Before a forthcoming pitch, one of our clients quipped ….

 “You might want to avoid telling us how many CATI stations and clipboards you’ve got!!”

Well, the particular client knows we’ve never had CATI stations and rarely go down the clipboard route but he wanted to make the point about the approach to gathering customer / market information and how agencies often focus on their in-house resources rather than their ability to derive helpful and actionable insights. (Read ‘death by stale PowerPoint’). 

Is this now a widely shared view of how the research industry (from a client perspective at least) is feeling? 

A quote from a recent read entitled ‘Consumerology - The market research myth, the Truth about Consumers and the Psychology of shopping’ by Philip Graves, perhaps echoes the sentiment….

“I would argue, the convenience of a technique that can be very good at providing research data – very good in the sense of the volume produced and how interesting it seems – has little to offer by way of dependable accuracy”

 Philip goes on to say …..

"Creative questioning styles can provide more interesting responses, but they are not necessarily more reliable. If any of the research techniques used has induced a frame of mind that is not present during the actual consumer experience, it is unlikely to have obtained an accurate picture of what people think."

This perhaps suggests that we need to get closer to the transaction and/or the real time brand experience to really gather meaningful insights – but then what of the post purchase / service feelings? Do store exit interviews not come under criticism for being a little short and rushed due to time pressures and a less than ideal environment generally? Traditional personal data collection modes can be said to give the answer the interviewer wants to hear, introducing additional unwanted bias. Established qualitative groups are at the mercy of (un)scrupulous recruitment to ensure the right individuals are in the room in the first instance and again, we must be ever conscious of direct moderator influence. Certainly for speed and access, online panels can be very effective but can also come under fire for sampling problems, representation and not getting to the why and how questions.   

So where do online communities fit in?  Do they resolve some of the more pertinent concerns of traditional market research?  For example, interviewer influence, environmental issues, timeliness, respondent selection etc. Can they really be used in a more flexible way, over longer periods of brand exposure time and capture valuable insights from naturally occurring conversations versus the interrogatory style of some traditional market research practices? Do quick start up, albeit technically competent, social media consultants offer an easy route into an arguably tired market research industry with their counts of brand mentions and sentiment analytics or are they too missing a trick by precluding and not integrating some of the more established data capture methodologies? 

I’m not sure we are all ready for a broad brush out with the old and in with the new but surely there is room for the twain to meet? Is it time for the industry to embrace and bring together the best of the past in a more holistic fashion and take advantage of the benefits of the new choices open to insight professionals today?