The line of quality

James Smythe, managing director of Culture of Insight, says with research budgets being endlessly trimmed, too many “quicker and dirtier” research studies have as much chance of being destructive as useful…

Market researchers could be forgiven for adopting a survival mentality as we are swept along by the tides of finance and technology, accepting both the opportunities and danger this brings.

These days we’re expected to produce the same results with less resource. The public sector might just be waking up to austerity, but we’ve been living it on and off since 2000. Teams have been downsized, and research budgets endlessly trimmed. The victim of this, apart from our stress levels, is quality.

Our loss of focus on what quality means and why it is important has meant we can no longer make the business case for it. Design decisions are less able to properly balance budget constraints with research validity. Unfortunately there’s a line beyond which quicker and dirtier studies have as much chance of being destructive as useful, and much research these days is crossing that line.

It’s a universal problem – a senior marketing scientist in the States has just finished a two-year “research on research” piece about internet ad effectiveness studies, commissioned by their IAB. He concluded that in most cases it’s impossible to know if the findings are right or wrong, and that the marketplace as a whole has shown no real interest in demanding or paying for validity.

Apart from clients, the ones that suffer would seem to be reputable research agencies, whose decades of experience of effective research are evaporating as knowledgeable people become a cost burden. If you’re on the buying side, you might not think this is a fight worth contesting, but think again.

Saving time and money on fieldwork would seem to offer an opportunity for more thinking and interpretation. But many research buyers seem instead to find themselves relegated to the role of debrief organiser.

Research done last year by Brian Jacobs & Associates (BJ&A) for ISBA suggested that client-side research buyers are undermining their own relevance. Lulled into a sense of security by tending long-term projects, they and their agencies lose touch with the business case.

It’s time for research buyers and sellers to get together to preserve the future contribution of research to media and advertising. And conversations I’ve had around the industry suggest this can happen in five ways.

First, marketing quality is everyone’s job. Quality to a traditional researcher is about process, but to the people who pay the bills it’s about actionable outcomes. We need to spell out why good research means better advertising, and better media. Quality isn’t just a box you can tick with an ISO9001 certificate.

Second, be confident and open about the price of quality in all its forms. BJ&A found that agencies rolled the costs of thinking time into fieldwork because clients didn’t understand the added value. With procurement now demanding cost transparency, agencies can find themselves at a loss to explain what they had previously hidden.

Third, be proud of statistics. So much of quality depends on being able to draw valid conclusions from research, but how many users know what a confidence interval or a standard deviation is, and how many user-friendly desktop tools or presentations show these important quality gauges alongside analysis results?

Fourth, build relationships outside research. Ask the FD or the procurement head how you should be making the business case for quality before they ask you the question themselves. Procurement people want to add real value the same as we do, we can learn a lot from each other. Ignore them at your peril.

Finally, better research communication is essential. If your client’s research manager asks for a 200 slide PowerPoint deck, only he is going to feel the value. Communicating research is like communicating about any other product: target the message, keep it clear and stick to the point.

James will be speaking at this year’s MRG conference in Malta from 3rd to 6th November. Click here for more information or to book your ticket.