By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

C+R does a lot of online qualitative, which means we use a lot of newly designed research platforms and try even more. We’re also very interested in using DIY survey tools as a means of giving our analytic staff a shorter, faster, less expensive path to fielding a client’s project. So, again, we’re constantly looking at new tools.

There are a lot of new tools and platforms entering beta or being rolled out, and they’re increasingly attracting investment and developer interest. There’s a huge amount of variation across tools, of course, but their designs have a lot in common, too. All of them have given a fair amount of thought to how to design an interface for the supplier/user, the people who are going to conduct a project. They have also thought a good deal about the respondent interface. But the interface for the end data – often dominated by a “report” that can be exported to PowerPoint – doesn’t seem to have received the degree of thought given the others.

And this last interface – which should be designed around the needs of the client, and should have been designed with the awareness that every client is looking for at least some insight and maybe an actual working plan – just regurgitates data in shiny graphic form, delivering “Marketing Research” rather than “Marketing Insight”. Why didn’t the smart engineers and web design people think more about this?

The main reason, I think, is that they’re listening to research providers, not the clients who buy the research and ultimately pay the bills. Either that or they’re just not watching very closely to see how the business is changing. Even if we allow that the model of the research report– delivered to the end client by a firm that conducted the nuts-and-bolts research, analyzed the data, and wrote the report– will be around for some time to come, we should also recognize that it’s already under siege. As time frames compress, team decision making grows, and the quest for insight replaces the delivery of data and analysis, team working sessions replace presentations and reports.

C+R frequently works this way especially for community-based, social, online qualitative projects. It’s also our standard approach for clients using Interactive Query powered by Invoke, a real-time, interactive, collaborative platform that offers surveys with statistically solid base sizes combined with the flexibility of on-the-fly questionnaire changes and one-on-one respondent interaction. Invoke is the only platform I’m aware of that is based on a model of a collaborating team interrogating the data being collected in real time and leaving at the end of the day having achieved consensus on its meaning. Kudos to them for their vision, but I want more, and I think our industry should, too.

So here, in no particular order, is my wish list for tools whose back ends are designed as decision support systems so a team of clients and research suppliers can have tools at hand for getting past the data and on to the decision. Some are pure flights of fantasy that I have no idea how to realize. Others are grounded in currently realizable technology (I think), given sufficient determination and resources.

• The “back room” team should have the same kind of information-sharing and messaging tools that we give the people in our marketing research online communities and that many corporations provide for their day-to-day operations. Every team member should be able to start discussions, join groups, and upload their thoughts and notes for comments or votes. Simply conceiving the team as a group and providing that group with the kind of functionality that we find in many corporate social networking platforms would be a huge advance. It goes without saying that the team should be able to assemble in virtual space, and should not have to be physically together at one site.
• Every team member should be able to independently, or with a group, explore whatever data the platform is collecting and working with. Everyone should be able to keep private notes with the ability to post ideas publicly to other team members at will.
• Team members should be able to tag or otherwise annotate items of interest in the data or produced by other members of the team when they find them especially insightful or meaningful. This is especially crucial in qualitative projects, but could be equally valuable in many quantitative projects. When a team is looking for insight, revealing items and ideas need to be marked as they are discovered so they can be quickly retrieved and easily shared out and discussed further.
• Functionality for data analysis specialists will have to be available. A coding team should be able to code/tag texts or media with the results then being posted for the team(s) to utilize. Video specialists should be able to retrieve tagged segments to compile “highlight reels” for sharing. The team should be able to tap statistical specialists, text or data analytics professionals, or other kinds of specialists as needed.
• Every team member needs access to information beyond the boundaries of the immediate project. This means access to the internet, of course, but the platform should make it easy to bring in information from corporate data stores and libraries, or from supplier data repositories. Being able to retrieve previous work or supplementary data is a key aspect of making good decisions– no project stands alone.
• Teams are often actively led by facilitators whose job it is to help the team move the process along. Tools to help expedite the process like voting and sorting tools that let groups work through piles of ideas to identify areas of interest and consensus would help.
• Displays of the results of the team’s discussions should be designed so that they are, in effect, self-reporting: the final state of the display should reflect the result of the team’s effort. Ideally, someone viewing such a display should be able to drill down into the top, final state to see more of the underline processes that led to the final display state, the “result,” “conclusion” or “decision.” The requirement of producing a PowerPoint “final report” should be left behind for a more powerful metaphor.

I would love to hear suggestions about this topic. Do you work in collaborative teams? What kind of collaboration tools do you have available? Are you using any tools or platforms that have incorporated a “back room” for your team, and, if you have, what do they provide?

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

C+R, like many of the companies that used to happily refer to themselves as “Marketing Research Companies,” is finding itself less and less comfortable with our traditional moniker. We look back and ask, “What have we been doing?” and then look ahead and ask, “And what are we going to do in the future?”, and then face the stark reality of the present, and try, “And just who am I?!” It’s as though we looked at an old picture of ourselves and suddenly felt uncomfortable that we were still wearing our hair the same way or hadn’t gotten new glasses.

