Review
Roderick White and Peter Mouncey (WARC) report on their highlights from ESOMAR’s 2006 Congress in London.
Prediction and forecasting, alongside innovation, was a major Congress theme. Omar Mahmoud of P&G and his (similarly bow-tied) colleague Vinay Ahuja, showed us how to forecast – almost anything.
With examples from the movies, crime and weather, they showed how it can be useful to draw techniques, ideas and experience from a range of different domains to aid the process of putting a forecast together.
They condensed this into two key acronyms: DICE and FORECASTER .
DICE (define, identify, collect, extrapolate) shows how you can decide what kind of outside domain you should look to for a suitable technique or techniques.
FORECASTER provides a sophisticated but simplified ‘equation’ for all forecasting activity which can be summarised as:
F orecast everything and forecast often;
O wn the forecast, and stand by it;
R ange your forecasts (include a best case ‘fullcast’ and a worst case ‘fearcast’);
E nsemble - use an integrated blend of techniques;
C heck and Change - use feedback to update your forecasts;
A ct on your forecasts, and make sure others do;
S cenarios help, especially with ‘soft’ subjects;
T eamwork is essential;
E xplore other domains for ideas, techniques and experience; and
R eapply the knowledge you gain.
Researching from the front line - Afghanistan
In a different perspective on innovation, Mathew Warshaw described the development of social and market research in this war-torn country which, as you might imagine, does not have the research norms that we ourselves take for granted. After all, Afghanistan is a country where the last census was conducted in 1979; 77% of the population live in rural areas; interviewers get routinely arrested; a letter of introduction from the central government may be a liability; a Kalashnikov rifle may be present during the interview.
It took two years to get to the point where a regular monthly survey was operational. Today, 500 Afghans are employed, of which Con gres 2006 400 are trained interviewers with training grants from the Asia Foundation. This was really a research story from the front-line.
Let ’s get psychological
David Bakker, Harris interactive, took us through the psychological roots of market research, and some of the ways in which MR practice risks falling into traps of misinterpretation. On one side, there is developed theory and, on the other, our assumptions (‘implicit psychology’), by which we interpret everyday behaviour.
While implicit psychology - and its various subdivisions like implicit motivation - is useful in everyday life, it can lead to a series of biases in our interpretation of market research. The problem is that we see a research presentation (or observe a focus group), which presents, inevitably, fairly limited information, and then use implicit (i.e. ‘gut’) interpretations, which rapidly become ‘facts’ by the time we are back at our desks.
Jane Raymond, University of Wales-Bangor, and Graham Page, Millward Brown, tied together a carefully-structured model of brain activity with a practical series of implications for marketing communications, with the aid of data from MB’s databanks. The model, which is not unlike Tim Ambler’s MAC model (Memory- Affect-Cognition), shows how the brain pulls together stimuli relating to knowledge, action and emotions, and the out-take for marketers is that ads and other communications should balance all three.
Researchers as archaeologists?
The two Simons (Blyth from Unilever and Roberts from Intel) argued in ‘The Dig’ that for too long market researchers have been solely consumer-focused, centred on needs, attitudes and brand images. Now it is time to return to the tangible: the product.
In their world, ‘things’ govern our behaviour, not the other way round. For example, a washing machine creates tasks - sorting clothes, selecting the right programme, adding detergent etc. ‘Things’ make consumer demand, they do not meet them; they construct and configure their users; they also evolve, along with society. The Simons advocate that we take a leaf out of the archaeologist’s book - they construct a society from the bits and artefacts that they dig up.
Their view of archaeology embraced seven ‘tenets’, to the effect that archaeology:
- makes the mundane extraordinary;
- recognises the materiality of culture;
- appreciates the substance of things;
- understands that things are inter-related;
- recognises that things change over time and space;
- is not dependent on the spoken or written word;
- can help uncover practices that have been deleted by history.
A better understanding of ‘stuff’ by researchers would then help to illuminate the nature of the socio-technical landscape and aid interpretation of consumer behaviour and practices.
Out of Africa
Tendai Mhizha of Research International, South Africa, provided an exciting, stimulating and engaging picture of modern Africa, and a thousand good reasons to do business there. Tendai wanted us to see that there is another side of Africa from the picture of failing states, so often portrayed in the news. She positioned the continent as the ‘last frontier for real growth’ in the world.Her points were backed up with evidence, what she called the surprising truths about Africa (e.g. only 11% of GNP is from aid), but she did not flinch from identifying the problems and challenges.
Tendai described the need to scrap traditional perspectives when conducting research in the continent. For example, whilst the growth in mobile phones has been huge and offers an attractive interview mode, one SIM card may be shared by twenty people!
Her advice included: demographic profiles don’t work well in Africa - instead, use the Living Standards Measure; cellphone ownership provides a proxy for income; a household is defined as all those who eat from the same pot; Africans often move freely between western and African paradigms; shanty town dwellings maybe stuffed with consumer goods, reflecting the desire to belong to the world of consumption; Africans are not poor, they just don’t have much money. Last but not least, qualitative research is the key to understanding local cultures and underlying attitudes.
The digital future - scary stuff!
In the final keynote, Ian Pearson, BT’s well-known futurologist, gave us a sketch of the digital future. Pearson sees abundant threats to any business that is not prepared to be agile, flexible and fast-moving: ‘If you’re not eating someone else’s lunch, you’ll starve, because someone will be eating yours’. So forget the 5-year plan, and be ready to evolve rapidly into a totally different business.Roderick White and Peter Mouncey covered the Congress on behalf of WARC, the World Advertising Research Centre.