Germany's MAFO 2014 Conference - My Take Outs
I recently attended - as a speaker - the German annual Market Research Congress "MAFO 2014" in Wiesbaden (http://bit.ly/1fXBx6I). Organised by The Conference Group, a subsidiary of the powerful Deutscher Fachverlag, and sister-company to the leading MR German trade publication Planung & Analyse, it has claims to be the single most important MR Conference in Germany.
It definitely has a German-speaking focus - outside of Austria and Switzerland, there were few international speakers or guests attending.
There were plenty of interesting papers and case studies given by leading companies - Gfk, the Iglo Group, Swiss retail giant Migros, German retail major Kaufhof to name just a few.
I find so often at Conferences that it's actually the comments made in passing, or in a Q&A session, that resonate strongly - perhaps inhibition levels dip, the pressure of sticking to an agreed and approved content and story line drops.
On that note, here's a sprinkling of the thoughts I took home.
1. MR Specialisation needs to avoid Perceptions of Over-Engineering.
Gfk presented an example of its relatively new facial tracking tool - EMO Scan - as one example of new ways of measuring. The ad it chose to illustrate was a Mercedes TV spot featuring (perhaps insensitively given current circumstances) Michael Schumacher, Franz Beckenbauer and Mikka Hakkinen. A great narrative, it raised laughs at obvious moments - clearly engaging the audience.
This lead to the (justified) question from the audience: wouldn't a traditional direct questioning approach have worked just as well? The implicit question was clear: was the facial scanning method necessary - did it justify potential additional costs?
The question wasn't answered in detail, understandibly, and perhaps there could have been a better ad example used that wasn't so obviously and effectively emotive.
However, the take-out for me was clear: as MR Agencies seek to specialize, find areas that still offer room for differentiation and lasting value such as biometrics, it's an idea to avoid the path of over-engineering that arguably made disruption (in short: a little worse but lots cheaper) possible in the first place.
2. Technology People can Build their Own MR Panels and Communities
The very last talk - improbably at 18.30h, which is a tough slot after a whole day of presentations - was given by the MD of Motortalk (http://bit.ly/1c1cZZa), a large (the largest?) European automobile user community.
It was a very informal but pretty well MR-informed talk, and showed clearly that someone who by their own description was definitely not a market research specialist could build a huge community of extremely engaged car drivers.
My take out: one of the key NewMR tools - MR communities - can be done by technically-savvy non-experts, bypassing effectively the "expertise" of MR, or perhaps dipping into it when necessary. DIY isn't necessarily low quality, and can be improved continuously by a "do-learn" approach.
3. Clientside MR is Challenged - perhaps Endangered
A few conversations and remarks in Q&A s painted a picture of a besieged clientside MR population: shrinking in size, losing the budgetary battles to IT areas, being expected to do the same amount of work with very few people. Multi-nationals with overall staffing of thousands, tens of thousands are choosing to get by in MR with only a handful of FTEs - often less than 10. The MR career as a choice remains a chimère, with many still regarding it as a place to spend 2-3 years and then move on.
This is a disturbing trend - I would suggest that it is a trend, it's what I hear from many of my clientside colleagues. If it continues, the overall MR voice will become less powerful, we will have fewer champions, fewer there to make and win budget arguments.
If anyone has examples of the reverse, or turnaround situations where a once-stagnant MR budget shifts to growth mode, I'd love to hear from them.
4. MR Has a Credibility Problem
This isn't a popular POV - so many of us stress publicly how much we love MR, what a great exciting area it is to work in, that the tasks we face are challenging, varied, involving both analytical and more creative cognitive skills.
The anecdotal evidence I encounter frequently throws a sharp counter-perspective: MR is still suffering from legacy-perceptions, we are not highly valued (witness the diversion of budgets away from MR departments clientside), associated with surveys that haven taken ages to execute, cost lots, and end up in a drawer in a remarkably quick timeframe. Unfair? Perception is reality - sorry to add that rather irritating cliche, but it's applicable.
5. Intuition Counts
Thomas Methner of Iglo delivered an impassioned plädoyer for a back-to-basics approach - stressing continuity rather than change, re-introducing common sense as a counterweight to the unnecessarily complex.
I tend to agree with this POV - anyone believing in the all-curing power of predictive analytics would do well to dip into Nassim Taleb's new book Antifragile (http://amzn.to/1brH7iC), which posits that to become stronger, more "anti-fragile", we should embrace concepts of non-linearity, uncertainty and randomness. The world is essentially unfathomable - so we should concentrate on strategies of coping, becoming happy in a state of non-comprehension.
The danger of a common-sense approach is that it underestimates the power of technology to create massive change - just think of mobile phones - plus it invites the question: do we need market research at all?
My take out: we need to explore ways of presenting the concept of intuition in a way validated by empiricism and social sciences, borrowing from the realms of psychology and sociology. New Qualitative Research is a term that could be filled with even more meaning.
6. Quality Is Still an Issue
Gfk enumerated five global trends it saw as important - one of which was the notion of Quality being at risk. They quoted stats from the German social research ALLBUS survey (http://bit.ly/1brI4Yd) showing response rates having fallen from 45% in 2004 to 35% in 2010. They also referred to issues of representativeness, respondent fatigue and the comparability of target audiences.
The area of quality in quantitative research is one that has been lurking around for a while, but hasn't captured much attention recently. Maybe the area of access panels is becoming so competitive, that there is little appetite to invest in further quality controls.
However, we ignore quality at our peril. It is the bedrock of credibility, and one of the bulwarks against commoditisation.
7. "Tools" won't solve core MR Problems.
A lively disucssion arose between a clientside MR - the forthright Mr. Methner from Iglo - suggesting we actually have enough MR tools already, simply adding new ones won't help much - and a supplier suggesting that new MR approaches could indeed make a difference.
The debate was energetic - rightly so in my view, it's a central challenge. Agencies understandibly need to differentiate themselves; however, many of the innovations introduced over the past 15 years have been hyped, often unjustifiably, leading to an oft-encountered jaundiced client view - the "new" is often hardly new, offers little difference to existing stuff, and is not always well validated yet..... Fancy being a guinea-pig for a new tool? Thanks, but....
New MR prophets would probably say "that was then, this is different".
My own view is that any provider needs to refresh his or her portfolio - and there needs to be a mix of near-in, familiar improvements and those that are looking to radically change things.
The danger for MR is that we end up doing neither because we concentrate on methodology at the expense of business outcome. Many business problems actually are relatively simply to identify - solving them is quite another issue.
Overall, I confess to coming away with a sense of subdued optimism.
Our professional is challenged from many angles - budget pressures, stagnating markets in developed countries, an ongoing credibility problem, machine intelligence...these are a few pressure areas.
The most serious challenge I see is the danger of being bypassed: brand owners of whatever discipline can themselves engage directly with genuinely enthused end-users in a given category (MROCs), can co-create in more or less sophisticated ways, operation improvements can be suggested by real-time dashboards through very simple micro-surveys performed on tablets. Who needs - I ask provocatively - market research as we know it?
Sure, there are definitely pockets of MR where growth is likely - qualitative being one of them.
However, if we wish to continue to thrive in future, we are going to have to stress the unique and irreplaceable skillsets that we offer: our understanding of bias, sampling, statistics, advanced analytics for example - and then clearly, repeatedly show how our input lead to a business outcome. Loud and clear: MR = added value. Or alternatively: "Results Over Intelligence" - my take on ROI ;)
VOC transformation is in many companies adopted strategically - but the reality on the ground may look somewhat different. MR is well positioned - we need to stick to our guns, raise our game and raise our voices.
Curious, as ever, as to others' views.