Consulting

Cambiar’s mission is to advise and assist research agency executives and corporate insight leaders that seek to thrive in an evolving and challenging world. Our partners and associates have extensive experience in all aspects of business management leading large global entities to early start-ups.  We’re unified by one common goal – to make an impact in our industry and our clients’ world. 

Cambiar Consulting

United States of America

United Kingdom

Management consulting, M&A, Training and Recruiting 

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By Simon Chadwick, Managing Partner
The campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have both focused on the role of offshoring manufacturing to explain the loss of factory jobs and increased economic pressures on the middle class – a message that has resonated. Neither they nor the Clinton campaign, however, have really focused on the real bogey man – automation. For example, the automotive industry is experiencing the best of times, yet with far fewer workers than they employed pre-recession. Why? Those jobs have been automated.
For a long time, the white-collar middle class thought “it can’t happen to me.” Well it can and it is. Just last month, a large NY bankruptcy law firm laid off 50 lawyers because IBM’s Watson is now taking over their jobs. And, yes, it’s happening in research too. Whether we are talking about the automation of downstream DP and IT jobs, the rise of the DIY platforms or the arrival of MR app stores, automation is very much among us and here to stay.
The big question is whether it will kill us or make us stronger.
There is no doubt that, for some, this is a death knell. If you work in DP or Project Management, your prospects of future employment are dim. If you are a vanilla, undifferentiated research agency still basing your business model on data collection, your prospects of existing five years from now are nil to zero. But there are very substantial silver linings, too.
For example, there is every reason to believe that the DIY platforms will expand the market, bringing small and medium-sized enterprises into the fold for the first time. As they and their sophistication grows, so will their need for specialist and expert input. If you are a differentiated MR agency bringing real value to your clients, you will now be able to divert resource from non-value add functions to hiring more consultants, more graphics specialists, more data scientists, more synthesists and more story tellers. You can increase the value that you bring.
In essence, the effect that automation will have on you as a purveyor of research is very much down to you. It depends on where you want to take your business and what your value proposition is. Get it right and these could be the best of times.

Automation: Will It Kill Us or Make Us Stronger?

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By Simon Chadwick, Managing Partner
For years the question of whether or not you can measure the return on research investment (RoRI) has ebbed and flowed, much as it has for the related question on marketing investment. Most of the time, opponents of the concept have held their ground and the practice has not yet become mainstream. Today, only 30% of major corporations actual measure RoRI, according to a study that we recently completed alongside BCG and Yale.
“It’s too difficult!” goes the cry. “Too much happens between the research taking place and any in-market effects!” Research should be judged on its innate quality and the degree to which it enhances understanding of the market and the consumer, not on some artificial metric tied to business performance. There’s the effect of distribution and competitor activity, not to mention media buying and the ad agency not listening. No, it can’t be done.
Well, guess what? It can be done, it is being done and when it is being done, it massively enhances satisfaction with the research function. That’s right – when a research department actually does measure return on investment, satisfaction with that department goes way up.
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It is not difficult to see why: departments that measure RoI are actually proving that what they do makes a difference – has an impact – on the business. They are able to actively market themselves within their own organization. Those that don’t, can’t. “Return” in this case does not have to be all about sales or profits. It can be about cost savings achieved, processes made more efficient, insights that changed senior management decisions and other anecdotes showing how research made an impact.
How is this relevant to research agencies? Well, the agency may be one step removed from the impact that a particular piece of work had in an organization, but it can still track the perceived return through communication with the client. In doing so, you may also be doing your clients a favor by pushing them to keep a log of research impact and return. And, in doing that, you may also be in a better position to highlight to them just how much you and your agency are contributing to their overall RoI – i.e. it is a marketing tool for you, too.
So, whether or not your clients formally measure RoRI, set up your own system. Ask your clients the question – what happened after that study? What was the impact? And show them, implicitly, not only how measuring RoRi might help them but what a great value partner you are as well.

What Is The ROI of RoRI?

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<blockquote>Editor&#8217;s Note: Our colleagues at Cambiar have just released their  4th Annual Future of Research Report, which along with our own GreenBook Research Industry Trends Report and the ESOMAR Annual Report serve as the three key strategic planning reports for much of the industry. Each report provide insight into specific business questions, and one of the key areas that FoR  explores well is the perception of change occurring on the client-side of the industry.
In this post Beth Rounds pulls out some of the results from FoR that indicate that perhaps the pace of change we have been discussing for many years here on GreenBook has not just accelerated, but has passed the tipping point and the changes in the industry are both rapid and massive at all levels.
We&#8217;re hard at work on analyzing the latest data from the GRIT survey and will be releasing the new report at the end of November. We see corroborating trends in GRIT as well, and the gist certainly seems to be that 2016 (and beyond) will be interesting years for the industry indeed.</blockquote>
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By Beth Rounds,
It’s great to be back working with the Cambiar team as we assist clients, both corporate MR teams and global agencies, with their transformation challenges and in many cases, their opportunities
For those that are embracing the notion that we aren’t in Kansas anymore, it is likely that you are re-thinking your business model.  At Cambiar, we see three models needing transformation, driven by three existential questions that manifest themselves in three meta-trends:
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So how quickly is change happening and what are corporate clients saying about the rate of change and their role in this new world?
In our 4th Annual Future of Research Survey, when asked to evaluate the pace of change in the last two years (on a 5-point scale where 1 was “minor” and 5 was “massive”), fully 49% of suppliers and 37% of clients opted for the top two boxes. This would suggest that suppliers downstream of changes in client organizations are experiencing that change fairly viscerally in their own organizations and business models. But it does not end there: when asked to evaluate the likely rate of change over the next five years, clients and suppliers alike expected a significant increase in the pace.
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The good news, in the midst of all this change, is that fully two-thirds of clients feel they are having a greater impact on the decision-making of their business partners than they did two years ago. Only half of suppliers felt the same thing, a figure which is open to numerous interpretations that will need to be the subject of more and later study. Interestingly, these figures are even higher when the researchers involved are integrating numerous sources of data and/or using social media analysis as a complement to more traditional methods.
And who are the key partners upon whom corporate researchers are having greater impact?
<ul>
<li>Brands and marketing (80%)</li>
<li>Senior management (C-Suite) (64%)</li>
<li>Customer marketing (51%)</li>
<li>Corporate strategy (43%)</li>
<li>Sales (35%)</li>
</ul>
It is probable that we would not have seen such strong identification of the C-Suite and Corporate strategy folks as key business partners for research even five years ago.
It is also clear that clients are excited about their future role. When asked to identify the expected differences in their roles five years from now, participants stressed aspects of the job that were of a higher order, including strategic thought partnership, being consultants and opportunity identifiers and providers of business recommendations. 
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This chart also highlights a number of other findings going on in the client side of our profession:
<ul>
<li>Today’s roles remain relatively limited compared to the aspirations we saw in the 1st Annual Future of Research Report. Primarily the role of corporate market research and insights functions are still seen as being voice of the customer and insights generation (with little thought as to how those insights are then taken on through the rest of the business).</li>
<li>The proportion of the clients saying that they play the role of strategic thought partner is identical today to what it was in our first annual report (37%). Given that the aspiration to become a strategic thought partner was as strong then as it is now, it is clear that progress in the client world is uneven at best.</li>
<li>While clients are aspiring to higher order roles, it is also clear that they expect to be taking on more roles in the future—even ones which had largely been confined to the back room, such as “risk reducer.” Will they have the capacity to fulfill all these roles? Will there be the corporate vision to let this be so? Disturbingly, only 44% of clients rate the role of market research in their own organization as being “clear” or “very clear.”</li>
</ul>
So what is holding us back? What are the barriers to success in market researchers’ quests to have more impact and play a greater role? When broken down, it seems to be a story either of reduced budgets or of research not being able to be in the right place (structurally or tactically) at the right time to influence a decision.
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Interestingly, clients tend to emphasize the tendency for senior management to make decisions on gut instinct, a factor that Corporate Executive Board brought to the forefront two years ago when they found that only 5% of customer-centric decisions actually involved research. Suppliers tended to emphasize market research departments not having enough influence among senior management. This would suggest that they have less confidence in their clients than perhaps they ought!
Perhaps most intriguing of all is that large clients (those with corporate revenues in excess of $10 billion) are much more likely to emphasize the influence of large consulting firms as usurping the research or insights department as thought leaders within the organization. Are the years of researchers shouting, “The consultants are coming!” really now starting to become true?
Key Takeaways From Our Research
When the 1st Annual Future of Research Report was released, clients and suppliers forewarned of major change to come. That change has arrived and its pace is only expected to quicken in the next five years.
Among clients there is a genuine feeling of having made progress in terms of the impact that they are having on their internal business partners, whom they identify as being much higher up in the organization than in the past.
There is both anticipation and aspiration in the roles that clients believe they will be playing in the future, but this is not quite matched by the progress we have seen in their roles in the last five years. Will aspirations be fulfilled or does disappointment lie ahead?
Some of the barriers that may lead to disappointment lie in reduced budget and headcount, as well as market research just not being in the room when decisions are made. In larger client companies, the consultants may be there ahead of them.
Next Blog – How MR Agencies Are Winning In the Change Game.

Toto, We’re Not in Kansas Anymore!

