Traditionally, the marketing research process starts with a business question that leads to a survey project.  Results come later, often too late.  The project results might be enriched with other information to help strengthen the insight and to tell the story, but “The project” is the starting point. Speed to learning is often in the slow lane.

Now we live in a world where there is a river of information that pre-dates the marketing question.  This river of information flows continuously and is fed by digital tributaries from social media, search, navigation pathways that wind their ways through owned media sites, etc.  This river is an incredibly rich source of marketing insights that is naturally occurring, in people’s own words, about what they care about.

So the marketing research flip is this: instead of starting with “The Project” and then adding in other stuff, we should start with the river and add in survey projects as needed.

What are some of the nuggets of gold we might find in the river?

• Certain consumer groups using our product differently than we ever imagined.  This was documented by the ARF listening playbook for Hennessy who found that people on Blackplanet.com were talking about the brand differently and using it more for mixing, changing Hennessy’s thinking tremendously about their own brand.
• Search leading to new predictive power.  Google economists presented compelling evidence last year of the forecasting value of search terms at predicting auto sales down to the brand level.  It makes sense; if more people are searching for your brand, it is a very good sign for near-term sales.
• Website metrics about traffic, which pages are viewed, etc. tell you a lot about how people engage with your brand.
• Emerging vocabulary.  When you measure brand performance based on attribute lists, you are using language that trails the marketplace, as it is the researcher’s vocabulary.  The challenge is to create listening platforms that create fast “sense and respond” systems to emerging social changes.
• Digital behavioral response to advertising or events.  Conversation in social media, search, visitation to owned media, the viral effects of sharing all can spike in response to either great advertising or to events (like acceleration problems).  I remember the NY Times created a tool to graphically show tweets minute by minute and by geography during the super bowl in 2009 (click on talking about ads on the left and play with the timeline).  The word response was dramatic.

Now, when you commit to wading into the river, you are committing to synthesis of these different information feeds into common themes that will hopefully result in the “aha” moment.  Also, because the river is continuously flowing, the speed to learning is faster than waiting for project results.

This new vision of how market research should operate it is not mine alone; it is the collective view of the leadership of the ARF Research Transformation Super-Council which includes leaders from Unilever, J&J, Kraft, Colgate, Kantar, IPSOS, McKinsey, Cambiar, Cambridge Group, MTVN and others.

On October 28^th, the new vision for research transformation and insights value creation will be unveiled by the ARF.  In this brave new marketing world where the consumer is totally empowered by digital life, there has never been a better time for the insights and research profession to up its game and have decisive impact on marketing action.

Marketing is forever changed by the “two-way world” we live in. People are no longer just members of passive audiences they are now also active participants.  They can pull information via search, going to owned media sites, become brand ambassadors (or angry activists) by exchanging ideas with friends in social networks. 

Marketers now need to build their brands in a mental marketplace to connect with people in four ways; functional needs, social attraction, self-expressive value, and offering entertaining and informative content that stimulates curiosity.

Brand building in a two way world means it is more important than ever to understand the changing world and how people are living their lives, which is the final theme within the ten “rock my world” changes. 

8. Multicultural becomes the American mainstream

According to the US Census Bureau, by 2023, minorities will comprise more than half of all children and by 2042, minorities are expected to become the majority. Maximizing brand relevance means that marketers have also made their brand culturally relevant. Two 2009 ARF Ogilvy Award winners who clearly demonstrated this were Honey Nut Cheerios and Allstate. Regarding Allstate, research found that Hispanics’ understanding of insurance products, the motivators and the process by which they go about buying insurance were different from Anglos’ approaches. Allstate re-engineered its owned media and agent environment (both English and Spanish) resulting in dramatic business success. 

9. Staying ahead of changing societal and personal values

As the values of society change, product and service marketers, as well as retailers, must stay in rhythm with society. Trends towards wellness, our aging population, and concern for the environment are examples of drivers of packaging, product ingredients, labeling, messaging and shopping experience. 

10. The new marketing research: commitment to quality and listening to the unprompted voice

As consumer values change, a commitment to insights generation is essential to bring the human into the boardroom. As telephone research gets less practical and less affordable, online surveys become essential for marketers, yet, data have not always appeared reliable. The ARF-led Foundations of Quality research program and Quality Enhancement Process are intended to understand and address the root causes of lack of data reliability. 

