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It may be another six years before London hosts the Olympics, but we've limbered up with this year's ESOMAR Congress... The annual flagship event of the worldwide association of research professionals has just concluded, sampled by our correspondent Phyllis Vangelder.
Phyllis writes...
The ESOMAR Annual Congress is not just about papers. It is essentially a networking exercise, bringing together colleagues and friends from all over the world – this year about 1,000 delegates from 70 countries. So, besides the formal presentations there were master classes, live keynote interviews, blogs and podcasts, and the usual Exhibition and elite social programme including the Welcome Reception in the Great Hall of the Royal Courts of Justice and a Networking Evening at the Hurlingham Club.
The Exhibition continued the trend of showcasing suppliers to the industry, rather than the research companies themselves, so data process companies, software suppliers, sample providers and the like, made up the bulk of the 64-odd exhibitors in the spatial, busy Exhibition Halls. Outsourcing is here to stay.
The London described by the opening Keynote Speaker, Deputy Mayor of London Nicky Gavron, was not altogether familiar to those of us living in the city – it boasted a good transport infrastructure, for example. However, her own remit of leading for the Mayor on mitigating the impact of climate change (including the recent launch of the London Climate Change Agency) and strategic planning for the environment meant that her views were in line with those of ESOMAR in respect of a sustainable future.
Gavron positioned London as the heart of the global market economy and acknowledged freely that much of what London does is powered by research. The strategic planning for London's Thames Gateway, the largest regeneration project in Western Europe, including Canary Wharf, was informed by research studies.
Tackling climate change is an overriding priority for London. Gavron warned that we have ten years before the point of no return. She stressed, 'Never have your skills been more needed – foresight, imagination and creativity'. Policy must be based on deep research, on current facts and attitudes, not just past trends. Longitudinal studies show how people's values change. We have to highlight the dimensions of values and attitudes to guide corporate decisions. New solutions and paradigms need the guidance of market research to help deliver appropriate packages.
The Deputy Mayor stressed that tackling climate change is not incompatible with economic growth, but all our social and economic certainties are vulnerable to climate change. We have to find optimal ways which are acceptable to people and in this market research has a vital role.
Keynote Speaker Charles Leadbeater, one of the world's leading authorities on innovation and creativity in organisations, set the scene on the Congress theme of 'Foresight' by suggesting that we are moving from an era of mass production and consumption to mass creativity and participation. He stressed that successful ideas often start from small conversations and invariably come when you are away from your desk. The tools for people to become more creative are now spread more widely. Some of the greatest successes have come about from people's uses of a product, rather than from the manufacturer – for exmplae mountain bikes started with avid groups of bike users in California who built their own machines to conform to their needs. The success of text messaging was due to children's and teens recognising this as an ideal way to communicate with each other. When you give people tools they will often use them in ways you had not thought of. For instance, reputations on E-Bay are built or broken by the facility to say how good the trader is.
Leadbeter said people now want to become participants, not just consumers, and proceeded to look at several drivers of this change. We think of organisations as value chains, with a set of links among which value gets created, with the consumer as the final link. This transfer and transaction notion of value can work for physical objects, but value is now increasingly being created by interchange and co-creation. In the area of computer games, for instance, much of the activity is being created by the user. Co-development is occurring as people get an unfinished product which grows through their interaction.
The second change is the concept of the pipeline with ideas coming from special people in special places. Creativity, however, doesn't tend to happen in special places. It takes place in conversations, at the interface of organisations, usually outside the office rather than inside. With innovation there is always a trap of uncertainty – the problem of finding, then filling gaps in the market. Radical innovation often starts in the margin and companies that co-create with consumers are often better at filling those gaps. Most innovation is about adapting use and increasingly consumers participate in this process.
The third concept Leadbeater turned on its head, was the notion of hierarchies of power. He instanced Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, which, though only five years-old, has more traffic than the BBC or New York Times sites. Wikipedia has 'only two staff' and is based on community input. A new organisational landscape is emerging in which we will be working not for companies, but for networks and 'swarms'. There will still be value chains, pipelines and hierarchies, but alongside will be open communities, with readers becoming writers and listeners participants. It is becoming an open world with companies getting more good ideas from outside than inside. There is a new creative space in which people can take part and into which companies are trying to negotiate.
Omar Mahmoud and Vinay Ahuja, Procter & Gamble, Switzerland, opened the session on 'Foresight: challenging visions of the future', with a paper on the principles for forecasting almost anything. They argued that no matter how different or intuitively impossible a forecasting challenge may be, there are in reality a variety of proven and validated approaches available and in sound practice. There is great value in searching for and understanding forecasting practices in other domains that may share some similarities with the one under deliberation. The industry should apply cross-fertilisation, adapting principles and practices from other sectors where success depends strongly on forecasting. The paper gave graphic illustrations of this from the movies, fashion, elections, weather, natural disasters, conflicts, crime, and even life (or death) expectancy.
The speakers looked at some of the pitfalls of forecasting The acronym DICE provides an operational aide memoire for the process of reapplying principles from other domains: Define and Identify the dimensions of the problem – what is special about it; Collect examples of how other disciplines go about forecasting; and Extrapolate the key drivers and proxies.
Of course organisations have business plans, but the system must be able to adapt. The forecasts must also range from full-cast to fear-cast, looking realistically at the downside potential.
Putting it all together, the FORECASTER credo is: Forecast anything; Own the forecast; Range the forecast; Ensemble difficult forecasts; Check and change; Act on your forecast; Undertake Scenario development; use Teamwork; Explore other disciplines; and essentially, Reapply learning from past forecasts, especially the wrong ones.
Anumita Sharma, the third eye Marketing Intelligence Research, UK, in her paper 'Before the after-shock: Strategies to awaken our powers of intuition', argued that foresight and intuition are interlinked – foresight and prediction are a function of good and intuitive thinking on the part of research suppliers and buyers. Intuition is our 'adaptive unconscious'.
The paper outlined a process for reactivating our 'third eye' for predictive decision-making, through intuitive thinking practices, looking at the philosophy of predictions from different walks of life and business. These include:
All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.
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