New Market Research - do we need to talk to people at all?
A brief summary of my impressions of the MRMW 2023 Conference in Berlin
I managed to attend the 2023 MRMW Conference in Berlin this week. A two day in person session, it had an impressive range of high-profile clients presenting – Electrolux, Mars, IBM and many more.
What did I learn? Lots, and too much to share here. Plus I didn’t catch all the talks.
Some observations though:
1. There were very few “full-service” agencies present – plenty of clients, plenty of tech platforms allowing DIY approaches.
A few years ago, disintermediation seemed just a word – this conference seemed to suggest it’s happened.
A gap seems to have opened up between clients and agencies – I didn’t hear anything about partnerships between agencies and clients. I heard one very senior client checking out the Day 2 agenda saying “Ah, clientside talk xxxx, that’s something fascinating….I don’t care about the agencies’ talks”.
2. Perhaps this harsh view was justified. A lot of the tech-agencies people I talked to had no background in market research, were effectively sales people or key account managers calling themselves client success managers.
All the MR expertise it seems is baked into the software. Quo vadis MR – or quo vadis AI perhaps.
3. In terms of the client presentations, a lot of the promise was left at that – processes, tools, beliefs, but few actual case studies with learnings, practical take-outs.
On the more concrete side, some things did stick:
I heard from a fellow attendee that Porsche is replacing the NPS score with its own simple “excitement” rating – a third option after rating points “good” and “poor”. If someone was there who picked up the detail, I’d be interested – not got the decks yet.
An SM based always-on approach described by a senior Insights manager from Reckitt was suggested as a way to use digital transformation to help predict future trends and needs. This involved a 24/7 scanning and trawling of Social Media via various digital agencies. Details were lacking - perhaps the 30 minute slot were inadequate.
Another clientside luminary made a case for the fusion of traditional MR tools with e.g. social listening, stating when questioned that she observed a 70% correlation between the latter and both sales/brand equity data. And when pressed, would sacrifice her brand tracker for SM listening.
Nobody, it seemed, believed much in the old ways of MR – slow, unreliable if based on stated intent rather than behavior.
Talk to people? Didn’t hear much about that. But maybe that was just this conference.
Curious, as ever, as to others’ views.
(Picture Source: Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash)