking at least some sort of questions, Jon convinced me that prediction can indeed be a lot more accurate than traditional polling, and more importantly that employing them transforms our relationship with respondents from treating them as a bit of data to a problem solving engine.
The next day dawning bright and windy, we started with a session questioning whether our industry-wide focus on innovation is, in fact, self-delusion akin to the emperor’s new clothes – are we too obsessed with new, shiny methodology at the detriment of good old-fashioned thinking?
Playing the devil’s advocate, Crawford Hollingworth from The Behavioural Architects argued that the opposite is actually true: while we might be fussing over technological innovation, we’re not excited enough about psychology even though understanding people is at the heart of what we do as an industry. Instead of being the “new semiotics” (like an unknown commentator had suggested), he proposed that behavioural economics is actually the “emperor’s new spacesuit” – the new frameworks and concepts provided by science are providing us with a powerful new way to understand consumer behaviour and influence it. Furthermore, he argued that this new deeper, behavioural understanding challenges how think about our current methodologies and how to surface the true subconscious drivers while inspiring us to consider the importance of context and helping us deliver value to clients through more actionable outputs. However, behavioural science also explains why we as an industry are not as excited: from anchoring and sunk cost fallacy to confirmation and status quo biases, we’re prisoners of how our brains are wired. Instead, we should probably harness our herd instincts by looking at the prestigious list of early adopters – after all, if it’s good enough for Barack Obama, Unilever and World Economic Forum, it should be good enough for us.
Bringing us back on track with innovations, Alex Johnston from Jigsaw reminded us of the realities of social media research with B2B audiences. According to their research, few people regularly interact with brands – and those that use social media more tend to have unusually low self-esteem. We also don’t know ourselves very well: while, for example, only 14% wold admit to being more opinionated online than in real life, 48% think their friends are. All this suggests that while social media research might be innovative and novel, interpretation is crucial.
Just as we were beginning to flag from the stream of energetic presentations, we were roped into an interactive session where we were pitching for a big research contract as different types of companies ranging from social media, digital advertising and big data agencies against the incumbent Old Ways Research whose approach wasn’t perceived to be innovative enough. Our job was to find out how we could resurrect market research after it had been “murdered” in the eyes of the internal stakeholders by what had been described as our existing, partly outdated ways as an industry.
Primed by the game, the grand finale came in the form of an interview with ESOMAR president Dan Foreman dressed as Sherlock Holmes and conference co-chair and past chair of MRS Phyllis Macfarlane as Miss Marple. Talking about crimes against market research, Sherlock noted that the biggest crime of all is that we’re beating ourselves up, and that we needed to cheer up and sell ourselves better: “It’s a profession rather than an industry – a profession that should be celebrated. Despite all the industry awards, we probably only see 1% of the great work”. Miss Marple reckoned that there’s still a lot of life left in the market research industry even though we’re being defensive and sticking to old ways: “We have a lot of skin in the game so it’s hard not to feel defensive but we’re not adopting new methods fast enough which is a danger.” Instead of being slightly obsessive about methodology, we should be obsessing about explaining value. “We have to behave more like consultants and look at the value we produce”, she said. And what does the future hold for market research? Sherlock suggested that as many more disciplines are getting involved in the insight and data management industry, we might need a different blend of skills as well as look at a different talent pool that we have previously and give them more freedom instead of pushing them down a certain route when they enter the industry. Miss Marple echoed that while we need to train people so they understand the basics quickly and easily so we don’t reinvent the wheel, we don’t quite know how to do it yet. So, despite the initial gloomy start of murders and crimes, perhaps there’s a brighter future for our industry after all!
Elina Halonen is a founding partner of the Irrational Agency and editor at InDecision blog.