Data in this article are sourced from Cambiar’s 4th Annual Future of Research Report. You can download the full report at <a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com">www.consultcambiar.com</a>.
Given the rate of change in this industry &#8211; in technology, methodologies, data sources and client demands &#8211; what will be the types of skill set needed in the near-term future? What types of people and what talents will we value?
Client research leaders and senior suppliers are both of one voice on this:
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Whereas today the skills that are prized are mostly centered on the process of research, those of tomorrow will emphasize the ability to synthesize and create the story and then effectively carry that story, with impact, to management. Whereas today we focus on project management and reporting skills, tomorrow we will need story-telling, consulting and influencing skills. Today we see ourselves as craftspeople, tomorrow we shall be creatives.
But, if this is the case, are we actually following this up in our hiring and training patterns? Well, yes and no. The “no,” in this case, is surprisingly found to be among clients, while research suppliers, especially the larger ones, appear to be hiring at a much more eclectic level.
Just over three-quarters of Future of Research participants made one or more hires in the past twelve months and 81% were currently hiring at the time of the survey. In half of the organizations in which hires were made, the successful candidates were labeled as “generalists.” This could be good or bad, depending on what a “generalist” is.  Are they capable of synthesis, consulting and story-telling or are they just generalist researchers? In another third of organizations hiring, the hire was of a specialist in advanced analytics.
And that, for clients, was pretty much where it stopped, aside from the 13% who hired a web analytics specialist.
Suppliers, on the other hand, filled a much broader variety of roles, including graphic designers (25%), management consultants (15%), social media researchers (14%) and many other types of specialist. This was especially true of larger suppliers, 98% of whom were hiring and were doing so across the board of specialties. Does this suggest that clients are going to rely more on their suppliers to provide the specialist skills that will be needed in the future—and they themselves will concentrate on hiring generalists (All-rounders? Polymaths?) and data analysts to deal not only with their internal big data needs but also their upward consulting needs?
Whatever the interpretation here, it is clear that the way in which researchers, both clients and suppliers, go about hiring is not a very structured process. The top three sources for new hires rely more on serendipity than targeted searches for the right type of talent.
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Suppliers are more likely to rely on referrals, social media and undergraduate programs than their client peers. Overall, the pattern is similar. Larger agencies, however, cast a much wider net than any others, perhaps because they are just that much more active in hiring at present.
Once these organizations are successful in hiring people, how much formal training can their employees expect, if any at all?
The answer to this is frightening: In 46% of client organizations, the answer is none at all. In a “small” client company (&lt;$10 billion in annual revenues), fully 60% of research professionals receive no formal training.
A further 26% of companies provide minimal formal training. In part, this is offset by the training that their suppliers offer to their employees—29% of suppliers offer more than a good deal of formal training, especially in the larger agencies (37%). Yet, even here, a significant proportion of agencies (44%) offer little to none at all.
In an industry where new skill sets are going to be demanded in addition to those already possessed, the lack of foresight represented by this dearth of training can only be described as breath-taking.
This is not to say that in these organizations there exists no training at all. Rather, what there is, is more likely to be informal, taking the form of mentoring, on the job supervision or conference attendance.
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Once again, the chances of an employee receiving any of the types of training shown above are considerably more likely in a larger research supplier than in any other type of organization.
Key Takeaways
Talent  appears to be an area of management in which insights executives, whether corporate or supplier, are not doing a great job—especially if you think about this from a strategic point of view. While accepting that the talents and skill sets of the near future will be very different from those of today, the pattern of hiring does not suggest that we are bringing these new talents into our organizations. And, once we have hired new staff, we are not doing a great job of training them to be successful in the era ahead.

The Future of Research in Talent & Training

<blockquote>UPDATE: Since the original announcement of Jay Wilson’s death, many people have been asking about where they should send donations or gifts. I am very pleased to announce that Colby-Sawyer College, in which Jay was very heavily involved, has set up the W. Jay Wilson Memorial Scholarship Fund. The family asks that all donations should be sent to this fund c/o Beth Cahill, Colby-Sawyer College, 541 Main Street, New London, NH 03257.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Editor&#8217;s Note: 
March has not been friendly to the market research industry so far, with the passing of two of our most iconic figures.
First we had <a href="http://www.mrweb.com/drno/news20613.htm%20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the tragic news of the passing of Larry Gold</a>, the former publisher of market research industry journal Inside Research and the AMA Gold Report (formerly the Honomichl Report), at the age of 80 after a battle with cancer. Larry was an inspiration to myself and many others by being a shining example of the role an independent voice could take in helping to shape an industry.  His influence and impact on our industry will be missed.
You can read a fantastic summary of Larry&#8217;s storied career on the MRWeb site here: <a href="http://www.mrweb.com/drno/news20613.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">http://www.mrweb.com/drno/news20613.htm</a>
The second blow was today, when Simon Chadwick passed on the news that Jay Wilson had died after a battle with cancer as well. It was my honor and privilege to get to know Jay about six years ago when we were working together to launch BrandScan 360. I was blessed to spend time with him in person on a few occasions as well as many hours on the phone, and every single time we spoke I left with two things: having learned something new from a Master of not just research but business as well, and profound respect for him as a human being. Jay was a class act in every single way and I am sure I join the throngs of people in this world whose lives he touched in grieving his death. Our industry is lessened by his passing, but we gained immeasurably by his being a part of it for so many years.
Simon knew Jay best and sent the piece below eulogizing him. It&#8217;s a wonderful summation of the man and his career, and celebrates his many, many contributions to the market research industry.
Details on memorials for Larry and Jay have not been disclosed yet, but we&#8217;ll pass them on here as soon as we receive them.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and friends of both of these titans of the market research industry.</blockquote>
By Simon Chadwick
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It is with extreme sadness that I must report the death of one of the market research industry’s most famous and beloved icons, William “Jay” Wilson.
Many people in today’s industry will perhaps remember Jay as the Chairman and CEO of Roper Starch Worldwide, a company that, under his inspired management, rose to become the 15th largest in the world before its sale to NOP World and the absorption of that company into GfK. Others will remember him as the highly effective and passionate Chair of both CASRO and CMOR. Yet others will remember his work at the Roper Center for Public Opinion. Some, maybe, will remember him as a co-founder of the consulting company, Cambiar.
Whichever incarnation of Jay you relate to, it is almost certain that you, like me, would be amazed at the sheer breadth of his contribution to the Market Research industry over the last 50 years and the impact that he had on its development.
Jay Wilson was part of only three father-and-son pairings to have been elected to the MRC Hall of Fame, along with his father Elmo C. “Budd” Wilson. The others were Elmo and Bud Roper and the Arthur Nielsens (Sr. and Jr.). Jay was early to enter the industry, working as a coding assistant in Audits and Surveys as a summer job, in the 1950’s while still at high school.
From there he took a break, graduating from Yale and then traveling to Europe to take a position with Reader’s Digest as their International Advertising Development Manager. While living in the leafy London suburb of Wimbledon, the thought struck him that he would love to do a post-graduate degree at the University of Cambridge. Being Jay Wilson, he attacked this initiative with gusto, writing to all the colleges at Cambridge, unaware that many of them were for women only. In later years, he would delight in showing friends his rejection letters from these establishments. But go to Cambridge he did, graduating with a Masters in Historical Studies from Corpus Christi College. He was also to study at the University of Vienna, his field of inquiry there being European economic and political institutions. His choice of these fields of study were no coincidence: Jay was always intensely curious about the development of the world around him, its historical roots and, tellingly, how human beings functioned in their everyday, economic, social and political lives.
In 1948, Jay’s father, Budd, had founded International Research Associates  (INRA) and had grown this into the first truly global group of <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-companies/south-africa">market research companies</a>. Returning from Europe in 1967, Jay joined the organization as an Executive Vice-President. This did not impress the mailroom clerk, who called him “the kid”. Upon his father’s death a year later, Jay jointly assumed the leadership of INRA alongside George Gaither and Helen Dinnerman and was to remain in this position for the next three years.
INRA fed one of Wilson’s abiding passions: exploring and understanding life in different and far-flung parts of the world. His next move, however, was to feed another of his passions: marketing and advertising. In 1971, he was invited to become President and CEO of the venerable advertising research firm, Daniel Starch and Staff. Starch was one of the first commercial <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-companies/toronto-(on)">research companies</a>, founded in 1923 and its founder, Daniel Starch, was still active (though not the CEO) when Jay Wilson took the helm at his company.  All was not well at the firm, however. It was losing money at a terrific rate and had delisted from the Stock Exchange in April 1970. It was taken private by Loeb Rhodes, the investment bank that had invested in Starch and helped take it public, and it was up to the young Wilson to turn it around. To hear Jay tell it, there were times when the company was not sure it could make payroll and creditors were literally pounding at the door. At one point, personnel from the phone company arrived to cut the lines. Jay threw them the keys to the front door, saying, “Here, it’s all yours. No phones, no business. No business, no payment.” The lines remained uncut.
Over the next two to three years, Wilson nursed the business back to robust health, so much so that he was able to acquire INRA in 1974, thus uniting his present employer with the firm that his father had started over thirty years prior. In the early 1980’s he then moved to acquire the Roper Organization, the firm that had given Budd Wilson his start in the business, thus squaring the circle of his family’s involvement in the development of the research industry. In 1993, the firm changed its name to Roper Starch Worldwide and grew steadily, both organically and via multiple acquisitions (including those of Friedman Marketing Services, Inc. and Response Analysis Corp.),  to become the 15th largest research company in the world.
Jay always used to be highly self-deprecating about his abilities as a researcher. He was, he would say, a businessman in the world of market research. Indeed, long before selling was an acceptable part of life in commercial MR companies, Wilson had a sign on his desk that read, “Nothing happens until someone sells something.” Nevertheless, while it is true that he brought a businessman’s instincts to what could be an overly academic and insular profession, it is also equally as true that he was indeed a great researcher. It was Wilson who, in the early 1970’s, led methodological research into alternative questioning procedures for estimating magazine audiences;; and it was he who, in the mid-1970’s, lead a major piece of research on the topic of purchase influence and introduced the concept of “interspousal influence” to the world of advertising. This was not too long after David Ogilvy had famously opined that “the consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.” Jay put that concept on a more modern footing. In those days he was, as Phil Dougherty, the ad columnist of the New York Times, put it, “Mr. Wonderful”.
In the midst of all of this, however, he had a businessman’s knack for spotting how to make money out of research. He instinctively knew that if you could turn a research methodology into a syndicated product, you would make much more money than if it were something purchased on an ad hoc basis. But, if you could add consulting to that syndication, then you would have gravy on top. So it was that he was responsible not only for a number of syndicated products that survive to this day (Starch, Roper Reports and Roper Reports Worldwide), but he also made it his mission to recruit some of the best consultants into the research profession that he could find. These he would hire out at what the research industry considered to be obscene rates to consult to C-Suite executives on data that he owned. Genius.
In the 1970’s, there were two hubs for really high quality market research – the U.S. and the major markets of Western Europe (the U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Spain). Jay knew from his earliest days in INRA that, as the global economy expanded, so too would the need for good market research. For him, therefore, INRA was more than an institution, it was a mission. He would travel the world, meeting with market researchers in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia-Pacific. All along the way, his passion was not only to export Western methodologies and techniques but also to learn and understand the challenges facing researchers in each part of the world that he visited. He was very proud of the fact that Roper was the first Western research company to conduct research in Russia (before the fall of the Berlin Wall). He was also one of the very first to enter the Chinese market, way ahead of the big multinational groups that were beginning to emerge at the same time. In every market that he and Roper touched, he would search out researchers and invariably become their mentor, their friend and their proponent.
And this was perhaps his abiding passion. Jay really loved talent – he loved seeking it out, he loved nurturing it and he loved seeing the people he nurtured succeed. One of his favorite markets was Mexico and here he contributed as much as he did in Russia and China in helping birth a new industry. One of his protégés was Manuel (Manolo) Barbarena, who himself became the Jay Wilson of Latin America before his untimely death at the age of 48. So saddened was Jay about his demise that he drove the founding of an endowment in Manolo’s name, run by the Americas Research Industry Alliance (ARIA), that would fund young MR leaders from all over the Americas to travel and learn leadership in their chosen industry. The Manolo Award still flourishes today.
That love of nurturing talent also extended to this country’s educational establishments. Jay was an early and enthusiastic advisory board member at a number of MSMR programs, including University of Texas at Arlington and the AC Nielsen program at the University of Wisconsin, as well as at a variety of colleges around the country, including Baruch College and Colby-Sawyer College. But even beyond this, he sought to invest in and encourage what he saw were promising enterprises, including Market Strategies, Focus Vision, Keller Fay and Cambiar. His enthusiasm for great ideas and entrepreneurialism was not confined just to Market Research and consulting, however – Jay was also involved in companies specializing in new types of safety car seat, data security, digital advertising and, most famously, helium dirigibles. He exhibited childlike excitement at all of these, spurred on by the creativity of their ideas but also with a shrewd eye on their potential for a return on investment.
Along with his desire to push talent and innovation, however, Jay was adamant about the need for the Market Research industry to improve itself and, importantly, protect itself from government regulation. For over 20 years, he served on a myriad of industry boards, starting as the US National Representative for ESOMAR in 1982 and going on to become Chair of CASRO in 1994 and co-Chair of CMOR in 1995. He was relentless in challenging sacred cows and in pushing his more conservative colleagues in the industry to understand and confront both change and challenge.
I have been fortunate to have had Jay as a colleague for over 20 years – first in CASRO, then in NOP and finally in Cambiar. One incident stands out in my mind as defining the man: in 2004, I was Chair of CASRO (the position Jay had held ten years earlier – and on whose board I had served) and he was Chair of CMOR. He and I were in the throes of founding Cambiar as a business venture; we were friends; and yet we were heads of organizations that were going through a very messy divorce. CMOR and CASRO had decided to go their separate ways and it was ugly. Jay was insistent that, even though we were facing off in public, our friendship would survive and that we would move forward to establish Cambiar. It did and we did.
On August 31, 2001, the company I was leading – NOP World – acquired Roper Starch. With it came Jay Wilson, a man who had been boss of his own organization for thirty years. How was I to use him? I appointed him as Executive Chairman of North America. “What in hell’s name,” he asked “does that mean?” I told him that it was a title but that what I really wanted him to do was to help me build up the company through acquisitions all around the world. This tickled him no end and he took on the task with huge gusto, reeling in all his contacts and setting up no less than 15 acquisitions within weeks. Then came 9/11, recession, Enron and Sarbanes Oxley. Our world collapsed, capital was no longer available for acquisitions and Jay chafed at being a part of the much larger world of our beleaguered parent company, United Business Media. He resigned in August 2003 to resume life as an independent entrepreneur, a free spirit and a promoter of talent and ideas.
Jay’s motto, which we carry on to this day, was “Have fun, do a good job, make money.” He lived that motto  &#8211;  and much, much more &#8211; to the last.  We have lost a giant, a character and a friend.

