Australian Awards Highlight Contribution of Research
September 14 2005
The Australian Market & Social Research Society (AMSRS) is launching its first Research Effectiveness Awards as part of the organisation's IMPACT: conference next month. The awards are designed to illustrate the contribution of research to business success. Conference papers will also address the impact of research in the real world.
The awards will be officially launched at the first morning of the conference on Monday 10 October, and the first round of winners will be announced at a gala celebration in July 2006. They will then be presented bi-annually in three categories:
- Top commercial award for excellence in research effectiveness
- Award for contribution to communication strategy effectiveness
- Award for social impact.
The awards were first mooted at last year's conference by Roger Jackson from Real World Marketing and Peter Harris from Colmar Brunton. The pair presented a study, which found that just 27% of senior marketing decision-makers agreed strongly that money spent on research can save a fortune in the long run. They suggested that awards would help to address the image problem, and build credibility for the contribution of research.
Following their presentation, the AMSRS asked Jackson and Harris to help develop the AMSRS Research Effectiveness Awards, working out the criteria, confidentiality issues, the judging panel and the role of sponsors. Harris says that the awards will 'transform research standards in Australia', and ' bring to the fore our industry's capacity to guarantee business results'.
This year's conference will underline the theme, with each paper describing a different kind of research 'impact'. For example, UK researcher Adam Joseph's paper 'Urbanites, insights and the bottom line' introduces 'urbanites' - consumers aged 18 to 44, working full-time in professional occupations, and living/working in a major city. He will describe Urban Life - the online research panel run by Metro (the UK's fourth largest national daily newspaper), dedicated to defining and understanding urbanites. According to Joseph: 'Metro's editorial team works closely with the commercial team, which is not how national newspapers in the UK usually operate!'
Graham Chant of Chant Link & Associates will present a paper, entitled 'Music soothes the savage customer: impact of music on customers', explaining how researchers used an experimental design, rather than a survey, to compare the effects of in-store music on shopping habits. Chant says the method used 'gives the researcher greater confidence that a relationship does indeed exist between the variables of interest'. He states that 'more often than not, conventional research techniques do not deliver outputs that allow researchers (and their clients) to conclude that relationships really do exist between the variables being researched.'
The papers presented at the conference will be available electronically at the World Advertising Research Centre (
www.warc.com ). The AMSRS is online at
www.amsrs.com.au.
All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.
