New opportunities, traditional values

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 fifth in this series of articles is by our former chairman, Tim Bowles, who worked at BMRB from 1986 until 1995.

I worked at BMRB from 1986 to 1995 and it changed my professional life. More specifically, I was the Chairman of the company, as part of my job as Chief Executive of MRB Group, part of first JWT Group and then WPP. It changed my life not least because of the extraordinarily talented management team at BMRB, headed by John Samuels. I had earned my research credentials as part of a very creative, but somewhat erratic small company, led by the wonderful Bill Schlackman. BMRB, with its painstaking graduate selection, careful training, and rigorous craftsmanship was a revelation. I watched with admiration as John, Simon Orton, and their team put together such research programs as the studies of sexual behaviour carried out to assist the Department of Health in forecasting the spread of AIDS through the hetero and homosexual populations. The sheer craftsmanship of questions that teased out truthful responses on such a loaded topic, the ingenious use of purposive sampling (recruitment in gay clubs) to supplement the main probability sample, and the painstaking analysis to interpret the data were all exemplary. And therein lies the rub.

While I chaired the management of BMRB, we lived through the first major wave of company consolidation: purchase by WPP, sharing a corporate owner with competitors Research International and Millward Brown, then incorporation into Kantar. Throughout this time, the company never wavered in its commitment to methodological rigour and research quality, even as it learned to live with the requirements for profit and margin improvement that come with being part of the industry, as opposed to the profession of market and survey research. I am delighted to observe that, even today, BMRB continues to uphold those same values, witness the cluster of industry awards won over recent years. But the going gets harder.

The globalisation of the industry, the challenges of surviving in a corporate environment and the immense price competition in data collection have all made it difficult to maintain the painstaking standards associated with studies of the kind to which I have referred. I know I am at risk of sounding Luddite but why should I worry? I’m only ten years younger than BMRB! Over the last two years I have been interviewed by telephone several times as a respondent in a tracking survey carried out by a well known and commercially successful research company. The topic is one in which I have a strong interest. On two occasions these interviews have been conducted by an interviewer who gabbled the questions so that they verged on the incomprehensible, rushed my responses, and left me with a heavy heart. The questionnaire wasn’t great either. If, as I suspect, my experience is not unique, the implications for data quality and for respondent engagement are dire. Despite the fact that quality control of telephone interviews should be less onerous than controls on in-home face to face interviewing, achieved standards are at best variable. I care because I fear that some of the basic values that have characterised research executive life at BMRB, and at other respected companies, may get lost as we struggle to accommodate the demands of the immediate future.

The spread of internet usage and the associated growth of the online access panels as a method of data collection have opened up new possibilities:

• Access to larger samples for the same cost as smaller face to face samples.
• Ability to send controlled visual and other stimuli for evaluation.
• Fast turnaround of results.
• Availability of extensive background data for cross analysis..
• Increased automation of research processes, driving costs out of the system.

At the same time there has been a surge in the availability of sources of rich behavioural data, initially as a by-product of the customer loyalty schemes operated by the major supermarkets, but now, increasingly, through web retailers like Amazon, and through the online collection of data on internet purchasing and visits to websites. The latter opportunity has been seized by a new wave of market and media information companies focussed on the internet as their data generator.

I am as excited about these developments as the next man but I am also concerned about our ability to maintain appropriate standards for data quality and rigour of interpretation in this fast changing environment.

To the extent that a wider range of behavioural data become available, this makes us less dependent on the survey method, with its own dependence on sample quality and the accuracy of reported, as opposed to observed behaviour. (For an insightful account of this trend, see Mike Savage and Roger Burrow’s article ‘Wither the survey?’ in the last issue of the IJMR). Nevertheless, the desire to understand why people behave as they do, as well as what they do, remains strong. It turns out that much of the value of the new sources of behavioural data (both from clickstream analysis and from customer databases) lies in the capability to link attitudinal and preference data to those behavioural data. This linkage expands the range of inference in terms of customer motivation, product development, and sales forecasting that can be made based upon the data. I therefore conclude that the ‘art of asking questions’ will remain just as relevant as it was when Stanley Payne wrote his book of that title in the 1950s. It is just that there will be much more emphasis on the integration of interview responses with the growing variety of behavioural data that is becoming available. To the extent that we accept this argument, then thoughtful question design and careful administration of questions, whatever the data collection method, will remain a crucial determinant of the value of insights we can provide for our clients.

As if all this was not enough to absorb, a further change is also gathering pace. Earlier this year Mike Cooke and Nick Buckley published an IJMR paper entitled ‘Web 2.0, social networks and the future of market research’. Their paper explores the rapid growth of online social networks and the emergence of Web 2.0; a set of online collaborative tools that enable us to track this ever changing phenomenon. Our clients are already responding to this opportunity to develop a new “open” relationship with their customers through the creation of customer communities in which the members can interact with each other, as well as with researchers and marketers from the sponsoring company. Such online communities are already being used extensively for qualitative research but have a wider significance in that the concepts of ‘collaborative content’ and ‘co- creation’ are beginning to shift the paradigm of how consumers relate with brands. The traditional model of brand development research in which customers are the passive target for marketing initiatives is being replaced by one in which customers are active participants in the creation and development of brands. New approaches to data analysis are called for to help us drive insight from these rich but complex data sets, where the questions, as well as the answers are determined by consumers, as well as by marketers.

It is my belief that we need to embrace these new opportunities and take the lead in developing disciplined methods to understand the significance of these less structured data sets, alongside our efforts to maintain the quality and relevance of survey data. Converging insights from these data sources will help us stay relevant in the evolving business environment. It is also clear, however, that concepts of data quality based entirely upon the sample survey model will not accommodate these new types of data. But our clients will continue to need guidance in the relevance and limitations of diverse data sources, and how to integrate them for delivering marketing insights. The spirit of rigour in research design, statistical discipline, and careful analysis which have characterised BMRB’s first 75 years remain as relevant today as they were in an age when the sample survey was the only source of data to understand brand performance. We just need to adapt them to the new world in which we operate.

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