Remembering Larry Gold & William “Jay” Wilson

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<blockquote>
Editor&rsquo;s Note: Many years ago I had contracted <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/insights/authors/schadwick">Simon Chadwick</a> to broker a potential M&amp;A deal for my old firm, Rockhopper Research. During the course of that engagement he shared with me one critical piece of advice when evaluating investment opportunities: follow the money. Well, Simon and the Cambiar team practice what they preach and for the second year in a row release the results of their Capital Funding Index so we can all follow the money, although many in the Mr space may not like where the path heads.
Over the last 2 months I&rsquo;ve had an opportunity to do three in depth strategy workshops with my consulting clients. In those workshops I use a combination of GRIT data, the Cambiar Future of Research results, and examples from investment news to illustrate the seismic shifts occurring in the industry and to attempt to flesh out a vision for the future and where my clients can fit in that future. Using all of these data sources, I find that each independently validates the other and invariably leads me to the same conclusion that Simon reaches in this post: the future growth of the &ldquo;insights sector&rdquo; will be driven by non-traditional technologies centered around mobile,social, and analytics.
These are not the shiny new objects some would like to believe; investors are following the money clients are pouring into these approaches and we&rsquo;re following the money the investors are putting in to get a piece of the pie. We can anticipate these broad trends continuing for some time.
Here is Simon&rsquo;s masterful summary of what the CCFI tells us. It&rsquo;s important information for us all.
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By Simon Chadwick
Generally speaking, 2012 was not a stellar year for private equity and venture capital investment. In our neck of the woods, however, in the market research, information and analytics industry, it was not just a stellar year, it was a galactic one.
Over US $1.7 billion was invested in our industry in 2012, according to the second annual Cambiar Capital Funding Index. That represents a massive 141% increase over 2011. And it was not just the amount of money invested that more than doubled, but also the number of investments (130 in 2012 vs. 63 in 2011) and the number of investors involved (227 in 2012 vs. 100 in 2011). Clearly, this is one hot area where investment capital is concerned.
The CCFI reflects announced infusions of new capital into an industry that we define as market research, information and analytics. New capital means funds that are newly infused into the industry, and so excludes refinancing, acquisitions that are funded internally or other deals that do not require infusion of new capital.
What&rsquo;s hot But what exactly is it that is hot? In 2011, we found that traditional market research certainly was not hot, accounting for only US $15 million of the US $830 million invested in the sector by private equity and venture capital firms. In 2012, that figure fell to a paltry US $1.5 million. No, what is really hot is analytics. In 2011, analytics accounted for 50% of all new PE and VC capital flowing into the industry. In 2012, that figure rose to 72%.
Before moving to what &ldquo;analytics&rdquo; actually means in this context, it is worth noting that the bulk of the remaining investment went into platforms (technology designed to collect, analyse or visualise data) and market research. The latter is defined not so much by traditional survey companies as it is by things such as mobile applications, eye-tracking technologies, MROCs, proprietary panel building and DIY applications. This, then, is what attracts investors in the &ldquo;market research&rdquo; world, so much so that the actual quantum of investment in this area rose from US $138 million in 2011 to US $226 million in 2012.
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But what really attracts them is anything that is (self-) labeled as &ldquo;analytics.&rdquo; Here, the quantum of investment rose from US $298 million in 2011 to an incredible US $1,047 million (or US $1.05 billion) in 2012.
But just what is analytics? In 2011, it was heavily defined by social media measurement. That fascination with social media continues today, with the amount invested in companies involved in social media measurement and analytics rising from US $198 million in 2011 to US $338 million in 2012. But it is the arrival out of virtually nowhere of &ldquo;big data&rdquo; that really catches the eye &ndash; from nothing in 2011 to US $358 million in 2012.
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Another eye-catcher in this set of data is the three-fold increase in investment in anything to do with mobile &ndash; whether data collection or analytics. Investors pumped US $178 million into things mobile in 2012 compared with only US $53 million in 2011. This matches data from elsewhere (primarily Inside Research and Cambiar&rsquo;s own Future of Research 2012 study) that suggests that spending on mobile <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-firms/advanced-analytics">market research</a> and analytics really did take off in 2012 after many years of false dawns.
By region In 2011, the vast majority (over 90%) of investment flowed into US-based companies, leading us to suggest that innovation in this space in America was perhaps more technology driven (and hence capital intensive), while that in Europe and elsewhere relied more heavily on intellectual property. While that still remains true in 2012, the US-centricity of capital investment has waned somewhat, suggesting that Europeans and Asians are also investing in more capital-intensive projects.
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Nonetheless, the US still trumps all other regions as the destination of choice for investors, with 79% of all announced investment funds ending up within its shores. In part, this also reflects a fact of life, which is that while some new start-up companies do begin life in other countries (for example, in Africa or Asia), many migrate to the United States to continue their early-stage development for the explicit reason that they can more easily raise funding as a US-based enterprise.
When we looked at the stage of funding, we found that the vast majority of investments were taking place relatively early on in a company&rsquo;s existence (Series A or B), but that there was nonetheless a significant amount of money also going into later stage (Series C or D) rounds. However, this is very much a function of the size of investments at each stage.
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While Series D investments tended to be large (these are, after all, usually investments in companies that have been very successful), there were some extremely large individual investments in companies at earlier stages. These included US $70 million in Qualtrics, a US $50 million Series B investment in the location-based analytics company Quora and a US $50 million Series C investment in social analytics provider RadiumOne (not to mention the US $68 million Series C investment in the crowdsourcing co-creation platform, Quirky).
But the biggest kahuna of all was the big data analytics company, Mu Sigma, which received a whopping US $108 million in Series D financing &ndash; the biggest this sector has seen to date.
Who is doing all of this investing? Well, as noted earlier, no fewer than 227 investors put money into the sector in 2012, including 177 private equity and venture capital firms, 28 individuals (mainly previously successful technology entrepreneurs &ndash; and this is probably an undercount), 15 corporations (mainly technology companies and media firms) and seven angel funds (also probably an undercount). Just nine investors accounted for 20% of investment occasions, with New England Associates, Andreessen Horowitz, IA Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital leading the way.
Where is this heading? So, what are to make of this, and where does it suggest that we are going? We would not ever suggest that capital investment trends are indicative of real trends in the industry. After all, investors (to misquote Mark Earls) are herd animals as much as the rest of us. However, it does suggest that investors see great potential in analytics as a discipline, that big data has taken a hold of their imaginations, that social media as a source of data and measurement is still of enormous interest, and that mobile is finally gaining traction. Much of this reflects the sentiments and actions of clients detailed in our Future of Research 2012 study, suggesting that investors are in sync with what major corporations are seeing as vital to their futures. It also amplifies what we have being saying in these pages for some time &ndash; that the industry has to redefine itself if it is to be healthy in the future, bringing analytics, social media measurement and big data inside the tent, rather than allowing these to be seen as separate disciplines with which we have only a tenuous relationship.
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This article first appeared in the&nbsp;January February 2013 issue of <a href="http://rwconnect.esomar.org/2013/02/12/new-capital-investment-soars-in-2012/">Research World</a>&nbsp;published by ESOMAR