One of my colleagues is on the External Advisory Board for a major university graduate program in Marketing Research. In both of their last bi-yearly meetings, there was long and active debate about how the graduate program should position itself… as a “Market Research” degree?  As a “Marketing Research” degree?  “Marketing Insights”?  Marketing Consulting?  Business Insights?  Marketing Analytics?  And many more.  After two such discussions, involving 30 research veterans at the top of their careers, there has still not been a consensus!

Personally, I’m in favor of “marketing insights” — at least for now. “Marketing research” is not only dated, it’s just plain wrong. No one wants “research,” they want the results that come from having done research, by which I don’t mean data or the analysis of data. What’s wanted is at least currently described as “insight.” It’s like the old story about nobody wanting a drill; what they want are holes, and drills are just a means to that end.

I’m not that sanguine about the long-term prospects for “insights” though, because I don’t think anyone really wants them either. “Insights” aren’t decisive enough; you don’t make decisions based on “insights.” If someone hands you an “insight,” you’re still stuck trying to decide what to do about it. “Insights” feels weak to me, but I don’t have a better term that doesn’t feel like over-selling (at least for the moment). But the long-term goal is probably more like a “plan,” “agenda,” or at least a “decision,” and the eventual term for the discipline needs to get closer to those ideas.

I find myself thinking a lot about whether the time has finally come when we can get past our fascination with collecting and presenting data. We’re much, much closer to it than we’ve ever been – but we’ve all got a lot of historical baggage to overcome. So I’m in favor of “Marketing Insights” as a stake in the ground, and a claim on where we’d all like to be, even if I don’t think it’s really where we need to be yet.

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

I’m not a news junkie, but I’ve always read newspapers. Having grown up and gone to college in New England, I’ve been reading the Times since I was a kid, and I can’t remember a time when www.nytimes.com wasn’t the home page on my computer.

My opinion of the Grey Lady has varied over the years. I’ve always admired how the Times tried to be the newspaper of record, even when it fell short of its own standards. And although I’ve thought they made some remarkably dumb moves over the years (see “Paywall, failure of”) I’ve increasingly come to admire the Times as an online innovator.

Although it’s commonplace today for online companies to have an API, the Times was the first major newspaper I was aware of to do so. It’s also the only newspaper I know of that has an experimental development arm, beta620. And although it’s almost impossible to imagine a news site without graphics, the Times has been especially thoughtful about the graphics they build and how they relate to the principles of journalism.

But the Times has also been working on data collection projects – I first noticed these around the last Presidential election cycle, but there may be earlier examples. I remember sending friends of mine links to an online “mood tracker” that aggregated answers to the question, “What are you concerned about right now?” into a timeline and used type size to indicate the number of people sharing a common concern. It was simple, informative, constantly shifting, and sometimes surprising.

More recently, the Times took a step further and created what looks to my eyes – practiced as they are at looking at surveys – as a truly re-imagined survey. It was in  (a) timeline.” Here’s a small screen shot of what the display looks like:a year-end piece about the future of computing, and it asked readers “to make predictions and collaboratively edit

If you hover over any of the entries, it will open up and show a longer description of the topic. Here’s what you see under “Routine Voice Interaction”:

This is a survey question – something on the order of, “In what year do you expect routine voice interaction to be available on all computing devices?” But, besides displaying the question, the Times survey shows who suggested it (they also link to information about the proposer), the current consensus answer, the number of respondents who have previously disagreed with the then-current answer, and an invitation to vote on moving the date forward or backward. Imagine how grueling this would be set up in a typical online survey. The Times version has 53 separate events – I can hardly imagine a way to make responding to a survey grid that size bearable.

A lot of things are going on here; one being better graphic design than most survey tools can support, of course. But the more I think about this, the more it strikes me that the big change is that the Times has shifted the concept of this “survey” from a model of “we ask questions, and you answer them,” to one that puts more power in the hands (and mouse) of the “respondent,” who is invited to explore this space of topics, to think about topics in a context of their own choice rather than in the sequence that the questionnaire author chose, and to ignore topics in which they have no interest and/or knowledge. The “big idea” here is a significant shift of control from the researcher to the respondent.

I encourage you to go to the site and try it – especially if you’re a tech person who knows and cares about computing. You’ll find that you don’t just respond to one topic at a time – you can, for instance, look across the items that are now all clustered around the same year and think about whether, in your mind, they should all belong together. You may advance one of the items a few years, which may make you re-think one of your earlier answers, so you go back and adjust that one to bring it into line with how you’re thinking now. And you’ll almost certainly give some items a pass.

Let me be clear here: I know the analytic reasons for questionnaire order and error messages that say, “You must answer all of the questions on this page before continuing.” And I’m not suggesting that this exercise represents the future of all surveys or that it’s even the best possible expression of a more user-driven alternative.

But ask yourself whether the ability to conduct certain kinds of statistical analysis based on certain kinds of sampling models, with control over order effects and incomplete data records always and in every case would outweigh the value of considered responses from involved respondents. The MR industry’s answer to data quality issues almost always involves a critique of survey design, so why do we continue to produce surveys that perpetuate the ones we designed for phone interviews in 1992?