MRS Conference: Social Media as Road Kill?

On day two, a session on The Future of Market Research looked at some up-and-coming MR technologies and techniques, leading to a debate about their potential to shape the future of the industry. Our News Editor Mel Crowther reviews the arguments.

Ray Poynter, MD of The Future Place, referred to the problems associated with 'web scraping' of social media sites, which he said has created a 'paradigm shift' where research is no longer being driven by researchers.

The act of 'life blogging' - where consumers want to tell the world about the minutiae of their lives - provides a new type of 'truth', claimed Poynter, while maintaining that the Market Research Society (MRS) is too hung up on telling the truth, as opposed to 'getting the message out'.

John Griffiths - founder of Planning Above and Beyond - highlighted the problems associated with knowing who the respondents of social media activity actually are. For all we know, they could be journalists trying to plant a story or lobbyists attempting to promote a particular viewpoint, he feared.

A keen participant in the 'sport' of shooting rabbits, Griffiths suggested there were three types of researcher: farmers, who are orderly and process driven; hunter gatherers, who catch fresh game (gather first hand data from respondents); and scavengers, who pick up road kill (or basically gather feedback in quantity through the 'Net). He cautioned all reputable researchers to have nothing to do with the last.

However, Griffiths suggested there was hope for the idea of gathering response from social media, in that co-creation with real people would enable control of sample, while allowing research communities to 'do the work' alongside research professionals.

In what Session Chair Rita Clifton - Chairman of Interbrand - defined as a cross between the sci-fi movies Bladerunner and Terminator, Griffiths outlined how 'Demographic Replicators' (robots or 'bots') are already being used to collect and collate data from numerous online sources. This intelligence, combined with 'real respondent' feedback, he stated, is currently being utilised by researchers to analyse buyer behaviour.

Continuing the scary movie theme, Richard Owen and Tom Woodnutt from Hall & Partners stepped in at this point to ask whether market researchers might have 'entombed themselves' in a world of their own. Believing that they have, they urged the industry to wake up and understand the threat of competitors who are encroaching on traditional market research territory. These risks, they suggested, could come from direct marketing agencies, web analytics firms, social media specialists and of course, the client's own in-house department.

Researchers are losing their status as primary providers of insight, the pair claimed, while they rallied in favour of the reinvention of MR through researchers adopting the role of brand evangelists. Owen and Woodnutt agreed that more contemporary measures of brand engagement need to be embedded into the research process; while they pressed for big changes to be embraced instead of agencies making small 'tweaks' to what they described as 'outdated' procedures.

While reasoning that digital technology should be seen as our friend, not our foe, they made the case for a re-brand of the MRS to the 'Engagement Conversations Society' (ECS). [Hmm, bit of work needed on that one]. With social media analysis now being so widespread, how can we possibly ignore it, the pair asked.

In closing, Griffiths suggested that research 2020 would be a smaller industry, more focused on the internal workings of its clients; while the Hall & Partners duo felt that clients would be less interested in what 'people like us' are saying, and more focused on what people are thinking.

During the very brief post-presentation Q&A session, audience member Paul Vittles voiced his concerns about the industry being seen as 'institutionally conservative', while providing the example that it has taken researchers nearly 19 years to acknowledge the value of integrating co-creation into the research mix.

Griffiths responded by speculating that perhaps this is the result of researchers being too nervous to walk away from a traditional model which has always been successful and has made them money.


Perhaps this last is a point worth coming back to, in a year which already looks much brighter than last year. There's an argument for saying that we're not an industry in crisis: that the skills we have are transferable to many of the new fields coming up. Businesses will always need to define problems, ask the right questions, and analyse and interpret data and comments based on a sound understanding of their market - and preferably informed by a wider knowledge of other markets. The Internet is a far bigger threat to traditional media than it is to the market research industry, and lawyers or doctors don't seem to be spending huge amounts of time worrying that they are going to be made irrelevant by changes in technology and society. If we believe that there's something fundamental about market research and something unique about the skills that make a good researcher, we should be viewing the undoubted revolution in one or two of our key areas (data collection and, arguably, quantitative analysis), not with fear but with fascination.

MrWeb's prediction for what research will be like in 2020? More like it is now, than many are forecasting, we suggest, with a huge number of new tools in the toolbox but most of the old ones still there too and not yet shrunk away to niches. What's certain is that we'll still spend Conference worrying about becoming an irrelevance for one reason or another - why change the habit of a lifetime?


[concluding remarks by Nick Thomas]

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.