Results of the 2012 Cambiar Capital Funding Index

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<blockquote>Editor&#8217;s Note:  I wasn&#8217;t able to attend the ARF Industry Leader Forum last week in NYC, but never fear: we had two true industry leaders on site ourselves that will be sharing their thoughts on the event. The first is MR industry &#8220;national treasure&#8221; Ian Lewis of Cambiar Consulting. If you don&#8217;t follow Ian (and the Cambiar team as a whole) then you are missing out; he is brilliant and has been a key influencer in the research transformation shift for many years.  In fact, as soon as you read his synopsis of the ARF ILF you should immediately download his article &#8220;<a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/enter-information-keys-to-success-how-corp-researchers-must-engage-and-operate-with-the-business/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Keys To Success: How Corp Researchers Must Engage and Operate With the Business</a>&#8220;; it should be required reading for all research professionals.
Later this week we&#8217;ll have a post from one of my favorite folks on the planet; Gregg Archibald of Gen2 Advisors on the ARF ILF. He moderated the discussion on key takeaways from the event and I think his unique perspective on what he was hearing will be wonderfully informative for you, our faithful readers.
Ian doesn&#8217;t pull any punches in this one; I think you&#8217;ll find it deeply impactful, provocative, and maybe even inspiring.
Enjoy!</blockquote>
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By Ian Lewis
From 2008 to 2010 ARF was the industry leader in Research Transformation, with a Research Transformation Super Council (RTSC) led by Susan Wagner of J&amp;J, Donna Goldfarb of Unilever, and Joel Rubinson of ARF. RTSC developed a new mission for Research “Inspiring better business futures by listening, learning, and translating humans and markets to bring them to life, in order to anticipate and give knowledge to the enterprise”. When Joel left, ARF dropped the ball on Research Transformation. While ARF was sitting on the sidelines of Research Transformation, the industry was busy transforming. Now, two years later, ARF picked up the Research Transformation ball once more and put on an event with a celebrity client speaker roster including Michelle Peluso, Global CMO and Internet officer for Citigroup; Joan Lewis of P&amp;G; Pamela Forbus of Frito-Lay; Richard Thorogood of Colgate; Dan Goldstein of Microsoft; and more (plus leaders from the top suppliers).
Did it deliver?
ARF CRO Don Gloeckler kicked it off citing lack of progress with Research transformation (or is it that ARF hasn’t been paying attention?). Don believes that too much energy has gone into developing proprietary solutions rather than collaborating and inventing together. He wants competition to be on application. Don cited as a glowing example the Apollo single source project, which collapsed in 2008. There was little evidence of support for his position from the audience.
Don was followed by some terrific speakers. Michelle Peluso stated “Behavior and real time trump observations trump synthetics” [focus groups and surveys being synthetic], noting that she’d only done one focus group in four years and “I’ll probably never do another focus group”.  Ouch! An example of Citicorp’s increasing consumer centricity is renaming job titles from “loss mitigation” to “homeowner support” for staff dealing with mortgage payment issues. Michelle is excited about solutions for cross-channel analytics, social media listening (citing the Gatorade Command Center, in Fast Company June 2012), and “real world” <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-firms/mobile-phone-surveys">mobile research</a>.
P&amp;G’s Joan Lewis talked to the evolution from one-way surveys to a research world characterized as 1) always on, always available; 2) continuous; 3) observing; 4) participating and co-creating; 5) a source for inspiration. Our role moves from being Farmers to becoming Chefs.
Pam Forbus was terrific! She threw down the gauntlet saying “New tools and methodologies are not going to get us there”, citing the need for leadership not navel-gazing, and for being savvy about business and company politics. Pam asked “Will Insight functions exist in the future?”, and went through a list of corporate functions [IT, strategy, business intelligence/analytics] and external sources [Wall St and management consultants], arguing how they are better equipped than Insights at the new needs &#8211; for total systems thinking, synthesis and simplification, speaking the CFO language, having a bias for decision-making and impact, moving from reporting to predicting, focusing on the business drivers and on growth.   What do clients need to do? Pam’s top four are 1) build and strengthen capabilities; 2) a mindset shift; 3) a new engagement model; and 4) a bias for impact and decision-making.
While Pam was throwing caution to the wind, Richard Thorogood’s theme was exciting times countered by need for caution. And if you need a word for cocktail conversation, try Ethotics – the merging of ethnography and semiotics. Richard’s most telling comment came in the panel discussion, where he talked about how Colgate partners fully with ad agencies and management consultants but doesn’t give the same treatment to research suppliers. He cited concern about confidentiality with suppliers (e.g. if they work for Unilever or P&amp;G). Richard’s views on this are emblematic of a big issue for our industry – we need true partnerships between clients and suppliers in order to deliver against the new needs, but we’re stuck in a transactional mode with procurement in the driving seat, outdated business models and suppliers who are treated as vendors rather than partners. Renee Smith of Kantar talked to Colliding Worlds – Why Partnerships are Necessary, giving a litany of challenges both within suppliers and with clients. Sobering.
GfK’s David Krajicek asked “are we prepared”? Technology needs to be focused on the ecosystem vs. the engagement, and be information stream agnostic; Tools needed are data mining, and visualization for insight discovery; Talent must be insight architects who are business partners that use inductive thinking and relationship mapping.  David didn’t address how to acquire or develop the right talent, and the answer to his opening question IMHO is No.
In a mixed panel of clients and suppliers, a warning to traditional suppliers was clear, maybe best stated by Joan Lewis &#8211; “things that are big, backward looking have to cost less. The money’s not going to be there in 5-10 years”.
Later in the day a second supplier panel was asked to design the ideal new<a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-companies/malaysia"> research company</a>. The NewCo characteristics included consultative, collaborating with clients, integrative, listening, speaking to the next generation at a conscious and unconscious level, and being priced appropriately.
Dan Goldstein of Microsoft provided an interesting and informative change of topic, addressing what social network data can do for targeting and diffusion. He used an example of people going to a store. Here’s another cocktail term for your arsenal: Homophily, the tendency of individuals to associate and <a title="Human bonding" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_bonding">bond</a> with similar others. Bottom line #1: social networks work for targeting. If your “friends” have been to a store, it’s more likely that you will go to that store.  Rationale is that people who are in social contact are similar in some way. Bottom line #2: content on social media sites rarely goes viral.
Last but not least, breakout groups addressed Future of Research needs. Key takeaway was that competencies are the key need, and Don Gloeckler asked for volunteers to work on roles and skills.
So did the ILF deliver?  We heard some interesting presentations and plenty of challenges for our industry. The day’s theme was Tools for Transformation; the key takeaway is that the top need is competencies, not tools.  Plus we heard plenty about dysfunction within suppliers and in the client-supplier relationship. My sense is that research transformation is well underway and no one has led the effort so far. If the ARF wants to assume that leadership role, they will have their work cut out for them and will need extensive collaboration across the industry to do it- including the new players as well as the traditional ones.
f you were there, please weigh in!

