BRB Report: Changes and Challenges for British MR

The UK's MR industry could work harder to attract top talent - and then provide a lot more training for it - but is managing to thrive nevertheless, according to results of the first British Research Barometer, published this week. Online communities emerge as the tech to watch.

The study is the first in a series planned by B2B specialist Circle Research and DRNO publisher MrWeb - fieldwork for the first wave was conducted early this year. In the best tradition of multi-mode studies, the first report combines findings from the survey with secondary analysis, in this case of news articles and job ads.

One reason for launching the survey was to sift out some of the hype from announcements, conference papers and yes, news reports, and gauge what is actually happening on the ground. As expected, the survey found almost all respondents making use of 'online surveys' (90%), but it also confirmed that traditional methods are still very widely used - more than half making use of (off-line) focus groups (60%), in-depth telephone interviews (55%) and in-depth face-to-face interviews (also 55%). Secondary research and analysis of existing datasets are important and seem to be a growth area - used by around half of respondents (43% and 55% respectively).

Among the rising techniques, evidence from both the survey and job ad analysis confirms that online research communities top the watch list. There is more robust evidence of their taking off / beginning to move mainstream than for mobile surveys or social media listening, never mind big data or neuroscience which are moving but lag behind the hype by some distance. We'll provide more detail on this in another DRNO article next week; and we'll also look at what the survey says about improving the client / agency relationship.

Job satisfaction in British MR firms and departments is generally good. Small agencies lead (mean rating 8.1/10) with clients second (7.8) and large agencies bringing up the rear (7.1) but even the last of these scores seems respectable. When it comes to intention to seek a new job, however, there's a different split: clientside researchers are, perhaps surprisingly, much more likely to be looking for a new role in the next 12 months (54% vs 27% for agencies). 54% seems alarmingly high. 27% seems... dare we say it, actually quite good.

Looking at satisfaction with individual factors, training and development opportunities prop up the table with a mean score of 6.1/10 - small agencies are again slightly ahead on 6.5, but large agencies and clients both score just under 6.0.

Perhaps we need to shout more about the happy state of many researchers - it might help to recruit more top graduates to the profession. At the moment, we do not consider ourselves to be great at attracting high quality talent: overall 16% think we're better than other industries, 36% think we're worse.

Although the first wave has moved quite slowly (mea culpa), we aim to run BRB every six months starting from next year, producing and reporting on trend information which should build up nicely. For those of you based in the UK, please watch out for the invite for Wave II in January and spare us ten minutes to contribute: it would be nice to up the sample size from the initial 140 completed. In the meantime, the full report from Wave I is available for download free of charge here:

www.circle-research.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/BRB-2018-report.pdf



Nick Thomas

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