Are Start-Ups the New Discounters?
Research is in full disruption mode - German giant Gfk is in the throes of restructuring/right-sizing with significant head-count reductions, the Financial Times reports on the potential sale of WPP's Kantar to a private equity company, and no doubt there's a lot more going on under the radar.
Many people are likely being forced to re-think their career within MR.
The causes of the change are well known - clients are looking for much faster turn-around times in data projects, at significantly lower prices. Agility was phase 1, currently companies are looking to automation/ AI/ machine learning to remain competitive.
So who are the new companies winning from all this?
A mixed bunch no doubt - including those using algorithms to process masses of video content in the qual space, crowd-sourcers, google-style quick-survey operators to name a few.
Many of them have significant VC backing - allowing them to be vocal and visible. Almost all are tech-powered, disruptive plays: cheaper than their legacy competitors, quicker, offering global reach - and operating according to the "good enough" principle.
What will this do to our industry of evidence, empiricism, analytics? I think we have reason to be concerned about the direction of the journey. Here's my take.
1. Expertise needs to be Proven not just Claimed.
Tech companies are often keen to rush forward, claiming broad validation before it really exists. For price-sensitive customers, that can still be a powerful promise - at least for first-time purchase.
Take Brand Tracking: often hailed as an area ripe for change - reducing frequency of measurement, questionnaire length and more. Many clientside companies are looking to reduce costs in this area.
Ripe pickings for start-ups, who can offer very basic tracking at a much reduced price - but with no legacy data, little sense of the ins-and-outs of data variance and bumps, sampling and more.
It doesn't stop them claiming tracking expertise.
2. Overpromise, Underdeliver - the Tech fallacy
A quick look at leading industry portals reveals voices from large tech companies offering "advice" on how contemporary MR can get with-it by utilising start-of-the-art tech.
They talk like second-rate advertising salesmen - speak of "delighting the customer" or "personalisation at scale", advances in predictive analytics.
This isn't the langauge of research - yet it is featured strongly in leading MR portals.
A reality check: Amazon is recommending the most abstruse stuff for me - constantly. Stuff I have never google'd, never bought, am not at all interested in. If they aren't good at predictives yet, then who is?
3. Start-up Culture - has the Bubble Burst?
As someone who lives and works in Berlin, I am surrounded by start-ups, and the people who work for them.
There's a massive sense of diversity, young people (yes, it's ageist IMHO, some say sexist), ambition - and churn. I have seldom seen so many different faces over the period of say 12 months in start-ups I am familiar with.
The initial start-up enthusiasm - change the world, work-hard, relaxed dress code, maybe get rich - seems to have muted into suspicions of an highly pressured, unstable but exploitative sub-narrative.
Maybe there is limited operational impact as yet from the push-back against their larger brothers in Big Tech - but the negative headlines on data privacy and taxation policies are likely to be cumulative in effect, which eventually may lead to the financial community changing its preferences for capital allocation.
One over-arching effect of the downward price pressure caused through many start-up pricing structures is on salary levels. Is it possible to survive on a graduate level MR salary in say a major metropolis like London?
It's time to push back against the drive downwards - disruptive business models don't necessarily create something better, more innovative or exciting. They are at worst not even imitative of a discounter strategy - just a lot cheaper, but offering significantly lower depth in quality, whilst promising more. Deceptively simple - or simply deceptive? Is this where MR wants to be? I hope not.
We have a remit to inspire, provoke, so that clients leave our debriefs wanting to go about their marketing tasks differently.
The human brain is such a complex collection of cognitive biases, it's impossible and nonsensical to even think of asking an IT developer to step up to the Turing test.
There are of course bright sparks: the tech-fatigue we are witnessing at a societal and political/governmental level will likely sooner or later spread to business realities.
Newcomers such as the MRS UK's 2017 Best New Agency - One Minute to Midnight - puts a simple but cogent focus on human values, on meaning and purpose. No, it's not old-fashioned - it got an important industry award in an age of tech and analytics!
To conclude: just because something that glitters doesn't mean its gold. Time for a fight-back on market research quality.
Curious, as ever, as to others' thoughts.