Industry Leaders Predict MR's Future

NB a more detailed article is now online.

'You have to be in Asia, be outsourcing, and using the Internet if you want to be in the future of MR' according to TNS Chairman Tony Cowling, speaking at the BMRA's annual conference yesterday. Other speakers predicted the demise of the phone interview and the death of the medium-sized firm.

The Brighton conference of the BMRA (British Market Research Association) was this year entitled Research Directions: A Fork in the Road? It focused on the future of the industry, and the six speakers at the Industry Leaders' Summit provided their personal visions and predictions for the next five years.

Andrew Hill, Financial Editor of the Financial Times said that both media and MR faced similar challenges, as two industries involved in 'using brainpower to gather and sell information'. Hill said that 'competition can come from anywhere as traditional barriers are eroded' - consumer-generated content such as blogs challenge traditional media just as the ease of conducting and publishing research using the Internet poses questions for MR.

Tony Cowling, Chairman of TNS presented six ways in which the UK MR industry is changing, and six external trends that will also affect how it looks in five years' time. He pointed out that, while the UK continues to be one of the world's biggest MR spenders, it faces considerable threats: namely, it has one of the slowest growth rates, and is the third most expensive country for research. His six internal market forces include the growing dominance of continuous, syndicated services, such as retail audits, media measurement, and ad spend studies, and the development of multi-country projects and business models by the global agencies.

YouGov Chairman Peter Kellner's vision involved the rise and rise of online research - mainly at the expense of telephone interviewing. Not only is online research cheaper and faster, he said, but it also allows for the use of visual stimuli and complex questions in a way that phone surveys cannot. He also believes that online research avoids the 'interviewer effect', and cited examples including its more accurate predictions regarding the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger - Kellner puts this down to respondents' sheer embarrassment at admitting they wanted to vote for an 'ex-movie star muscleman'.

Full details of these and the views of Penny Hughes, President of the Advertising Association, Tim Bowles, Synovate's CEO for Western Europe and Cris Tarrant, Chair/MD of Business Development Research Consultants (BDRC) are featured in a longer article..

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