The research function in an organization really should do two things; quantify the expected (provides metrics that chart business progress and direct resources) and listen for the unexpected (to fuel new thinking about innovation). Listening gives us a way to tap into naturally occurring conversations and behavioral signals found in social media and search to hear changes in vocabulary and sense the next big thing. Listening is essential for innovating new offerings, media strategies, and having an existing brand adjust course.  Listening also opens a portal to impacting the rest of the organization as it merges insights and learning together with marketing action.  First you listen, then integrate yourself, then hopefully create a community of brand enthusiasts who even become ambassadors. 

The Changing World: The Bottom Line

Marketers must become fast learning organizations in a world where society and technology evolve at accelerating rates and change the consumer landscape. Management intuition based on past behaviors and preferences are becoming increasingly inaccurate predictors of the future, which makes a future-focused marketing research/consumer insights function more important than ever. Marketing research must not only measure but should also use a full range of listening tools to guide the marketing organization based on anticipatory insights.

But….the problem begins here because there are so many easy ways to get “listening” checked off your list without really taking the opportunity seriously. All one needs to do is check out Google Trends, or talk to Nielsen BuzzMetrics or TNS Cymfony about sentiment, set up a community or two, or get IT involved looking into Clarabridge or Lexalytics.

But is this “listening”? Is this consistent with the unprecedented opportunity to hear your customers talk honestly about your brand? Or, recognizing, as Chris Brogan said recently, that “Twitter is free mind-reading!”? I think not.

The ARF convened a Listening Workshop in New York City in November, 2009. Listening is exploding, right? Well, it is, if you consider all those “check-list” projects listening.

The disturbing thing to me about the talk at this event was that many speakers were preoccupied with the obstacles to effective listening –“no budget…nobody in charge…where is the statistical rigor?… is it projectable?… tough organizational issues… hard to sell internally…ROI tough to determine…legal has major issues….etc.

So, what’s up with this? True listening is scary, that’s what’s up. It’s a big change from our traditional way of thinking.

So, the single biggest opportunity in the history of consumer marketing lays dormant. The singular opportunity to tap into the brain of today’s newly empowered consumer in such a natural way that what we hear is the purest “research” ever is buried in nay-saying.

The purposes of the ARF Listening Playbook and our January 28 San Francisco Industry Leader Forum – Putting Listening to Work –  are to change that. To get you so excited about the promise of listening, the essentialness of listening, the unequaled power of the insight potential of listening that you will not go another day without taking your important first step.

That little first step? – implement a continuous, 24/7, listening program in your company tomorrow.  Not project listening…that’s checklist stuff. Welcome to a new world.

In September, 2004, Bob Barocci was named President/CEO of The ARF.  Just prior to joining the ARF, Bob was the director of communications of New School University and part of Bob Kerrey’s leadership team. Before that, Bob, as he says it, was privileged to enjoy a very satisfying advertising career including 21 years with Leo Burnett culminating in the position of President of Leo Burnett International.  After he left Leo Burnett, he was founder/CEO of McConnaughy Barocci Brown and then invited by Alex Kroll to become Director of Central/East Europe for Young and Rubicam.  He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard University and a Phi Beta Kappa mathematics degree from the University of Wisconsin

Online research panels proven to produce different results

The ARF foundations of quality research compared results from the exact same questionnaire across 17 online research panels (including all of the big ones) fielded at two different points in time (2 weeks apart).  We found that the test retest reliability of each panel was high but that results differed across panels by more than you would think based on sample sizes (n=2,000 per panel per wave).  This insight led to the ARF Quality Enhancement Process, a series of metrics, planning, and reporting templates intended to control for this effect.

Cell phones are primary for close to 40% of US households

The most recent CDC NHIS survey found that 23% of all US households are cell phone only (46% of those aged 25-29) and another 15% have landlines but are cell phone primary.  We are changing the way we connect.  Landlines have become less important than cell phones and for many, talk is becoming a less important method of communication than text and social media updates.

The Media Ratings council has said that media research must have a solution for this, implying that landline-only research can no longer be equated with probability sampling.  Nielsen, Arbitron, and Knowledge Networks have all switched to addressed-based sampling methods to restore probability sampling properties.

Listening becomes a source of insights and marketing intelligence that anyone can access

Listening is a way of hearing in real time what people WANT to talk about, rather than what marketing wants to talk about.  People express themselves in their own words rather than the interviewer’s vocabulary.  Google’s team of economists proved that what people are searching for predicts many things from the geographic spread of the flu to auto sales right down to the brand.

