A colleague protested to me that he was rather disappointed
to hear the same old same old at the Market Research Society conference again
this year:
"It was a bit like Groundhog Day. It always seems to be themed
around self-flagellation over research agencies not getting close enough to
client business problems, not getting an airing in the boardroom, not being an
attractive option to grads, not having kept up with pace of change in other
Marketing disciplines. Wish they'd stop talking about it and just do something
about it!"
There were some good speakers lined up but I couldn't bring myself to attend this year largely because of the aforementioned lack of innovation in the programme. Nonetheless I was keen to read this excellent blow by blow account of the conference to see if I had missed anything interesting.
And sure enough it looks as though the conference did have its moments:
1) Andy Dexter tackled the main reason I left the research agency world in his paper where he made the point that "people businesses don’t sit well with volume based business models". The low margin, high volume business model of most major quantitative research agencies is unworkable because it offers researchers no time to think and add value to the data they collect. The notion of an "insight factory" is clearly an oxymoron in the same way that an "idea factory" is. Andy argued that research agencies and their clients need to "admit that data is a commodity but thinking is not". Not an easy task.
2) Rupert Howell, founder of HHCL and now at ITV, told the tale of the research ITV conducted prior to running 'The Palace'. The research said it would be a hit. It flopped spectacularly. Rupert suggested that "rather
than run away, the research company should work with ITV to find out
what happened and how it can be resolved in future". I wonder who he was aiming that barbed comment at?
3) Malcolm White, chairman of the APG and founder of krow, made the astute observation that "planning is currently obsessed with planners and not planning". Such introspection is clearly unhelpful but I remain unconvinced that blogging is to blame as you might expect.
4) Andrew Sharp, once of Initiative and now at PwC, quoted an analysis that claims to have demonstrated that 49% of brands that were created after 1991 were no longer in existence by 2006. The average life-span of a brand created during this period was only 4.1 years and only
11% of brands remained in existence throughout the 15 year period of the analysis.
5) And finally, my comrades at the RLF did their bit
on the fringe again this year and even achieved some coverage from the official conference scribes at WARC.