Who Is Leading Insight Industry Transformation?

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<blockquote>Editor&#8217;s Note: My friends at Cambiar have another great strategic-focused post, this time centering on client needs &#8220;straight from the horses&#8217; mouth&#8221;. This was also published earlier this week on <a href="http://www.research-live.com/corporate-insight-leaders-their-most-pressing-needs/4007254.blog" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Research.live</a> &amp; <a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the Cambiar blog</a>, but I figured it was good enough info that we should put it up here too.
So often we as an industry (and me especially) get fixated on the latest and greatest piece of technology, theory, or approach and it&#8217;s easy to lose sight of the bottom line: what clients need. Our job is very simply to help them do their jobs better, and ultimately their job boils down to helping their company sell more stuff, be it a product, service, or idea. Ian Lewis reminds us of that simple truth in this synopsis of what clients are asking for.</blockquote>
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by <a href="mailto:ian@consultcambiar.com">Ian Lewis,</a>Cambiar Partner
The Market Research Council (MRC) was chartered in 1927 to promote the field of market research. MRC members are senior research executives, and MRC meets monthly to host presentations and discussions with research leaders. Monica Wood (J&amp;J Diabetes Care) recently moderated a terrific panel discussion with three corporate research leaders –Jack Lee of Estee Lauder; Jim Nyce of Sun Products (formerly head of insights for Kraft); and Trish Rainone of Chase. What were the key takeaways?
<ul>
<li>It’s about anticipating and inspiring action that fuels growth and profitability. Jim opened with “We’re here to make the business grow and be more profitable. Without that we’re just a cost.” He went on to say “Getting ahead and anticipating what the company needs to know is critical”, and Trish added “It’s about how to have answers before they have the questions. 4-6 weeks doesn’t fly. We’re trying to be thought leaders.” And it’s about inspiring action. “Taking learning out in a way that’s so inspirational they can’t help act on it. The time for people to pay attention to us is smaller and smaller [Jim].” “We cull down to 3-4 pages that are sent in advance to our CEO, and then the CEO may have one question and then talk about recommendations. We don’t do research presentations any more to the C Suite [Trish].”</li>
<li>Synthesis is huge.  “There are vast amounts of data coming at us. Proprietary, secondary, social media. Data is a commodity. A searchable repository is not good enough [Trish].”  Jim noted “Accountability for organizational learning is at least as important as the learning (from studies)”.  Jack added “We’re looking everywhere for insights. E.g. social media, customer complaints, more. The role of MR is to synthesize it all. It’s less specifically about the research, it’s more about what we know, what it means.” None of them would trust a supplier to do it completely because suppliers lack deep knowledge of their business. They want suppliers to synthesize the learning from all the studies the supplier has done for them, but that’s as far as they want the supplier to go.  “Project management orientation doesn’t cut it. Suppliers ought to be doing cumulative learning [Jim]”. When addressing “What makes for a good synthesizer?” Trish answered “Curiosity.  I look for someone with a Master’s degree who sounds curious and asks good questions. A drive to know and learn.”  Jack concurred, adding “I look for curiosity and drive to learn and look across different areas, to be able to think across categories.” Note to suppliers – synthesis is a huge client need, and a huge opportunity for suppliers who can understand their client’s business in depth</li>
<li>Suppliers need to step up. Jack led with “Suppliers need to understand what my business partner needs to know. It’s never reliant on a single piece of information. I want suppliers to come with a POV, be willing to disagree, challenge the way I think, stand up in the Boardroom and present difficult facts.” Trish has some preferred suppliers, who she expects to learn and grow with them. She wants preferred suppliers to reach out and touch base – a lot of suppliers don’t do that even yearly. Jim noted “I can’t manage the quality of the research product. I pay for that.” Making a different point, Jim stated “You (supplier) can’t communicate with the CEO. There’s been a huge desire to do the things you can’t do (i.e. present to CEO).”</li>
<li>They need help with social media. Everyone recognizes the need to do more and for more help from the supplier community. Trish spends a lot of time tracking social media – providing texture around quant data, especially on brand health; and volunteered that “the engagement piece is where I get lost.”</li>
<li>Marketing ROI is currently unmeasurable in the new era.  Jim provided an excellent historical perspective – “We became very, very good at measuring the ROI of traditional marketing programs, so much so that it was irresponsible for companies to be making significant marketing investments without serious assessment of the productivity of that spending.  As a discipline we delivered tremendous value to companies through this work.  Now, however we are leaving that world and entering a new era in which the vast majority of brand exposures which consumers will have are not through intentional, targeted, context controlled media delivery by the brand owners, but rather through incidental on-line encounters, and through discussions and pass alongs via social media. That world, including the branded creations which will populate it (like the commercial I showed – an Old Spice commercial developed with the intent that people will forward it along), is currently unmeasurable and not currently amenable to marketing productivity assessment.”</li>
<li>A closing thought, on mobile.  “Mobile’s coming. We know we have to start. We have to figure out how to do it.” [Trish]</li>
</ul>

Corporate Insights Leaders Share Most Pressing Needs

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<blockquote>Editor&#8217;s Note: There has been no shortage of excellent coverage of of Google&#8217;s launch of their Consumer Survey service, but in keeping with our credo here at GreenBook blog we prefer to focus on content that has some strategic focus, so who better to augment our own views on the issue than <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/insights/authors/schadwick">Simon Chadwick</a> of Cambiar? It&#8217;s been awhile since Simon posted here so I&#8217;m thrilled to have a new thought piece from he and his team today on such an important issue.
One thing I forgot to mention in <a href="http://greenbookblog.org/2012/03/30/google-makes-their-market-research-play-now-what/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">my own initial take</a> on this development is what is truly disruptive about the Google launch is it&#8217;s scale, not method; <a href="http://www.civicscience.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Civic Science</a> has been doing virtually the same thing for several years now and pioneered the model of &#8220;macro sample micro polls&#8221; in collaboration with content publishers. This idea isn&#8217;t new, it&#8217;s the scale of the execution and the overall strategic implications of  a company like Google doing it that is. Simon does an excellent job of painting that picture for us, and I certainly hope we all pay attention.</blockquote>
 
<a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">By Simon Chadwick, Managing Partner &#8211; Cambiar</a>
Let’s face it – we all knew this was coming. If you were a company that possessed massive content, an awesome analytics machine and access to billions of people, wouldn’t you be looking at ways of monetizing all of that? If, in the process, you became a classic example of disruptive technology to entire industries, wouldn’t that be cool? So, why are we acting so surprised?
<a href="https://www.greenbook.org/marketing-research/webinar-Google-Consumer-Surveys-Smarter-Faster-Market-Research">Google Consumer Surveys</a> is just one little brick in the wall of Google’s march towards becoming the world’s go-to company for all things analytic and intelligence. At present, GCS looks pretty basic: two questions per “survey” (but you can string “surveys” together), $0.10 to $0.50 a response and a limited range of question types that you can utilize. Certainly not professional grade, so they must be targeting SurveyMonkey, right? Wrong. Just go through that pricing structure again. If you want to do a 4-question, general population survey with 1,000 people, it’s going to cost you $400. On SurveyMonkey, all you need is a $25 a month account to do the same thing. No, it’s the data collection companies they are after. Get a quote for the same thing from Toluna, uSamp or SSI (and we did) and the price will be four times as high.
So who is the target market? Quite clearly, it is the professional DIY research user – the brand manager, the marketer, the guy in IT or, quite possibly, the researcher who is attempting to achieve more with less. And the pitch to them is fairly compelling – sample that delivers more accurate results than that from any panel (so they say) at a price that cannot be matched and ‘now’.
The professional <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-firms/online-communities">research community</a> may well look upon this and conclude that it isn’t ‘real’ research; after all, it can’t handle complex innovation projects or brand trackers, can it? Yeah, well that was what DEC said about personal computers and what Polaroid said about digital photography. A disruptive technology will always enter a market with a supposedly inferior product at a ridiculously low price. The establishment writes it off and then it’s ‘boil the frog’ time. Established companies do not realize that the interloper is slowly boiling them until it overtakes them and they are out of business.

What is Google Up To With Consumer Surveys?