Marketing research is no longer a gatekeeper to rich consumer insights as marketing, customer care, corporate communications, agency of record planners can now can tap into Twitter, forums, etc. directly. Only by listening would J&J have known they needed to pull the Motrin campaign.  One of the Ogilvy Award winners, the NBA, needed listening to find the way fans’ express and share their passion.  The research team must embrace listening as well as asking (i.e. surveys) to remain relevant and get to the front-end of marketing innovation.

Marketing research still struggling to be recognized as having significant impact

The ARF research transformation initiative has brought many leaders together and conducted executive interviewing in 2009 among 20 research leaders.  The consensus is that the research team is often brought in too late in the process, viewed by many below the C-suite as an expense rather than an investment, and as an impediment rather than an enabler.  We must prove that research creates an indispensible runway between the consumer and the boardroom that leads to making the right calls on big, future-focused issues that result in business growth.

Media companies and advertisers form CIMM

The leading media companies and advertisers came together to create the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, making a clear statement to the industry that they intend to turbo-charge innovation in media measurement.  Why?  They believe existing media metrics are not keeping up with the fast-paced evolution towards the multi-tasking, multi-platform, long-tail way that people consume media.

Shopper research takes center stage at understanding the effects of the recession

Numerous studies about the effect of the recession focused on changes in shopping patterns and increases in buying store brands.  In other words, shopper research became as important as consumer research this year, especially on the big issue that was keeping marketers up at night.  Marc Pritchard (leading marketer at P&G) has been emphasizing “store back” marketing.  The ARF formed a shopper insights council to inform media planning and the new era of winning at retail.  We foresee a powerful convergence of mobile and shopper marketing.

Marketers have always been more focused on brand-building than what happens at retail.  Marketing research has always been more comfortable with consumer research than shopper insights.  This must change.

Six big wakeup calls in 2009 are doing our profession a favor; refocusing us on what it will take to conduct trustworthy research, find unexpected feedback, provide anticipatory insights, measure media in a way that people now choose to experience it, and properly rebalance our understanding of how people choose brands by placing more emphasis on understanding the shopper.

He continues” “As we approach 2010 planning, companies need a strategy around listening. Sadly, most companies, and their agency partners don’t know why to listen or how. He adds that the top stages require evolving the classic market research organization.

• Social customers:  Yes, we live in an increasingly interconnected world.  Life has become an open-book exam where people can seek guidance from virtual friends in social media and effortlessly search through the accumulated knowledge of mankind for information.
• More empowered: Control is passing from the marketing and media establishment to people. No longer is content and messaging exclusively marketer-generated. People have gained control in other ways.  People have more choice as the long-tail keeps getting longer for media and purchase choices. People, not the marketing and media establishment, are in control of scheduling, as video can be viewed on three screens, on demand, or time-shifted. It’s their choice. We now live in a real-time world where the newsroom at CNN monitors Twitter for breaking news.

In 2006, Time signaled the change. Time’s “person of the year” was ‘you’ (the consumer, person, human).  Time’s rationale went like this:

…look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story…It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

And we now know that this was just the beginning.  Facebook has overtaken My Space.  Twitter came from nowhere.  Consumer sharing on Youtube created a Susan Boyle and blogging and twitter took down a big marketing campaign (like the 2008 Motrin misstep).

Listening reveals insights via social and open-book approaches.  Listening is about studying the change-makers (people) in a way that is native to how they are increasingly living their lives. We must learn how to add listening to our survey-based approaches for generating anticipatory insights.

Listening for the unexpected should be at the heart of the innovation process.  It takes research from the back end and places it squarely at the front end.  It says our role doesn’t kick in only when the marketing team is ready to “order up” a concept test, a commercial test, etc.  Our role is to anticipate the next move of consumers and to help the marketing teams turn that into innovation.  Take an example.  Currently there is a tiny share of newspaper reading that occurs on the Kindle.  If this was going to take off, wouldn’t the first signs be in social media comments and reviews and in terms people are searching on?

As Jeremiah says, marketers need to know why and how to listen. The ARF’s 2010 San Francisco conference on January 28th , “Putting Listening to Work” will be about Research Transformation and teaching you how to listen. Jeremiah Owyang will talk about his eight stages of listening organizational model. We will distribute and discuss our forthcoming book, “The Listening Playbook”.  Industry leaders from LinkedIn, Toyota, Microsoft, IBM, Saatchi and Saatchi Wellness and others will show how they have integrated listening into their organizations.

Welcome to a brave new marketing world!