At the end of last year it struck us that we're not really that good at asking our clients what they want. Yes, we challenge a brief. Yes, we seek to make recommendations on projects. Yes, we have ongoing relationships with many of our clients. However, do we ever stop to understand their challenges and what they truly need from us? The answer is 'not enough'.
So we decided to hold a workshop with some of our key clients. With the added carrot of Burns Night entertainment, we got together with 10 influential research buyers, including executives from Diageo, COI, Tesco and Santander. The objective was to understand life in their shoes and where they see the research industry going in the future. With more than 200 years of research experience in the room we certainly weren't short of stories and opinions.
The workshop revealed a clear consensus that the market research industry is changing, particularly in response to the growth in social media. Developments in social media were considered to be influencing the researcher's toolkit and research approaches, and were something our clients were keen to see agencies embrace (if it helps them). In addition, the workshop showed an increased desire for agencies to aggregate disparate information sources in order to provide a more 'holistic' service.
Achieving this will lead to a relationship based on even greater levels of knowledge, collaboration, opinion, expertise and advice.
At Virtual Surveys, a key first move into this 'future' landscape was in the field of online communities. We set up our first in 2006 and have now conducted more than 100. By their very nature, they are operating in the new landscape - neither traditional qual nor driven by quant.
They allow a variety of new research tools that are intuitive to social-media-savvy consumers, including forums, blogs, video, webcams, live chats, photo uploads and SMS.
Online communities generate a different type of insight compared with more traditional approaches. Traditional insight belonged directly to the client and the client could choose to use or ignore it.
The new form of insight is centred on the brand relationship; customers expect to be listened to, for their views to be factored into decisions, to be treated as a stakeholder, and for this to be a visible process. Brands such as Kellogg, Diageo, United Biscuits and easyJet are really benefiting from this new spirit of listening and collaboration.
As well as the new and engaging ways that social media allows us to engage with consumers, clients also see a trend toward needing a more holistic, multi-source perspective to their research issues. The aggregation of multiple data sources, using multiple methods, has become more important, both in generating and validating consumer insight. For example, for certain projects we might use online communities (qual), surveys (quant), buzz research (qual/quant) and the client's own behavioural data to ask questions, listen to revealing conversations and validate against actual behaviour. One example of a 'holistic' project is Next's development of a social-media presence model to assess the brand's ventures into this world, incorporating 'buzz' research, an online community and online survey.
Another example is Vodafone, which analysed website data along with survey data to explore how individual visitor journeys indicate how content and navigation through the site could be improved.
Similarly, ING Direct combined survey data with internal behavioural data to offer more holistic and robust insight into the customer experience.
The client workshop highlighted to us that the toolkit and sources of information are going to continue to grow, and clients are going to expect agencies to recommend appropriate approaches and tools, and aggregate the disparate information sources.
The session also confirmed to us that listening and collaboration were not meaningless buzzwords. We all need to be developing exactly that type of relationship with our clients - so much so that we are already planning the next session.
Graeme Lawrence is director, sales and marketing, at Virtual Surveys. Contact him at graeme.lawrence@virtualsurveys.com
