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■ Maintenance of a successful market research group requires that the group stays out of the politics, while being very sensitive to them.
It is very important indeed to sustain an image of integrity, and the easiest way by far of doing this is genuinely to have integrity.
■ Within the organization there are many people who are in a state of stress. This is generally because the levels of work required these days are very high. The disadvantage of this is that it reduces the efficiency of an organization and people make mistakes.
Furthermore, people often have no time to think things through, so one cannot be expected to take what people say at face value. Life would be much easier if this were not the case, but unfortunately it is. The market research function can win a lot of friends by recog- nizing this and trying to help those people in distress. This means actually trying to accommodate this stress, and not being difficult when briefs come in late, e-mails are not responded to or people change their minds again and again.
■ When power politics raises their ugly head, it is rare that they do so blatantly, so it is very important to be constantly on the lookout for them. People can become very disagreeable when decisions go against them, and are likely to attack the researcher or the research function. This is all in a day’s work, but can be fatal if not handled well. The greatest defence to this is to anticipate these attacks and work to neutralize them before they become manifest. This is gen- erally possible because people on the whole will not admit to being motivated by anything other than the rational good of the company.
■ It is of great importance to have a group of suppliers that suit the organization, and these can only be built up over a long period of time. It goes without saying that suppliers should be properly and considerately treated. This means having some knowledge of the difficulties that they face and trying not to make these difficulties any worse than they otherwise would be. High on the list is giving suppliers the time required to do the job, the information that they need to do it, and just as important, the information when they need it, not a day (or so) later. In order to understand the market of research products and people in the profession, it is very impor- tant to keep in contact with the industry. This means allowing people to pitch, attending conferences, reading papers and con- necting with the gossip. All this is vital in order to perform the role of a research buyer.
■ It is proper that a large buyer in the market should try to help move the market on. This means having a budget to do so, and this is not easy to achieve. However, if the company really does believe in the research function, this budget is a tangible manifestation of that belief. Ideally the company will want to do research at the leading edge of the market and to have the advantages this brings over the competition.
■ Staff development is important from many standpoints. Not only does it contribute to the ability of people in the industry (as staff will always move on), it is also an exciting way of developing new products. A major buyer should also try to be engaged with its sup- pliers’ staff in terms of personnel secondments or just by going to talk to them. This is obviously a two-way process as how else will a buyer, who may never have worked in a research agency, know what goes on deep inside it?
All the above principles contribute to being part of a successful research function. The following are a few thoughts about changes that may take place in the future.
■ Market research does not stand still, and one has to keep an eye on what is just round the corner. This book is unusual in stating the view that there is absolutely no difference between the quality of information of a qualitative nature and that of a quantitative nature, although they are clearly different in kind and fit for different pur- poses. As described, qualitative research has gained ground, rather grudgingly, because it delivers what quantitative research cannot, but the schizophrenic view about it continues.
■ There are moves to be more holistic in the interpretation of quanti- tative research (which suffers from a question-by-question analysis framework) and to take a more cavalier attitude to the caveats that have traditionally been applied to its findings. This looks rather like taking on qualitative clothes, and to a certain extent is obviously to the good, but there is a danger in this. Doing quality quantitative research is very hard (as also is doing quality qualitative research).
With a growing view that all the caveats are tedious rubbish comes the possibility that not only will they not be mentioned, but also they will not be applied to the research, so there could be a problem about knowing whether the work that will be done in the future is
going to be of a proper quality. Furthermore, as quantitative research is not that easy to understand properly there could be a tendency to actually throw out the use of quantitative research in its entirety as all being too boring to cope with (as some advertising agency planners currently appear to be doing). Clearly this would be unfortunate.
■ There could be a revival of quantitative research – what I have called the ‘new quantitative research’. This is the because of the increasing amount of information available from company systems that could be leveraged by combining it with external quantitative data. There are signs of this happening already where external data is attached to customers’ data from a loyalty card scheme: for example, of data attached to a customer’s phone or other utility records.
■ One of the greatest opportunities with new quantitative research is the ability to model it mathematically. The modelling of quantitative data is on the increase mainly because of the greater availability of computers than there was just 10 years ago. Modelling allows a more holistic approach to be taken (because a number of individual characteristics will be used in the model), it allows a greater simpli- fication of the data (often to a simple spreadsheet) and it allows
‘what if’ questions to be asked. In principle there is no reason why these models should not be operating in real time and become an integral part of the process control of the company.
■ This possible future will depend on organizations getting to grips with their entire information in an integrated way. As mentioned earlier, vast amounts of information are being collected at the moment by companies and being stored either on departmental spreadsheets or within company databases. At the moment the manner in which analysis is conducted on departmentally held data has to be questioned, as there is no reason this should be done well. As for the case of system-held data, at the moment this is largely impossible to access, although the situation is slowly chang- ing. The move to the creation of customer insight departments could herald the recognition that there is more information in the company than financial and sales analysis or market research, but this whole area is up for grabs.
This chapter has reviewed the basic contents and messages of this
book. Probably the book has concentrated too much on what is diffi- cult and what is not right. Actually there is a lot that is right in the industry and in the way it works, and there is a tremendous amount of fun and fulfilment to be had. Fortunately, it looks as if there are fantastic opportunities ahead. They will not be easy to seize and make happen, but then nothing that is worthwhile is.