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Over the past year, the Cambiar partners have been writing, presenting and blogging about <a href="http://greenbookblog.org/author/cambiar/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Winds of Change </a>within the MR industry.  Leading companies across the value chain are listening, evaluating business models and setting strategy for the future.  In addition, new entrants, many from outside our industry, are adding to the mix as well as challenging the status quo.  With all the change happening, executives are also realizing that their talent needs are changing.  Joan Lewis, Global Consumer and Market Knowledge Officer, P&amp;G, said in the recent ESOMAR <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/company/Global-Market-Research">Global Market Research</a> Report, “the element of research that will have to change faster is the profile of people – people who can show integrated thinking, courage and leadership, with less emphasis on back-room analysis or sales. …what we need are more talented people who can build the industry.”  We agree! Where in the past the individual project was king, now the relationship dominates. Corporations expect their business partners to know the business, bringing a holistic array of information to bear on the issue at hand.
All this is good, but are MR executives really embracing this “New Talent for A New Age”concept?  I asked Lock Collins, Cambiar’s Human Resources Practice Leader to weigh in on the topic.
Beth: In the area of human resources and talent, what do MR executives want these days?
Lock:  Clearly clients are looking for  those unique individuals with grounding in market research combined with the ability to understand and discuss marketing with senior management the key business issues that they face.  In our industry, that’s a rare combination. Of course, they need to have a track record of success and must be passionate about the industry.
Also, it seems that we’re moving away from the traditional “hunter-farmer” models with companies structuring around account managers that “have it all”.  Desirable candidates can listen to a client’s problem, develop solutions, oversee the project team and provide insights.  These people are truly the “renaissance men/women” of the market research industry.  Add on top of this, individuals will need to have a POV on the New MR world and be story tellers.  This is a tall order for most!
Beth: Are clients starting to hire specialists or mostly generalists?
Lock: Right now, I think MR firms are still looking for generalists, especially at the account management level.  We’ve had discussions with firms regarding their interest in hiring researchers outside traditional marketing and business channels.  For example, some companies have hired graphic designers to support their reporting and presentations, and others are experimenting with hiring individuals that understand story telling — journalists for example.  I can see this trend picking up steam in the next couple of years as the new modalities gain acceptance.
Beth: No company can afford a wrong hire.  What recommendations do you have for improving a company’s success rates?
Lock: Managers have to be serious about interviewing and selection.  All too often hiring is treated way too casually.  There are a number of best practices in this area that I’d be happy to share at a later point, but in my experience great managers are looking for candidates who possess those intangible behaviors that will lead to success in the position.   We’re doing more to help our clients focus on the desired behaviors and characteristics, as well as a strong organizational fit vs. the traditional list of research methodologies and knowledge of the end-client’s industry.
Beth: On the flip side – it still seems like a competitive employment market.  Do you see any trends in what employees or prospects want from an employer?
Lock: Our sense is that individuals with 0- 5 years of experience may be operating in a traditional employment environment, not much different than twenty years ago.  At the more senior levels, where our practice is focused, candidates are consistently looking for a few things:
<ul>
<li>Autonomy and the ability to develop solutions in an unconventional way – not the way “we’ve always done it”.  With this autonomy comes a blurring of work and personal life, with individuals wanting to working on their own schedule in their own location.  Some of our clients prefer to have employees engaged in the day-to-day activities of an office.  We’re finding that more and more of our clients, however, are expressing the flexibility for senior level employees to be located anywhere.</li>
<li>Among our candidates, we are also noticing the desire to walk away from the large established research suppliers. Many more are now attracted to entrepreneurial opportunities in which they can “build something”.</li>
<li>Finally, senior candidates are not looking for a job.  They are interested in moving a vision forward and financially sharing in the results.</li>
</ul>
Beth: What is the role of recruiters like Cambiar’s Talent Practice in impacting strategy?
Lock: As part of any corporate strategy, executives look to the major trends that are affecting clients and <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-companies/united-states-of-america">research companies</a> alike. The MR industry is poised for great change and we are starting to see how those macro trends play in to the types of talent that we will require in the future.  As we all know, a successful business strategy can’t stop at a new and improved sales and marketing plan. To borrow a concept from Jim Collins of Good to Great fame, having the right talent  in the right seats on the right bus is critical to the success of any organization.

Smart Hiring Pays Big Dividends

<div id="attachment_528"></div>
By Simon Chadwick, Managing Partner &ndash; Cambiar
One of the strongest and most frequent complaints we hear from market research clients is that suppliers &ldquo;don&rsquo;t get their business&rdquo; &ndash; i.e. they don&rsquo;t display a fundamental understanding of the client&rsquo;s category, needs, competitive context or even internal processes and decision making. I often hear this in relation to new business pitches, where research companies come in ill-prepared to discuss their wares in the context of the client&rsquo;s business and its needs. It&rsquo;s also one of the top reasons that clients give for being less than satisfied with their current suppliers.
Recently, we were asked by a research supplier to define &ldquo;getting the business&rdquo;. What do clients mean by this and how should research companies act to show that they really do &ldquo;get it&rdquo;? Well, here are a few thoughts.
First of all, &ldquo;getting the business&rdquo; is a mindset. You are curious about the client; you have an insatiable desire to understand everything about them. You are able to put yourself in their shoes, to empathize with them. From that mindset comes meticulous preparation, whether what you are preparing is a pitch, a proposal or a report. What data can you find, from as wide a set of sources as possible, that will help you understand the client better? What previous research in their category is there that can help paint a picture of their competitive context? What has been published about them in the business and trade press? What do you know about their products? What can you find out about their financial health and their strategy? (A good tip here is to find podcasts or recordings of recent investor and analyst calls they have held).
Given this mindset, here are five things that demonstrate that you really do &ldquo;get&rdquo; the business:
1. You demonstrate an understanding of key financial metrics (P&amp;L&rsquo;s, balance sheets, ROI, etc.)
2. You show an understanding of marketing and have an appreciation for what marketers do and the situations they face
3. You demonstrate deep knowledge of the client company:
<ul>
<li>its process (for example, in new product development or strategic planning)</li>
<li>its culture (how do decisions get made? how open are they to innovative thinking and approaches?)</li>
<li>you know who the key stakeholders are, their roles and their needs</li>
<li>you understand and can speak the company jargon.</li>
</ul>
4. You show real understanding and learning of the brand and its category
<ul>
<li>you know the brand&rsquo;s positioning</li>
<li>you are aware of the history and trends impacting the brand and the category</li>
<li>you understand, and keep up with, the competitive landscape</li>
<li>you are abreast of the key issues and opportunities</li>
<li>you know what the knowledge base of the MR department is concerning the brand and the category &mdash; or, if you don&rsquo;t, you make it your&nbsp;&nbsp; business to do so.</li>
</ul>
5. Finally, you are aware of what role MR plays in the organization
<ul>
<li>does it have a strong objective voice?</li>
<li>to whom does it report?</li>
<li>is it viewed as a strategic partner or a tactical necessity?</li>
<li>what is the relationship between your client and their client &mdash; and what are their client&rsquo;s primary needs?</li>
</ul>
Do and demonstrate all of this and you will show that yes, you get the business &ndash; and, who knows, you may get the business!&nbsp; Good luck!

Recently, we were asked by a research supplier to define “getting the business”. What do clients mean by this and how should research companies act to show that they really do “get it”? Well, here are a few thoughts.

To Get the Business – Get “Their” Business

The next few years will see a paradigm shift for market research – to borrow from Andy Grove in “Only the Paranoid Survive” we are approaching a strategic inflection point.
As part of the ARF Research Transformation Super Council, a small group of us envisioned how research will look ten years from now. The volume of available information will continue to grow exponentially, driving the need and opportunity for synthesis and knowledge creation. Our fundamental premise is that research in 2021 will represent a continuous and organic flow of knowledge, which Kim Dedeker (Chair of the Americas for Kantar and former head of market research for P&amp;G) named “The River”. There are 1,000′s of tributaries that feed the river, representing individual information sources.
There will be a fundamental shift in how we approach business decision making and influence of strategy. We will move away from a project orientation toward an ongoing process of knowledge access and utilization. Value creation will be catalyzed from the organic knowledge found in the flow of the river.
Today we answer marketing questions by designing a study. Tomorrow we first fish the river of information and only then decide if a study is needed – if so, it will be focused by what we learned from fishing the river. That old 80/20 rule will be flipped – today we answer 80% of questions with a new study, tomorrow it will be 20%.
Corporate leaders will develop fluid, search-able knowledge collection capabilities – an insights-on-demand resource that will not require interruptions to initiate individual studies for most business questions. These “corporate information rivers” will be private, not public – they will contain digital information (from social media, websites, mobile, etc.) and will also contain proprietary information from market and media research studies, competitive intelligence, customers, sales and other sources.
What will happen structurally to client market research departments? With so much information available, who in the client company will “own” this resource? Truly progressive research departments will take the lead and be rewarded with a bigger role, but less progressive departments will lose relevance and risk being dis-intermediated.
And what will happen to research companies? Will today’s research companies develop or acquire complete capabilities to become a true partner with progressive client departments? Or will they fail to adapt and lose relevance along with the less progressive clients? Advanced analytics will flourish, and new entrants will challenge entrenched research companies. Will tomorrow’s leading companies come from an advanced analytics heritage? Will the leaders be IBM? Google? Facebook? Or will WPP just keep buying more stuff? Or will it be a company that isn’t even on the radar? (E.g. Autonomy – <a href="http://www.autonomy.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">http://www.autonomy.com/</a>)
Nobody knows exactly how and when this will play out. But we’re convinced that major change will be evident within five years. Now is the time to stay on top of how clients and existing research companies are evolving, and to study new entrants, so that you can develop and implement your strategy.
For more, read the March 2011 JAR article “The Shape of Marketing Research in 2021” at <a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/knowledge-center/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">http://www.consultcambiar.com/knowledge-center/</a>

