	The Macer View
	Comment and analysis from Tim Macer Number Number 10, April 2005

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The Macer View

A New Flight Path

Report from Research 2005

Tim Macer yearns for more focus on the research industry's 'ground crew'

“We need to avoid the flying crew and ground crew mentality,” said David Smith during the opening session of Research 2005, alluding to the negative impact this attitude had had on the unreconstructed airline industry. It was one of only a handful of references, in an event themed around “Reconstructions”, to touch on the future plight of the operational engine at the heart of market research today.

Smith - and many other speakers at conference - saw the principal goal of a reconstructed research industry to be the provision of must-have insights at the highest levels in business, alongside other consulting firms. For Smith, this meant a more confident, assertive researcher, more adept at communication and creative thinking. But the client-facing elite should not lose track of their research roots. Creative and technical teams needed to pull together.

In the preceding paper, Simon Chadwick, previously at NOP World and now at Cambiar, observed that “research [has] moved from a strategic to a tactical tool” and the result was lower prices, standardisation in methods and an emphasis on the safe at the expense of the innovative. The research factory has to go, he said. If not, it is likely to be a victim of disruptive technologies such as cheap data gathers, website analytics, CRM and even self-drive web-based surveys that would render classic MR data gathering activities superfluous. Chadwick asserted that employees occupying IT and DP functions would resist the move, to prevent their work from being outsourced or moved offshore.

Although there was nothing else so explicit - or bleak - throughout the remainder of the conference on the future direction for IT in research, it was clear that much of the fresh thinking being presented would call on very a different technological infrastructure from that currently used today. It would also require a very different set of skills among those using the tools or intuiting what researchers might need at their fingertips to deliver research in its reconstructed form.

This was not the event to provide those answers, being rather noticeably ‘flying crew’ in its attendance and focus. IT is shaping consumer behaviour, markets, brands and new product development. It has the potential to facilitate or limit the ability of MR to reconstruct what it does tomorrow. The past three years of conference have brought much-needed new thinking and a self-conscious move away from the introspective. It is now time to ensure that there is some narrative for the ground crew to engage with too. The discourse needs to move on to how to achieve the dream, on what it means to reconstruct the software and the delivery systems. It needs to consider how to reskill the people whose job it is to make research happen, accurately and on time.