Thought Leadership in MR - Time to Deliver
The restructuring currently affecting major players in the MR industry is significant: Gfk has sold off a number of its units to Ipsos, WPP has announced the intention to sell Kantar/TNS, bidders unknown.
One outcome, easily overlooked: thought leadership, fragile at best in MR, is likely endangered further, as attentions become diverted.
Time for us to take up the slack perhaps - at the same time linking in to wider business and societal issues.
Here's my contribution, borrowing from fields outside the MR space, but on topics that are very relevant to contemporary insights.
Nudge - Not Quite as Powerful as we Thought?
Behavioural Economics has enthused not just swathes of market researchers, it's long caught the attention of Governments, the world of advertising has also embraced BE as an opportunity. "Nudge" is a central concept - changing an environment to influence to more positive decisions, often with societally beneficial outcomes.
But how valid is Nudge in practice? How effective have experiments been?
Thanks to Colin Strong of Ipsos fame for bringing my attention to a meta-analysis published on Psychology Today/ 10/2018 (https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/future-minded/201810/nudge-fudge-leaves-policy-makers-in-the-dark?eml) examining 111 governmental-sponsored nudge experiments across the globe.
None of them were demonstrated to have scientifically valid effectiveness. 58% were found not to have achieved their objectives.
Premature to jump to conclusions perhaps - but certainly a reason to pause for thought.
Social Media Sentiment Analysis - Treat with Care!
Harvard Business Review recently published research conducted by Boston University (https://hbr.org/2018/10/brands-shouldnt-believe-everything-they-read-about-themselves-online?utm_campaign=hbr&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter) comparing data from a composite brand strength index of over 100 brands with a Social Media sentiment analysis of the same brands.
The hypothesis that the brands with the strongest index would also score highly on the SM sentiment analysis proved wrong.
To quote: "There appears to be very little predictive power between how people appear to feel online and how consumers who have experiences with those brands rate them."
Wow. The article explores the reasons behind this surprise contrast - reminding us that those posting online aren't necessarily representative of the universe of brand users, adding that those posting on SM tending to extremes, either positive or negative.
Interestingly, it's not well tagged on google - trying to find it via search isn't easy. You have to be plugged into HBR - maybe a strategy!
Facial Recognition - OMG, is that Me?
The adoption of facial recognition in MR is slowly broadening. Given question marks over it's accuracy, it's beneficial to read studies delivering proof points, helping us assess validity.
Recent articles in US and UK media have highlighted how tests by police authorities in these countries have revealed serious levels of mis-matches and false identifications.
Wire reported on UK police trials in various regions (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/face-recognition-police-uk-south-wales-met-notting-hill-carnival), focussing on one in particular where of 17 potential matches in a crowd at an Elvis festival in South Wales, 10 were correct, 7 wrong.
US press - including the NY Times and Washington Post - reported on similar mis-matches during tests of Amazon's Rekognition software. 28 members of US Congress were falsely identified as people who have been arrested for crimes (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/technology/amazon-aclu-facial-recognition-congress.html). People of color were disproportionately mis-identified in a mug-shot data base, leading to claims of racial bias.
The article goes a level deeper, including a statement from Amazon, with their recommended confidence thresholds; the study in question was apparently set to 80%, Amazon recommended a 95% similarity score for police departments.
Why should these kind of info-nuggets matter, you might ask?
Knowing about these kind of studies helps us engage more broadly in business conversations outside our normal narrow focus of MR expertise. They are witness to intellectual curiosity, boost our business acumen, help us on our efforts to depart from the strict MR swimlane. At the very least, they prove we read more broadly ;)
All of us can make time if we wish, at weekends or evenings, scouring business magazines, academic publications, case studies - and sharing maybe on Linked-In.
So here's raising my glass to MR thought leadership, however humble.
Curious, as ever, as to others' thoughts.