Winds of Change Series: Fishing the River

“We’re all doomed!”
“No, this is the age of Aquarius!”
These are, in a nutshell, the two opposing arguments that we hear and read at MR conferences, in the blogs and in our trade magazines. The one group would have you believe that the survey will be dead by 2020 (the title of a workshop at this year’s MRS Conference in London, Research 2011) and that researchers who don’t get that will end up like the dodo. Tom Ewing of Kantar more ghoulishly predicted that the survey (and, presumably, survey researchers) will be the “walking dead”. The other believes that this is just the start of an incredibly creative era in research and that our best years are ahead of us. Which is right?
I am naturally a “glass half full” person and so I tend to err towards the Aquarius group. But why this fuss and why now?
The answer is the plethora of new methodologies, techniques, sciences and approaches that seem to be invading the market research industry and sometimes even surrounding it with guns drawn, preparing to take down the poor old venerable survey and all the other traditional techniques that we have been using since the dawn of MR time. Neuroscience, biometrics, gaming, web analytics, text analytics – hell, anything “analytics” – crowdsourcing, netnography… you name it and it’s the next big thing in research.
Reactions to this tidal wave of innovation tend to fall into three categories:
1)    Traditional MR techniques (read the survey, focus groups, IDI’s any other methodology based in questioning people) are on their way out and unless the MR industry wakes up to this fact very fast, it will be wither and die on the vine, much like the buggy makers at the dawn of the automotive era
2)    All of this is just a fad, a rush of blood to the collective head of the industry, and after a while we will all calm down and realize that the survey is going to be just fine. Anyway, none of these methodologies can substitute for proper probability-based sampling and finely-honed questionnaires
3)    This is the new research paradigm and it’s exciting! In ten years time, research will look totally different and we will all be better off as a result.
My own belief is that there is some truth to all three reactions – as well as much hyperbole. It is likely that the survey (and other traditional techniques) will indeed play a smaller role in the totality of consumer research, especially as we become that much more adept at fishing in the “river” of organic information that surrounds us daily. But that is not to say that the industry will not adapt – remember that the very first auto makers (of which there were hundreds) were primarily buggy makers! As it does adapt, we will fairly quickly work out which methods and techniques are indeed fads (currently neuroscience is under this spotlight) and which actually do add weaponry to our arsenal. The survey itself will not disappear – after all, it has had some fairly notable successes in its career – but perhaps the science that lies at its heart will be deployed to some of the new techniques to increase their validity and credibility. John Samuels, the veteran and incorrigible British social researcher, foresees a future that is based on probability sampling but perhaps not on direct questioning.
What is not in question is that this is indeed an era of unparalleled creativity in research. Technology has unleashed the power of research in so many ways that now things that were clunky only a few years ago (ethnography, eye tracking) are much more feasible and scalable today than they ever were; and things that were unimaginable just five years ago (web analytics) are now a powerful tool. At the hub of all this are entrepreneurs and creatives who just relish the prospect of “shaking things up”.
All power to them, I say – it makes life much more interesting and fun for us crystal ball gazers who are wondering where it is all going to end (or begin)!
Contact Simon Chadwick at <a href="mailto:simon@consultcambiar.com">simon@consultcambiar.com</a>
P.S. Check out:
Ian Lewis’ contribution to March JAR Editorial: <a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/knowledge-center/">The Shape of Marketing Research in 2021</a>
&nbsp;

An Era of Unparalleled Creativity In Research

by <a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/the-team/bill-guerin/">Bill Guerin</a>, Partner at Cambiar
Contradictions fascinate me, because if I’m able to hold the associated tension in my logically Newtonian left brain, some resolving flash of insight eventually emerges in my right brain.
We all know the story of the cobbler’s shoeless children and the related irony that sometimes those who we expect would most naturally benefit from a situation go without.  And as I think about our industry (an occupational hazard), I’m struck by some surprising ways in which clients of market research firms may be going without – and I’m also curious as to how they might feel about that.
Let me explain….
I’m currently at 30,000 feet (literally) returning to the US after conducting a 5-week series of consultative sales and account management workshops in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.  In reflecting on these recent experiences – as well as my 5 years sales consulting experience with Cambiar and work with 50+ market research firms and over 1,000 client-facing employees – I’m seriously wondering about a few apparent contradictions with market research firms:
1.   How can we routinely give exquisite advice to our clients on ways to uniquely position their brands in targeted markets, yet so many of us try to be all things to all people, struggle with defining our target markets and lack an original and compelling value proposition?
2.   What do our end clients think about us promoting to them the necessity of collecting, processing and acting on customer feedback, yet so few of us do the same with our clients?
3.   Why do we consult with our clients on optimizing their CRM platforms without doing much of the same in our business?
4.   When we know so well the economics of maintaining an existing customer versus attracting a new one in our client’s business, why do we oftentimes fall short in establishing and executing account strategies to keep and grow our clients?
5.   When we really understand the crucial importance of a strategic plan to lead and drive our client’s business – and help our clients put those plans in place – why do so few of us have similar plans to lead and drive our business?
6.   How can we be in the question-asking business, yet when we get in front of our clients and prospects we often miss opportunities to ask good, consultative questions that uncover their core needs?
7.   How can we guide an advertiser in creating a commercial that elicits a desired emotional and behavioral response, yet so often neglect to connect emotionally with our clients and prospects?
8.  When we create disciplined processes for our clients to take new products from initial concept to successful launch, why are so many of our own product development efforts fragmented and unsuccessful?
9.   When we regularly work with our clients to understand their drivers of performance and help them establish KPIs to monitor and manage their business, why do so few of us have a similar dashboard to run our own business?
These are just a few of the many contradictions I often see.  Please understand, my intent here isn’t to whine, bash, generalize or self-flagellate, but to provoke some creative thinking and dialogue around what might be possible if we consumed more of our own medicine – the advice “Physician, heal thyself” comes to mind here.
Or if we return to our friendly neighborhood cobbler, to have a thriving shoe business, perhaps we should first consider making delighted customers of our own children.
I suspect others have thoughts and perspectives to share – would love to hear them.
&nbsp;

I Wonder How the Cobbler’s Children Feel?

by <a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/the-team/beth-rounds/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Beth Rounds, Partner at Cambiar</a>
Last week <a href="http://greenbookblog.org/2011/01/28/do-it-yourself-or-die/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Leonard Murphy posted </a>on the scope of the issue and potential implication of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) technology on the <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-companies/new-zealand">market research</a> industry. Continuing Cambiar&rsquo;s <a href="http://greenbookblog.org/?s=Winds+of+Change" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">&ldquo;Winds of Change&rdquo; series</a>, we&rsquo;d like to examine the issue from a different perspective and put forth some ideas on how our industry can leverage this trend.
DIY is certainly a hot topic these days with frequent announcements about new start-ups and product offerings. Just this week, two more companies announced DIY solutions for online qualitative and panel management. While early entrants, Survey Monkey and Zoomerang, defined the space, the DIY category has grown well beyond &ldquo;quick and easy&rdquo; feedback tools. In fact, Cambiar estimates DIY end user spending to be $700-$800M worldwide, when you combine all license revenues from easy feedback, EFM/Enterprise, data analysis, qualitative and custom panel software. Even if you take the non-MR license base (HR, event, education customers) out of the picture, it is still a substantial and growing area of our industry.
What&rsquo;s driving corporate users towards DIY solutions? Let&rsquo;s look at some underlying facts:
Fact #1: Doing More with Less forces introspection and innovation. To understand this, we need to remember that doing more with less means corporate researchers are being asked to be more strategic and more consultative, while budgets or information needs are not necessarily down. This is good news for researchers that offer high value services, whether internal to the organization or as a research supplier. At the same time, companies are turning to DIY for (a) non-value-add methods (most often for straightforward work, such as idea/copy testing or CSat) and, (b) interacting with their customers or consumers via an online panel. Once built, they can interact with the communities and panels themselves, or they can rely on their suppliers to do so for them &ndash; sometimes both are done in the same company at the same time. For corporate insights executives, it&rsquo;s all about making trade-offs and strategic choices as to where they are going spend their resources.
Fact #2: MR Technology has come a long way &ndash; baby! If you&rsquo;ve been to any Market Research conference in the last two-three years, chances are you noticed a real change in the exhibit hall. Joining the regular exhibitors like <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-firms/online-panels">online panel providers</a>, traditional software firms (IBM/SPSS, Confirmit, <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/marketing-research/CFMC-Becomes-Survox-1000048">CfMC</a>) and a small set of full service companies, are a whole new set of service providers that offer self-service or assisted serve options&mdash;most of these founded as SaaS software providers. Companies such as Revelation, Global Park, Vision Critical, GutCheck, MarketSight, <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/company/Medallia-LivingLens">Medallia</a>, Survey Analytics, Evolve 24, Survey Writer, Nunwood&rsquo;s Fizz, among others have sprung up in the past 5-10 years. Most, if not all, are enjoying higher growth rates despite the recession. Their solutions are highly intuitive and rich in functionality. Even the &ldquo;low end&rdquo; tools, such as Zoomerang and Survey Gizmo offer amazing features for the hands-on user. I suggest you take a look&ndash;you will be amazed.
Fact #3: DIY has gone way beyond a standalone tool to being integrated into the way we work. It&rsquo;s pretty obvious that the younger generation of MR professional (for fun check out Beloit College Mindset list) is very comfortable with survey and reporting software, social media and mobile applications. &ldquo;Hands on&rdquo; is more of the rule vs the exception with this group and will only increase in acceptance going forward.
What conclusions and implications can we draw from these trends?
1. DIY technology can deliver faster and better ways to gather and analyze information. It can also enhance respondent engagement, giving consumers more opportunities for deeper involvement, dialogue and co-creation. Yet technology is just a tool and we desperately need to adapt our skills to this new environment. A new type of researcher will evolve (see Ian Lewis&rsquo; latest blog) to include data synthesizing and storytelling. If you need help in this area &ndash; Ian Lewis would be happy to share his insights on the topic.
2. The old adage &ldquo;garbage in &ndash; garbage out&rdquo; still holds true whether you are doing the work yourself or working with a <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-companies/philippines">research company</a>. Of course, if you do the work yourself, you have no one else to blame for any &lsquo;garbage out&rsquo;!! There are also different ways to improve the process. At TMRE, both Microsoft and 3M talked about Marketing &ndash; not MR &ndash; conducting DIY surveys. Obvious risks are disintermediation of MR and bad quality research. Microsoft MR spent a lot of time developing &ldquo;guard rails&rdquo; to protect against bad research. 3M MR took over conducting the research, providing a highly cost effective DIY solution managed by the MR dept. For a supplier, offering a DIY capability that includes a guard rails component to help ensure quality could be attractive.
3. Training is now important than ever. Kudos to those companies, academic institutions and suppliers that offer research skills training &ndash; in person or via the web. A new venue &ndash; The New MR Virtual Festival &ndash; offered an innovative, on-demand conference venue that has amazing potential for learning and sharing going forward.
4. New and exciting opportunities exist for traditional suppliers to pair up with new technology players in order to create new offerings and business models &ndash; ones that combine value add consultative skills with new collection and delivery platforms. If you aren&rsquo;t aware of what&rsquo;s out there &ndash; we can point you in the right direction.
What do you think? Is DIY a Friend or Foe? I vote Friend.

