The dour vibe is understandable, especially against a backdrop of war and recession. Granted, it doesn’t help that researchers can be almost Russian in their dark-humored pessimism. But I’m convinced all is not lost.
Against this less-than-sunny backdrop, I sat down for a chat with Adrian Chedore, CEO of Synovate. Synovate is the new name for the companies that make up the Aegis Group plc’s research network, which was rebranded and introduced in January. The network spans 46 countries and includes firms such as Market Facts, BAIGlobal, Asia Market Intelligence and MEMRB, all of which are now known as Synovate.
Rather than bemoaning the current state of things, Chedore spoke with infectious enthusiasm, brushing away the clouds of doubt and instead focusing on ways to revitalize the industry and improve its near-term and long-term prospects.
What are some ways that researchers can raise the profile of marketing research? Is demonstrating ROI the key?
Adrian Chedore: To the extent that ROI is achieved, that is clearly a way of upping the profile in the boardroom because you get their attention. That is something of a holy grail in a lot of types of research.
I think in terms of improving the impression of the industry, we need to be a bit braver. I think the image of marketing research is still of people going around with clipboards doing surveys and that we are a bit of a sort of cottage industry. That’s no one’s fault but ours. We have been very, very conservative. We have shied away from [being associated with] anything like telemarketing or CRM. Now, I’m not suggesting in any way that we want to be involved in those processes but this is an evolution and those things are happening and we should be taking our part in those industries, developing them, monitoring them, providing information, rather than seeing them as a threat, as many people do. Clients may say, “Why do we need research? We have this huge CRM database.” But I think it’s the exact opposite. If a company is getting into CRM that means they are thinking more about their customers and gathering information on them and using it, and that is marketing research’s biggest strength. And I think we as an industry should be much more aggressive in broadening the scope of how research is used and viewed. At the end of the day the vast majority of marketing research is still about doing surveys and focus groups but I think we can leverage our skills of analysis and interpretation to be used in slightly less conventional areas which may follow the emerging industries.
I think that technology and the demands of marketers provide huge opportunities for marketing research to get involved and I think that would get us up the food chain. I don’t think the consultancy route is the only route. To me they are not a threat to marketing research. I think they are an asset because they encourage the use of research. So I don’t see them as competitors though certainly they get to the boardroom more than we do.
For us trying to say that we want to compete with them, that isn’t using our innate strengths. It’s just saying, “We don’t want to be like us; we want to be like them.” That’s not what it is about. It’s about being proud of who we are and demonstrating the value of marketing research in new ways. I don’t go to a huge number of industry events but I hear a lot about doom and gloom and “Is this the end of market research?” and I say, why? Why, when the whole world is showing more interest in information and understanding consumers, why would this be a time for marketing research to be in any way worried? I think it’s because it is changing. What we used to be maybe doesn’t fit what we should be. The skills and information we have are more relevant now than ever before.
What can client-side researchers do to raise the profile of research?
I think where researchers need to establish themselves is in being willing to bring together a sort of dashboard of information, though some of those bits won’t necessarily come from marketing research. Again, it is going beyond that conventional box. Instead of doing just one survey, a survey should be part of a whole stream of information from different sources, a CRM database, from a consultant, maybe it’s demographics. And I think once that is all pulled together, the sum of the parts is obviously far greater than the individual parts.
That said, I think that would be very difficult in some companies because the structure that’s there tends to put them in a box in the same way as marketing research companies are put into a box. I hope we have the opportunity to at least stretch the box if not break out of it. It’s a challenge, but it’s an important one.
I think marketing research companies have a role in helping clients, in being proactive in suggesting, “Let’s collect this kind of information in this kind of way and analyze it in this kind of way.” By doing that and by learning what’s helping in other industries or with other clients, [research companies] can pull those best practices together and help increase the profile of research for us and for the research buyer.
Will online research save the industry from declining response rates, etc.? People seem, at the moment anyway, to be more receptive to participating in research online.
It gives it new avenues. At the end of the day it is another form of data collection and data delivery and with it come problems.
Who’s to say that that level of interest will maintain? I don’t see it as the solution to respondent cooperation problems, that’s for sure. I think it has great strength...it is a medium which was not available before and it allows us to do things we couldn’t do before - we can send videos into people’s homes to test ads, for example; we can send simulated car designs into people’s homes to get their feedback - that was pretty inconceivable previously.
I don’t think telephone research will die; I think it will find its place. Once again it comes back to not just thinking in terms of replacing what we did with our clipboards and simply putting it online. It’s saying, “This technology provides us all kinds of opportunities to do something different, to interact with respondents.”
Do you see any other methodologies playing key roles in future?
