Reengineering research: Making it the best of times

Editor's note: Valerie M. Crane is a partner in The Capstone Group, a marketing research and communications consulting firm in San Diego.

"It was the best of times and it was the worst of times." While Dickens was describing a France ripe for revolution, Dr. Wayne McCullough, program director, communications measurement & research for IBM, was referring to the marketing research environment of the last 10 years. McCullough made his remarks to the AMA's Attitude/Behavioral Research Conference in late January in La Jolla, Calif.

"We've experienced, whether you recognize it or not, fundamental change in the research industry," said McCullough to an audience of more than 200 marketing research professionals. "Since the mid-'80s, America's large and even small firms have been caught in this constant downward spiral of downsizing, or, to use the politically correct term, 'right-sizing.' As a result, large numbers of management and staff have been furloughed and oftentimes these reductions were just x-percent across the board.

"Our own experience within IBM is that in 1987 we had hundreds of researchers spread throughout the country. The overall population [at IBM] was about 408,000. By the year 1994, that number had been reduced to 216,000 and the research function had been reduced to about one-fourth of what it had been."

Many marketing staffs have now taken over the responsibility of planning, executing and reporting research activities. Other companies are depending heavily on suppliers or inside consultants. While practitioners in the field may be alarmed by this, they should instead view it as a genuine opportunity to initiate real change in how research is done, said McCullough.

"We're all well-acquainted with the MBF syndrome - more, better, faster - and we may not like it, but therein lies an opportunity to reengineer our activities to meet or exceed those expectations."

So how can the marketing research function position itself to cope with the scenario of MBF? "In the past, research was more reactive. We did tracking studies and profiled the marketplace. We were basically order takers. If you want to simply be an order taker today, your function will disappear."

If being reactive will force researchers along the path of the dinosaur, what does it mean to be proactive? The key word is anticipation. "We need to be able to anticipate marketplace questions - questions that our organizations have not yet asked. The transformation of the function is really going to be one of being a provider of synthesized information, knowledge and customer insights. The knowledge piece is different than just data. Where we'll end up is being a repository of customer insights."

Besides a functional transformation, Dr. McCullough argued an organizational transformation is needed as well. In the past, many research organizations were rigid and compartmentalized, often removed both physically and psychologically from their clients.

"What we're going to need to do in terms of organizational structure is facilitate the transformation of data to organization knowledge. We need to be closer to our clients. Oftentimes, requirements come out of hallway conversations. If we're not sitting in those meetings where someone isn't satisfied with sales data, we won't be able to anticipate those requirements. So we need to be physically and psychologically integrated with our clients."

Functional and organizational transformation are two of the three legs of the reengineered research footstool. The third is skill transformation. While researchers in the past could be specialists with narrow skill sets and very specific experience within a category or industry, the new researcher needs to be what Dr. McCullough described as a "broadened specialist."

"You don't need to have everyone understanding and executing everything in research, but you're going to have to understand and execute the broader range of research activities. We need to expand skills of design, data collection, analysis and consulting. The more effective market research functions are those that have been very successful in understanding requirements. The best piece of research is often that which is not executed. You often get requirements that aren't going to make a difference at the end of the day. So consultancy skills are more important than ever."

This new broadened specialist also needs one additional item in his toolbox: international and cultural literacy. The four fastest growing world markets are Brazil, China, India and Mexico. As McCullough noted, "You cannot just go into these markets and do research like you have in the United States. There are cultural issues and it takes a very different skill set."

Future success for the research industry - to make it the "best" of times - will require cutting-edge methods, faster analytic techniques, a new integrated organizational structure and broadly based specialists who can transform a plethora of information into meaningful customer insights.

But can this transformation take place? Are the right people available now to make it happen? Will they be in the future? The evidence is not necessarily encouraging.

A recent report by Career Consulting Group Inc. of Stamford, Conn., found few opportunities on the corporate side for entry-level positions. There seems to be almost a universal failure of corporations to invest in training new college graduates. A panel of speakers was convened at the AMA conference to follow Dr. McCullough and address these critical training issues.

The opening comment by Rod Bell, director of business insights, Coors Brewing Company, was one that was echoed by many conference participants. "At Coors, we do very little formal training in marketing research. We have looked to our suppliers and consultants to do actual training on research techniques."

Not surprisingly, Michael Redington, president of M/A/R/C and on the supplier side of the business, noted, "In the last decade or so, we've come to realize that training is the most important thing we do besides make money. The first thing we do is teach our account services people the nuts and bolts of the business."

In the past, companies made significant investments in training entry level analysts. As Redington remembered, "Out of graduate school, I went into the executive training program [at Burke] for a full year - it was six months on the telephone, door-to-door for a summer in New Orleans, learning how to tabulate data, understanding the basic science of the business. Today I don't think we can take a year to do that."

Michael Lotti, director of marketing research, Consumer Imaging, Eastman Kodak Company, found mentoring to be a critical part of his early career development. "Perhaps my most important experience was not training, but development - the opportunity to work with a senior analyst in a partnership, watch how they work, understand the questions they were asking. We were invited very early to business meetings, to sit at the table, not necessarily as full participants, but as observers, and that helped us formulate the questions we asked."

Lotti argued that a valuable component is being lost by the industry's changing attitude toward entry level training. "People aren't taught the soft side of the business anymore - the consulting role." Yet, this consulting role is exactly what Dr. McCullough and others agree is necessary to reengineer the research industry. Larry Gibson of Eric Marder Associates, Inc. and a conference participant, summarized the importance and the challenge of the consulting role. "The essence of the corporate researcher's job doesn't have to do with conjoint analysis, discriminant analysis or modeling, let alone questionnaire design or working, sampling issues or anything like that. The essence of the job has to do with problem definition. When projects fail, it's not because the interviews didn't get done or something like that, but because the problem wasn't well formulated. How do you go about training somebody in problem definition?"

The emphasis today is on strategic thinking. The panelists generally acknowledged that it's difficult to train someone to be a strategic thinker. It's more a matter of selecting someone who already has this fundamental competency. But where to look and what questions to ask?

As moderator, Tim Key, director of market research, Ross Products Division-Abbott Laboratories noted, "Earlier in my career I went on an interview for a director of marketing research position. The person doing the interviewing was assessing strategic thinking by asking hypothetical business questions and seeing whether I, as a marketing research professional, answered those with tools and techniques or whether I brought to bear a bigger picture. In other words, how broad was the landscape of my answer?"

If consulting, problem definition and strategic thinking are the three components necessary to reengineer the human side of the research equation, the questions are many and the answers few. As Coors' Rod Bell observed, "The most important piece of training is how to teach someone how to sell, because they're selling themselves and they're selling their strategic thought. To me, that is the biggest challenge we have as an industry."