By the title, I really don’t mean PR. No, I really don’t. Research is one of the main spanners in the PR toolkit, especially for news generation purposes. Want to show a demand for a new product, communicate a client’s main USP, highlight trends around the UK and most importantly, make it relevant for the media? Market research often is the tactic you employ.

What I’m talking about is the marketing and creative community in general. It seems that the creatives are tired of having statisticians and focus groups putting limits on their thinking and art, man. As reliant as the marketing community is on the Milward Browns of the world for measurement, for spotting trends and niches to fill in the marketplace in the first place, for test-and-learn campaigns – market research is rapidly getting a bad rep. At the recent Economist Big Rethink Conference, the thread of ‘market research bad’ was underlying throughout many of the presentations. They were blamed for inaccuracies, for being out of date, for allowing single voices in focus groups to skew campaigns which may have been groundbreaking. I have to admit, having many years since been part of a focus group which was testing the creative for a major food brand, I recall holding forth at length within the discussion about how I felt the campaign in question was based on stereotypes and would do the brand harm. The company ran with it (in fact, still runs with it) anyway. I guess this is why usually focus groups screen out the PR community.

Fair enough, to the outsiders, market research feels stuck squarely in the last century. My mother in fact used to work as one of those women with clipboards who stop you in shopping centres or knock on your door to ask your opinion of several designs of wrapper for a non-brand specific chocolate bar. You still see them around (I was approached by a nonthreatening woman with a clipboard on a train recently to ask about my experiences of West London overground journeys). The biggest threat to market research has come from the behemoth of social. Thanks to Twitter, to Facebook, to Pinterest, brands now feel closer to their consumers than they have ever been. They can have a real two way dialogue. They can understand what consumers feel and think about things directly from their own mouths. They can see at a glance what other brands a consumer likes. Why would they need a middleman to amalgamate, to sample size, to extrapolate trends from this for them? They can just ask. Directly.

It’s fair to say that the role of market research is pretty hard to spot in recently successful ad campaigns such as the Cadbury’s Gorilla, the Bravia Balls, the Old Spice man. The spark of creative thinking shines pretty brightly from them – that’s part of the magic, the appeal. And yet the illusion of consumer closeness from social may be steering brands down a dangerous path. Who’s to say that what a consumer says online is what they really do, rather than what they want other people to think that they do? It’s the research experts, the companies who have long made a living from crunching the numbers and stacking the surveys to be able to spot the real insight who will be able to shed the most light onto real consumer activity. To pan for gold in the reams of data available – an increasingly difficult task. There’s got to be room for the bean counter alongside the muse-inspired artist, in fact one usually makes the work of the other shine more brightly.

Market research has a profile problem. It has to show it has moved with the times. Accountability – whether the creative community likes it or not – is a major factor in most marketing/ board room discussions at present, and when belts are tight spend has to be justified. Nothing rationalises the creative genius quite so well as tangible proof that its message is likely to get through and inspire action in an audience – especially to a risk averse client. I would go easy on the men with the focus groups and the pie charts, and the nonthreatening women with clipboards in shopping centres. There’s a reason why they exist, and it’s to maintain the balance and to provide the tools which allows the artist to create.

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Posted in Eulogy!, Market research, Media & Marketing, PR industry | 1 Comment »