At the Royal Society in London, the International Journal of Market Research held its second one day conference to challenge high level market research thinking under the umbrella theme of ‘Stop Talking, Start Listening’. Jon Chandler reviews some of the key themes of the day.
Jon Chandler 
17 Nov, 2009
‘Stop talking, Start listening’ New Directions in Market Research
The International Journal of Market Research occupies a unique role within
the Market Research world, modelling itself on academic journals, publishing
on a quarterly basis and now in its 51st volume.
The Royal Society in London was the venue for the second annual one day conference organised by the IJMR, this day stripped away the usual conference paraphernalia and focused exclusively on the realm of ideas and thinking. With the over-arching title ‘Stop Talking, Start Listening’ this event self consciously sought to push the boundaries of MR thinking with a number of esteemed speakers challenging the status quo from a variety of perspectives.
Peter Mouncey (Editor-in-Chief of IJMR) introduced the conference by posing the challenge of where market research is going … “are the old methods outdated, is there a need for a new research paradigm?”
In a series of future features we will look at some of the challenges presented to market research within the healthcare arena by some of these papers. Here I will simply outline some of the big issues raised.
In her keynote address, Phyllis Macfarlane (Chairman, GfK NOP) looked at the
performance of Market research as a business over time. The last thirty years,
she said, has seen a phenomenal growth in MR, to the point where MR now represents
a $32billion global market, divided between 80% quantitative and 14% qualitative;
“the 21st century has produced a massive explosion in the generation of data”
Tempering this picture of successful industry growth, Phyllis pointed out that the MR industry performance in recession has been worse than anticipated by financial analysts, showing something like a 10% overall decline. Likewise her picture of the future is not one of gilded optimism;
“the volume of work and margins will not recover for a long, long time”
The negative impact of recession has not been evenly spread. Phyllis identified ‘Brand and Communications trackers’ as having been particularly vulnerable to recession, when ad spends are reduced less work is done. By contrast she noted that strategic research is doing well, “research that is necessary to transform the clients business” should be and has been resilient in the face of recession. The emphasis in this strategic research is not just upon data, but what is done with that data. Here Phyllis echoed themes developed in our ‘analysis’ series completed last month, stressing that strategic research requires a full market research arsenal of “facts, understanding and insight”.
Here Phyllis emphasised that the challenge confronting Market research may
be the same as that faced by the computing industry in the past. She suggested
that just as IBM has moved from a vertical market model to a horizontal one,
so too may MR have to move to more horizontal models. In the horizontal MR
model the generation of data and the supply of facts would be separated from
the analysis and interpretation of that data.
What is important about Phyllis’ alternative future model is that this would mark a profound change from the way that much Market Research is currently executed. Such change would demand that we develop very different ways of measuring quality in each arena. It allows us to recognise that delivering real quality in data is very different from delivering real quality in understanding and insight. What this demands is that start to open up the ‘black box’ of analysis and interpretation and develop more overt and coherent models for strategic insight and development.
Over the course of the next three issues of Third Tuesday we will look at
three of the other papers from this conference. Each of these suggest important
ways of building more profound “facts, understanding and insight”. Each of
these suggest ways in which Market Research within the healthcare arena can
take genuinely new directions:
- Roy Langmaid talked about ‘Co-Creation’; in future issues we will look at the limited ways in which this kind of approach has been used in healthcare to date and how it could be taken much further.
- Michelle Harrisson talked about ‘Deliberative’ approaches; in future issues we will explore how this type of approach has been implicitly applied in healthcare and where it can be taken much further.
- Ed Keller talked about tapping into ‘Word of Mouth’; this represents a totally new approach in which a genuinely new and more profound raft of data is generated, in our next issue we will explore what this could offer in healthcare.
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