Posts from — September 2007

How do we get better data? asks a recent print article in Ad Age about the state of the market research profession. Actually, author Jack Neff asks a lot more, ranging from why marketers don’t fully utilize consumer insights and why research professionals aren’t doing a better job helping them utilize them.

But it’s the data question that’s a big concern. According to research by Burke, anywhere from 11% to 20% of online panel respondents were “fraudulent” or “mentally cheating” in their responses. When you compound that with inherent sampling error, you really have to wonder what in fact you are getting from custom research these days. It goes back to my previous post on the Database of Intentions, if you want the best quality insights these days, you need to focus on what consumers do vs. what they say and you need to aggregate these insights on such a scale that sampling error becomes merely a whisper. Self-reported data still plays a big role, but we really should be looking at it qualitatively versus giving it quantitative authority.

Most market researchers have a good tally of how many times they’ve heard “How come we didn’t know about this trend earlier?” or conversely “Why did we spend all these dollars on new product development when this was only a temporary fad?”. It’s truly a no-win situation. Most of the time, it’s not that marketing researchers haven’t seen some consumer shift coming, it’s that we didn’t have a good sense of its scale or duration. I’d argue that another problem is that we don’t always have our terms right. While we may not be any better at predicting the future, we at least should be able to agree on what’s a trend versus a minor fad.

Trendingwatching.com is an excellent resource for anyone with an interest on how the consumer landscape may be shifting. Their monthly briefings have a wealth of information and a quick search through their back issues can find something for everyone. Their latest issue attempts to define what a trend is and what it is not and to provide a common language we can all use to discuss them. They define a trend as:

A manifestation of something that has unlocked or newly serviced an existing (and hardly ever changing) consumer need, desire, want, or value.

What a trend isn’t is a fashion, color, or flavor fad that will be gone by next year, or something that’s still 15 to 20 years out from having a major impact on society.  Predicting what’s the next major consumer trend is not a sure science, but having one’s terms right can at least eliminate a lot of confusion.

Now this piece from Promo Magazine talks about some clever PR.  The current feel good color is green and that is what Cellfire, a company that’s trying to break out mobile couponing to the masses, is wrapping itself in.  The idea of delivering coupons in the right context (at the shelf) is one whose time is coming and what better way to show the outdatedness of paper coupons than to label them as tree-killers.  However, while the PR is good, mobile couponing is truly not going to take off until WalMart starts accepting them at their registers….

1. It’s not just the kids:
   In this post from the Center of Media Research, a Deloitte study finds 56% of Millenials (13-24) creating their own entertainment. Not surprising. But it also cites 25% of Matures (61-75) as participating in User Generated Content as well.  Certainly a challenge to dated notions of who is doing what on the web.
2. It’s on the move:
   Participants in UGC are no longer tethered to their computers. In this post on eMarketer, a Juniper Research study predicts mobile end user generated revenues will grow to more the $5.7 billion by 2012.  Social networking will be about half of that.
3. It can generate big business ideas:
   Through it’s Connect+Develop site, 50% of P&G’s new product innovations have benefited in part from externally developed ideas.  Even old guard companies are realizing the “Wisdom of Crowds”.

An interesting post on the Metrics Insider by Josh Chasin of ComScore describes the potential conflict of two forms of online measurement tools, panel based and site based. I agree with Chasin that the question should not be which data source is “right”, since both have their strengths and limitations and neither method can lay claim to absolute accuracy. The question should be to look at both types of data and ask why they may bring one to a similar conclusion or to a divergent one on a particular analytic issue.

For those who have worked in the CPG industry with both traditional retailer store scanning data (IRI, Nielsen) and their panel data services, you know that you can have two data sources looking at similar events (product purchasing) and see differences and still get value out of both. You have to know their roles and limitations, and you need to triangulate them with other sources to get the best answers.

I realize from an advertiser or portal standpoint, they’d like to focus on just one form of measurement and preferably one they have some influence over, but I agree with Chasin that in general we should all really “take advantage of this embarrassment of riches”.

There is probably no book that I have read to date that does a better job of outlining the consumer research potential within search engines than The Search, by John Battelle. A good chunk of the book focuses on the rise of search engines on the web, culminating with the ascendancy of Google. However, his beginning and ending chapters on search itself give a great sense of the aggregated scope of just what all these simple clicks and queries could mean.

Like many of today’s marketing researchers, I considered myself to be a behavioralist. In other words, I believe there is more true consumer insight to be found in studying what consumers do versus what they say in response to a question. Another way to think about it is that we may learn more by looking at the questions consumers ask others, versus what we as researchers ask them. It’s search as a digital ethnography.

Search, with its billions of questions typed in search boxes, provides a clickstream of questions that reflect the wants, beliefs and concerns of a vast array of consumers. By dissecting the totality of queries, such as “best rated digital camera” or “recipes picky eaters”, we can understand the mindset of these consumers. In The Search, John Battelle describes this rich resource as the Database of Intentions:

“Link by link, click by click, search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous, and significant cultural artifact in the history of humankind: the Database of Intentions. The Database of Intentions is simply this: the aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. It lives in many places, but three or four places in particular - AOL, Google, MSN, Yahoo - hold a massive amount of this data. Taken together, this information represents a real-time history of post-Web culture - a massive clickstream database of desires, needs, wants, and preferences that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited for all sorts of ends.”

The consumer research potential behind the Database of Intentions has only begun to be tapped, mainly by those marketers focused on search engine optimization. The next big area is the study of search from a cultural anthropologist’s standpoint, which will lead to even richer consumer insights for market researchers working in traditional retail environments and the consumer packaged goods industry.

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