The future of marketing research, the development of the customer insight industry

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The future of marketing research, the development
of the customer insight industry

• Dr David F. Birks
• School of Management
• University of Southampton
• Programme Director MSc Marketing Analytics

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MR turnover globally 2004 - Top 8 (Global
turnover 21,501million)
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Largest Growth rates in Asia Pacific 2004
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Countries with a real growth rate over 10
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Proportion of turnover globally

• Quantitative - 84
• Postal surveys - 7
• Telephone - 20
• Face-to-face - 31
• Online - 11
• Other quantitative - 15
• Qualitative - 15
• Group discussions - 11
• In-depth interviews - 3
• Other qualitative - 1
• Other - 2

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Marketing Research Malhotras perspective

• 144 US Universities
• Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian
• North American, International, European,
  Australia and New Zealand
• Marketing Research
• Is the systematic and objective identification,
  collection, analysis, dissemination and use of
  information for the purpose of improving decision
  making related to the identification and solution
  of problems and opportunities in marketing

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Marketing Research Malhotras perspective

• Step 1 - Problem definition
• Step 2 - Development of an approach to the
  problem
• Step 3 - Research design formulation
• Step 4 - Fieldwork or data collection
• Step 5 - Data preparation and analysis
• Step 6 - Report preparation and presentation
• Ch. 2. - 4th International edition, Ref. 21
• A positivist perspective on research is
  used here. This is the dominant perspective
  adopted in commercial marketing research.

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Factors shaping the Marketing Research Industry
Low cost survey providers
Surveys to generate sales PR
Competitor Intelligence
The nature and future of Marketing Research
Internet, e.g. online panels
Customer Analytics
Value for money marketing
Respondent rewards
Strategic consultants
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Advantages and disadvantages of approaches to
support marketing decision making
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Market information (Coundley and Speller, 2006)
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The power of web analytics

• Web analytics record actual customer behaviour
• what products customers look at
• how often they return to the site
• what they purchase
• items purchased together
• what they dont purchase
• where they drop out
• From this marketers can determine various
  customer buying strategies and offer a choice of
  routes through the site to satisfy those
  strategies. e.g browsers, price led, product led

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It goes beyond web analytics

• Record, experiment, analyse, model
• Internet use
• TV viewing
• Loyalty and spending
• Operational databases
• Scanner data

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Research that will stay and prosper (Ray Poynter
- Millward Brown IntelliQuest)

• Qualitative
• Online will grow, but so will real qualitative
  such as ethnographic techniques
• New Product Development
• Exit interviews
• Branded products Analytical framework
• Brand Strategy

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To prosper enormously

• Massive Access Panels, people exchanging their
  IDs for incentives such as
• free telephony
• free TV channels
• free videos
• purchasing points
• Cash
• Online qualitative research International
• Database linked research
• Longitudinal research

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Techniques that will decline

• Face to face interviewing
• Those that are left may well be WAP enabled
• Telephone interviewing
• perhaps moving into customer care
• Customer satisfaction
• But not necessarily strategic products
• Purchase panels
• Segmentation studies
• move towards 1-to-1 relationships profile
  building

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And from the Internet

• Pop-up interviews
• people will increasingly resent being bothered
  with requests for interviews
• and browsers will help them avoid the bother
• Yahoo does not permit them, even for their own
  research

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Integrating the approaches who will drive it?

• Marketing Research Companies developing
  expertise in all approaches through mergers
  acquisitions.
• Commoditising of basic MR techniques
• Value added in branded MR, integration
  interpretation
• Software/IS companies those driving the
  technology and its implementation
• Client companies setting up Customer Insight
  Marketing Intelligence functions
• Management Consultants with ability to supply
  differentiation in strategic marketing direction
  pull in support from whatever source

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The search for talent
Our company does not even use the word market
research any more, we speak of strategic
marketing intelligence David Smith, Chairman,
Incepta Marketing Intelligence Im looking
forward to working with researchers who are able
to synthesise not just the data of their own
surveys, but also that of a variety of sources.
This could be anything from hard data and other
databases, to anecdotal information. That is a
skill that requires the ability to generalise
from a great deal of information. You could call
it reading between the lines. Subjective
skills, but ultimately based on very hard
research data. Not easy to learn. Frederic
John, MasterCard