Another technology we use is interactive voice response. You can ring up an 800 number, you can do it at your convenience, which is great, but at the back of my mind, that’s still the researcher with a clipboard, just translated into something different. But we can do more than that with the technology. We can get a consumer into a call center, for example, but divert them into a survey so that immediately after they are through talking to a customer service representative, they can be routed to a survey to provide instant feedback on their experience.
When you think of customer satisfaction, you can ask someone to think back to the last time they went to their bank and what they thought, for example, but they still have to think back. With this approach, you can get immediate feedback from people.
That raises the question: Is that market research or is it quality control? I’m not sure, and I don’t really care, because to me it is using our skills and our abilities in a way that is beneficial to clients. And very often it will lead back to other things, to traditional market research. You uncover a pattern of response from customers and you have to find out why. It’s mystery shopping, it’s qualitative research, it’s tracking.
What do you think is behind the move toward conglomeration in the research industry?
Clients need global service and to provide that you have to put together a global network, and that almost invariably would require some level of acquisition. When you have a global network, you need to leverage it by running a product or solution that you have acquired across those geographies.
It actually is quite difficult for independents to compete in some sectors, though there are some sectors where they can do quite well and be quite profitable; qualitative would be an obvious example. A lot of the niche players and the national players are very large and do very well.
For independent firms, is it a matter of “be acquired or go out of business”?
I think independents have to take a view of, when are they going to maximize the value that they have created in their company? Now in part, obviously the prices being paid now are lower than they were two years ago. I don’t think they need to go out of business but you have to pick that time where you are a really valuable commodity and a lot of people need you. If you prefer to remain an independent you can still earn a very good living and have a good stream of clients. But there are a lot of people in these companies who want to cash in, not in the sense of getting out of the business, but in getting a return on their investment and that is a question of timing. So I don’t think it’s “sell or go out of business,” it’s “sell or perhaps not get as much as you might have done.”
Does it make sense for client companies to use a global provider as they go more and more global with their marketing?
Clients fall into different categories. Some are highly centralized - the global decisions are made in one or two locations. For those companies, they probably want to deal with a supplier who could mirror that. It is possible to deal with someone who doesn’t have a global network but I think there is a level of reassurance in working with a group.
There are other clients who have a decentralized approach but they still might have preferred or recommended suppliers so although it’s not strictly leveraging the global power of a research group, it’s that sort of reassurance again that they’ll be able to do the same kind of job.
The ideal is, a client wants to work with a boutique where he knows everybody and he has a very strong personal relationship and that boutique somehow magically has global capabilities. In a sense that is what we are trying to create, that level of service and that level of intimacy, not just with client relations but for staff.
My new buzzline is that Synovate is the biggest small company in the world. How achievable it is remains to be seen. But I do believe it is a desire on behalf of staff and clients to have that mix of personalized smallness as well as scale and consistency.
Where do you see the industry heading?
I think there is substantial growth in the industry of market research. But that growth won’t all go to traditional market research companies. There will be other data collectors, providers and so on.
If companies are willing to expand into new areas, new technologies, then I think the picture is extremely bright. It is a changing definition. Years ago we used to talk about media buying companies, for example, and what that meant was that you went out and bought media. It’s much more than that now. They are doing the planning, the strategy. All of these industries have reinvented themselves by taking into account ancillary services. Marketing research must do the same.
But it seems as though client companies have cut back on research in these tough times, reducing the size of their in-house departments as well as reducing their budgets for conducting research...
That’s another fault of our industry. We shouldn’t allow that to happen. If you are trying to save money, cutting the research budget is not going to make a big difference, not in the same way as cutting new product development, advertising or media. And, isn’t it when things are getting tough that you need the information to know how to handle the downturn? I don’t think there is a good reason to cut research expenditures. But that is for us to sell more emphatically. Or maybe it’s for us to go out and do the research, to prove the value of the information, and sell it after the fact. It’s the confidence in what we do that is sometimes lacking.
Researchers have an almost apologetic approach. A typical marketing research report starts with several reasons why the reader should be cautious about the results: it’s only this-size sample; we only looked at this; it’s not representative.
That‘s not the way we should go about introducing things. We should be saying, “Wow, we’ve got some great information here.” Put the cautions in bold and put them in the appendix; they are not your opening statement. “I’m going to tell you some news here but actually you probably shouldn’t believe it.” That’s a pretty stupid way to sell a product.
I hope we are trying to instill a bit of a change of attitude with Synovate. We’re new, we have a clean identity. We can basically say, this is what we are and this is what we are going to do. Yes we have all the heritage of all those companies but this is Synovate, and no one knows what Synovate is so let’s try and be fresh and aggressive and different.