Art, Science, Fragments and Segments – All in a Day’s Work for the 21st Century Researcher
To celebrate 75 years in the business, we have invited BMRB managing directors and chairmen, past and present, to write about issues concerning the market research industry. The first in this series of articles is by current managing director, Richard Asquith
When I first joined the industry, the attraction of market research to me was how it combined the science of statistics with the art of questioning and interpretation (this was long before the word “insight” had become the answer to everything!) Twenty-five years on and there’s more science and more art than I could ever have imagined. The accelerating pace of technological change allows us to gather information in new ways, to process data in ever larger quantities and to manipulate and analyse using more sophisticated processes. Science has created an explosion of options for the researcher. But more choice isn’t always better, particularly when the raw materials we are working with are changing. The general public, who are the essential ingredient of our work, behave less and less like docile, compliant information providers – raising serious questions about sample representivity and meaningful responses. So the art has become making the right judgements from the proliferation of data and analysis options available to us. “Fit for purpose” has replaced “gold standard” in the researcher’s vocabulary.
BMRB is probably most famous for its work on behalf of media and government clients. TGI has played a central role in the trading of media space for the past 30 years and is now available in nearly 60 countries worldwide. Our work for the government from the seminal studies on Aids in the 1980s through to the British Crime Survey (BCS) today has helped to shape public policy. So we are fortunate to have a perspective on changes occurring in society, media and technology and their impact on the world of research.
In 2004 at the biennial Media Research Group conference I made a number of predictions about the state of joint industry audience research in the UK in 2014. My contention was that a combination of audience fragmentation, declining respondent compliance and commercial vested interests would result in research fragmentation. While you can now listen to digital radio on your TV set and read your newspaper on the internet, the research to measure the audiences wouldn’t converge and, if anything, we would see a proliferation of specialist studies to measure the pockets of audiences on the different platforms. Four years on and I won’t be giving up my day job to become a full-time forecaster, but the trend away from research convergence has been even greater than I had anticipated.
So, for example, in the last couple of months RAJAR, the body that oversees the UK’s radio audience research, has announced that it is terminating its experimentation with audio meters (due to serious concerns over the quality of listening data produced) which could potentially have provided a standardised research platform to measure both radio and TV. The audience currencies show no sign of merging and we are seeing pressure for the newer media such as online, event sponsorship, product placement, in-store TV, ambient etc etc to be accountable through dedicated audience research, as they gain share of the advertising cake.
At the same time, the affordability and flexibility of online panel research is opening up new opportunities for media owners to supplement audience currency data with proprietary quantitative, qualitative and diagnostic research. BMRB’s, award winning Urban Life panel for London’s Metro newspaper being a good example of this.
“Behavioural data” ranging from Set Top Box return path data to store card purchasing data from the big retailers is adding another layer of audience insight.
And on top of this, Advertisers are increasingly looking beyond reach and frequency to understand what mix of channels will provide them with the best means of triggering the desired consumer response. This is fuelling the development of new metrics such as ‘engagement’ and new studies to provide the data.
Media data proliferation is rife and increasingly the challenge is making sense of it all; developing the thought processes (and software) to collate all of these information sources, assess their roles and value and then derive meaningful conclusions.
In the public sector, it is reassuring that there is still a demand for very high quality research. Whatever we might hear about the public’s participation in research dropping through the floor, the BCS continues to employ a random probability research design and to achieve a response rate comfortably above 70%.
But large scale studies to inform and monitor the impact of public policy are rarely conducted in isolation. In recent years there has been an influx of professionals into the civil service with commercial experience. Insight teams are growing, sometimes within, sometimes in parallel with the existing Government Social Research departments. And these new Insight teams are importing techniques which are more typically associated with private sector research. Segmentation studies of the public are now common, “customer” journey mapping techniques are widely used and even data fusion is on the agenda.
Research is increasingly politicised. Political opinion polling has of course been around for years, but in the past decade we’ve seen the rise and backlash against government by “focus group”. And in the past year Gordon Brown’s enthusiastic endorsement of “citizens’ juries” has given a very political slant to the well-established and academically-rigorous discipline of deliberative research.
The inescapable observation is that market and social research is generally becoming a more complex, crowded and politically-sensitive field. While successful research used to require the traditional craft skills of questionnaire and sample design coupled with rigorous and insightful analysis; the 21st Century researcher must be equally comfortable dealing with the power of IT, marketing, politics and commercial vested interests.
Richard Asquith, managing director BMRB.
