A brave new world?

The GRIT report always provides an opportunity for a moment of reflection and this year is no different. As an industry, we have to understand where we have come from and where the opportunities lie in the future in order to continue the evolutionary process.

I’m delighted to see that last year’s disappointing growth and take-up of mobile as a methodology has turned around, both in terms of the number of companies currently using mobile in their studies (64%), as well as those considering the mobile approach. Negligible increases in tablet and smartphone uptake don’t seem to be having a significant impact in the swing to mobile as a methodology. It seems that agencies are no longer sitting on the fence about mobile surveys and simply getting on with it which bodes well for the future.

And it’s indications about what the future might bring that I found most interesting in this year’s report.

The introduction of new quantitative and qualitative methodologies have risen (to 34% in Quant and 38% in Qual) which suggests that we are prepared to take on board new technologies, skills and knowledge as they become available to MR. This is good news for clients who want to shake up the research mix with non-traditional approaches such as behavioural economics, neuro marketing, social media analytics (46% of agencies are currently conducting some text analytics), online communities, and even wearable-based research. However I do still wonder how many clients and agencies are actually prepared to step out of their comfort zone. For example, gamification and text analytics have both been around for a long time but how many agencies are actually adopting it or using it in the research process? There is still too great a focus on ‘tried and tested’ techniques instead of experimenting with new ideas.

I think that the challenge going forward is absolutely going to be about getting the mix of adoption right. Braver clients are jumping early and exploiting new technologies – especially smaller agencies that are more flexible or customers in the Asia Pacific region have a record for being early adopters. More traditional clients are moving slower but that does not mean that they should be left behind.

If we intend to change over the next five years - and the report found that 32% expect some change and 25% expect a lot of change – we will need to work hard to make it happen.

Perhaps the best place to start is to accept that we now operate in a world where marketing and business strategists are working alongside traditional MR professionals, as part of an Insight Division instead of a Research Department. We are increasingly presenting our findings to C-level executives and business analysts, instead of statisticians or data analysts.  

The report clearly indicates a significant increase in the mix of people working within MR going forward and specifically mentions a rise in the number of “Designers and Data Visualisation Experts”. This suggests that the industry has indeed accepted that it needs to employ different types of people with different skills to do different kinds of work in the future. More importantly, it has realised that making insight more visually representative and easier to understand is now an absolute ‘must’.

I think this is the key point. The future of research will increasingly be determined by its approach to reporting. The quality and style of reports will govern how well research engages with business because of the changing nature of the client base. The convergence of MR with Voice of the Customer programmes highlights the demand for actionable insight and this desire to extract real business value from research is only going to continue.