Archive for April, 2010

We need to transform ourselves. Transparency would be a good start. Our methods have to rise to the level of acceptable standards and the only way to get there is to have them in full view. End users need to see what they are buying. In the end they will get what they pay for. If they want to move forward without looking in the rear view mirror than they have to encourage those of us who will watch their backs.
And how do we protect them from themselves? We must protect them from us. The debate must shift away from client involvement and toward a more responsible transformation by the industry itself. We must create meaningful quality standards, discourage meaningless rhetoric, and encourage truthful dialogue. Poor quality poisons us all. It rots the foundation of what we do. If we don’t move on they will move on.
The new normal must include standards for respondent engagement, an open dialogue on conditioning/attrition effects and a battery of new quality metrics. If we fail to keep score then we cannot expect to know which road to travel.
This is not the forum to detail everything that we must achieve in a short time. It would be enough to agree that if our clients must look over their shoulders while they drive than someone will get hurt. Most likely they want us to share with the vision out front, there can be no better time to set aside proprietary differences and come up with a joint vision.

At the CASRO panel conference, Kim Deteker, (recently at Procter and Gamble) now returned from the Dark Side, gave her take on what the new quality must be: sample must be replicable. Sample frames must be stable enough to minimize sample frame error: we must know the real changes in our data. She is correct. Probabilistic models have fast become insurmountable obstacles. Weighting has heightened error. We must achieve some measure of stability in a fast changing world and come to accept it. We can measure our sampling frames and assure clients that the changes they see are interpretable for good business purposes.
Yes this is a “good enough” approach, in a climate where the clients want quality and are unlikely to pay for it.
Quality may be what they want, but is it what they need? They can’t have what they need. The days of probabilistic sampling frames have past: replicability is the new measure of quality.
As for who pays for it? Well they do of course. They will either pay for a placebo and live with costly decisions or pony up.

So once again, we find ourselves at a cross road. End users will soon tire of the quality quandary and yet we have a long way to go before it goes away. And so, we fall on rhetoric. Claims for better quality are easy to make. After all, quality is a perception and if you can argue the case loud enough than it must be true.
An informal poll of booths at the ARF had quality claims leading over two to one. Everyone sells quality. Few can define it.
End users want us to be part of the “New Normal”, where everything changes so fast that reality gasps to keep up. Quality is too difficult to achieve by sprinting. It takes time and consideration. At odds with progress are ill thought through snake medicine claims that discourage real progress.

What he wants from us besides brilliance and guts is speed. “Information, insights, action: want it all, right now.” Anything less won’t cut it.
While we struggle with online quality, the end users seek to move forward. Their tolerance has more than worn thin. Stan can’t be the only one.
Yet, when costs for quality become the issue, and they inevitably always do, the answers are vague. One panel respondent, when asked if her company would pay more, answered: “Sure.” The point died there.

Let us listen to Stan. Why not? Few others are as eloquent or as outspoken. Besides he is the most quotable.
He is now well known for calling quality “table stakes”, that is the minimum needed to move forward in the research game. There is a certain degree of symmetry to his thinking. We are the keepers of the sample frame. He is the end user of our intellectual output. We must innovate and in his words, “Develop the product, short list the flavor, design the label.”
Nothing less will do. Debates over quality must come to an end. Stan won’t pay for better quality; he doesn’t even want to entertain the debate. If it becomes his responsibility to keep the sample frame than he is looking backwards, doing the tasks we should be trained to accomplish.

It’s not a pretty prospect. “No company has become great by looking back.” Market research is at that fateful fork in the road where either it shakes the quality debate or it is forever going to be explaining itself.
End users have no wish to wallow in our troubles. They see opportunity beyond those recessionary hills and either we fill their needs or are left to lick our wounds. Business “…as usual is not an option….inspiration and provocation are needed to drive transformation and change.” “If transformation does not happen, we will be left behind.”
There is a seat for us at the corporate table but it is to drive focus on return on investment, “To help companies seek what we (they) don’t know.” They would say, “We don’t know what we don’t know and we don’t know how to know what we don’t know.”
All these quotes are from the very quotable Stan Sthanunathan, research chair of Coca-Cola. His rhetoric is a telling measure of unspoken end user opinion. Few of them are willing to put themselves out there as does Stan. His is a lightning rod position as chair of the Advertising Research Foundation’s important research quality effort. He is also a chosen keynote and at the ARF’s annual meeting he was freed to voice his vociferous opinions.