Editor's note: Lucy Davison is managing director at Keen as Mustard, a London marketing agency. She can be reached at lucy@mustardmarketing.com.
I was lucky enough to attend the ESOMAR Congress in sunny Nice, France, in September. This was an inspiring occasion with over 900 delegates from all over the world all focused on thinking about the future of our industry. While I was there I did a few short video interviews with clients about what they are looking for from market research agencies in terms of marketing. I interviewed senior clients from Coca-Cola, Heineken, Electrolux, 02, Telefonica and UBS.
Overall I was interested in finding out how difficult it is to navigate the marketing research market compared to other business-to-business or agency markets. I asked the clients about how they find new agencies or suppliers to work with and how agencies they are not working with generally communicate with them. I asked them if they are aware of any differences between agencies and how these differences are communicated. And I asked them how they felt the industry would change over the next 10 years.
First of all, I should thank all the clients who took the time to talk to me. It was a really encouraging and engaging experience doing these interviews. The participants were all extremely helpful and enthusiastic about the industry and their agencies and they were all very clear about what they wanted.
Second of all, I want to declare an interest. Right now, I think branding is a core issue for our industry and in the tradition of the best marketing research my interviews were more of a hunting trip to provide support for my views than a fishing trip to find out what people thought.
Why do I think branding is a big issue? At Mustard, we recently did some analysis of the logos and straplines of the top 35 international research companies. From a purely visual perspective, we found that the industry is overwhelmingly grey, with a bit of corporate blue thrown in. But we are not a dull grey industry – we are a vibrant, dynamic and fast-changing industry at the forefront of technology and innovation.
So we looked at how these companies described themselves. Again, it was overwhelmingly generic. A word cloud throws up the words “global,” “research” and “insight” over and over again. A presentation at the March MRS Conference in London analyzed the language on several MR Web sites and found it to be very generic, particularly in comparison to the benchmark that the text analytics agency used from an analysis of the language on lots of business-to-business Web sites.
So we have a brand problem; we are generic and grey. Why does this matter? It matters because we are living in a very stormy business environment. Our competition is not from other research agencies or suppliers but massive brands like Google or Amazon. And we have no idea where the next big idea will come from.
Technology has changed our business model; agencies used to provide access to people, gather data from them and throw in some business perspective and analysis for free. But companies no longer need to pay for access to customers or data – it’s freely available in large quantities. The old model was a commodity model; the price of data is being driven down all the time. The model we need is a consultancy model, charging for brainpower, business context, storytelling and analysis. This is a model that commands a high price and a corresponding strong point of view on the world. And it is this point of view that a lot of research agencies and suppliers struggle with.
So, back to my client interviews. It came through loud and clear – they find it hard to distinguish between suppliers and they are fed up with generic, bland marketing approaches focusing on lists of services. They are looking for new thinking, new technology and new ideas. They are looking for agencies and suppliers to have a point of view on the world and be true to themselves. In my book that means clients want to work with people who know what their secret sauce is and are not afraid to share it. In other words, clients want to work with true brands.
And branding doesn’t only matter to individual companies; it matters to the research industry as a whole. We constantly moan about how we struggle to attract the best graduates, how people fall into marketing research almost by mistake and how recruitment is a big headache. One reason for this is that marketing research is perceived externally as dull, grey and boring. Now, I wonder what is giving that impression?
A vibrant, lively and rebranded set of companies in MR would benefit the industry as a whole as well as the individual companies. A strong brand articulates clear messages; rather than listing menus of services, a strong brand is known for something, has a philosophy and is not afraid to stand up for that. It’s time for MR to step up to the mark.