Winds of Change Series: DIY – Friend or Foe?

The future of client market research departments lies with management consultants, polymaths* and specialists. Management consultants will lead client market research (MR) departments, satisfying C-suite demands for MR that ‘gets the business’, is effective with senior management, is future-focused and is a driver of innovation and growth. Polymaths will have the conceptual thinking ability and agility to integrate and leverage the myriad sources of information (what Simon Chadwick referred to as the New Modalities and the River in his Nov 21 “The Winds of Change” blog), identifying insights that give a competitive advantage. Specialists will bring deep analytic capabilities and knowledge that unlocks fresh insights for polymaths to leverage.
Why do we say this?  And what does it mean for staffing of the future, in client market research departments and in research companies?
Three major forces are driving change in future staffing needs, and market research is rapidly approaching what Andy Grove of Intel called a “strategic inflection point” in his famous book Only the Paranoid Survive.
<h3>Force 1</h3>
Senior management in client companies is demanding that MR moves from being an operation that largely does validation and tactical research to one that is a strategic partner in driving innovation and growth.
<h3>Force 2</h3>
A river of information beyond traditional market research data is rapidly coming on stream (e.g. social media, web analytics, and location-based data); information synthesis and knowledge management will become critical to the survival of MR departments and will offer a huge opportunity for innovative <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-companies/philippines">research companies</a>.
<h3>Force 3</h3>
There has never before been a time of so much innovation in MR tools.  There’s neuroscience, biometrics, eye-tracking, social media analytics, online ethnographies, virtual shopping, “digividuals”, and more.
Force 1 drives the need for people with management consulting skills, and for polymaths (think Leonardo da Vinci and Theodore Roosevelt).  Force 2 drives the need for polymaths and analytical specialists.  Force 3 drives the need for a wide range of specialists.  The vast majority of specialists will work for research companies.
Take heed of the winds of change, and take these three steps now.  1) Evaluate your structure and staff against the new needs, 2) Design a training program that addresses key capability gaps, and 3) Restructure as needed, and hire to fill gaps that cannot be filled with training.
*A polymath (<a title="Greek language" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language">Greek</a>: ?????????, polymath?s, “having learned much” is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas. [Source: Wikipedia]
Connect with <a href="mailto:ian@consultcambiar.com">Ian Lewis</a> or <a href="mailto:lock@consultcambiar.com">Lock Collins</a>

Wanted: Management Consultants, Polymaths and Specialists

<div>
by <a href="mailto:monica@consultcambiar.com">Monica Wood</a>, Cambiar Partner
In the world of Market Research often times the function and its deliverables are thought of as a cost center. This is an obvious problem for the industry, as the Market Research function is in the business of&nbsp;value creation.&nbsp; As we continue to want organizations to see us as strategic business and thought partners, budgets get slashed and headcount cut. So how do we be strategic thought partners in times of cost cutting?
I have some thoughts on the subject as this is something I was constantly challenged with while at Novartis and other large companies where I ran the Market Research function.
<ul>
<li>First, prioritize all work. I highly recommend this be done and aligned at the very top, as frequently as monthly, since priorities are always changing. Next, outsource low value-added work. This is where outsourcing to India can play a great role.</li>
<li>Second, make your Procurement Department your best friend. The more procurement understands that all <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-companies/new-zealand">market research</a> is not created equal, the more likely they will be to accommodate the Market Research function&rsquo;s need to add value and help drive the business.</li>
<li>Third, create &ldquo;smart approaches&rdquo; to get to insights more cost effectively. Online communities and other social media tools can be used to get early insights at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods of focus groups and the like.</li>
</ul>
Last, forgive my reframing this great line, but the strongest defense is a strong offense. I suggest you demonstrate and market the value the function has created frequently and to whomever is willing to listen. Often times the Finance department can become your biggest champion if they understand the risk the company is avoiding by using appropriate new product screening approaches, as just one example. The more functions in the organization and the more individual champions for the function you have, the more likely the function will move from being perceived as a cost center to a value creation center.
Have you been challenged with doing more with less? What are your thoughts on how to keep the monies and resources flowing?
Contact Monica at <a href="mailto:monica@consultcambiar.com">monica@consultcambiar.com</a>.
</div>

Winds of Change: Three Ideas for Doing More with Less

<div>
by <a href="mailto:simon@consultcambiar.com">Simon Chadwick</a>, Partner- Cambiar Consulting
&nbsp;
&nbsp;
Those of us trained in market research thirty years ago entered a world that was stable, established and trusted. We were taught probability theory, sampling, questionnaire design, analysis frameworks and report writing. If we were lucky, we also received training in qualitative methods and content analysis. For us, excitement came in the form of new methodologies (conjoint analysis, volumetrics and brand personality), but the basic format of research itself did not change.
Today, we live in a very different world &ndash; an exciting world where the status quo is being challenged every day, even down to the bedrock of what research actually is. Some of this is internally driven &ndash; researchers challenging themselves to come up with new and different ways of collecting, analyzing and communicating information and insight. But, truth be told, most of it is externally driven &ndash; new types of companies entering our field, new technologies, new media. But, most of all, it is client-driven. Our industry changes fastest and most fundamentally when the needs of our clients change. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, those needs are changing dramatically and rapidly.
We are facing the five winds of change.
In the coming weeks, I and my colleagues will examine each of these winds and speculate as to what they mean for the profession and industry that we grew up in and came to love. What are these winds? Here&rsquo;s a quick summary:
<ol>
<li>Doing More With Less &ndash; You might think that this is nothing new, but it is. And with a vengeance. Clients today are being pressured to be more strategic, more proactive, more impactful just as the resources that they have at their disposal are bring cut to the bone. Think of the automotive company that used to have 165 researchers and now only has 8 &ndash; and yet those 8 researchers were instrumental to their company&rsquo;s survival. How do they do it? What does it mean for how they structure their work? And what does it mean for their supplier relationships?</li>
<li>Do-It-Yourself Research &ndash; Long derided, the self-serve research software packages that the research industry loves to hate are now becoming mainstream. When SurveyMonkey can raise $100 million in financing, you know something is afoot. What are they being used for? Who is using them? And why? Added to which, the very definition of DIY research is changing. Five years ago, nobody had heard of proprietary panels and market research online communities (MROC). Now they are ubiquitous and an entire industry has built up to provide them. How does that affect how we view what research is? And how do they fit into the rhythm of clients&rsquo; research needs?</li>
<li>New Modalities &ndash; Once there was the survey and the <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/focus-group-facilities/canada">focus group</a>. OK, that&rsquo;s an oversimplification, but you know what I mean. Today, we have new modalities (or methodologies) springing up all over the place &ndash; neurosciences, biometrics, online ethnography, crowd sourcing, predictive markets, web analytics. Even research robots on Twitter. How does this affect how we view &ldquo;research&rdquo;? How are clients fitting these new modalities into their overall research ecosystems? What is being replaced and what is incremental?</li>
<li>The River &ndash; No, this does not refer to river sampling. This is the concept of a mighty river of information that surrounds us daily, with thousands of tributaries, swirling around us on the Internet and in social media. If we can learn how scientifically to fish in this river, maybe the insights that we need are instantaneously at hand. How does that affect traditional research? Does the survey lose its primacy as the first way to plumb consumer sentiment and information? Does it move down the food chain into more of an instrument of clarification when we don&rsquo;t understand what the river is telling us? What does that mean for the industry&rsquo;s portfolio of techniques? Indeed, what does it mean for the very definition of &ldquo;market research&rdquo;?</li>
<li>Pay For Performance &ndash; Or, to put it more gently, &ldquo;Value-Based Compensation&rdquo;. Coca Cola has announced publicly that it is moving to payment to research agencies based on performance &ndash; or value generated. The advertising industry had to accept this ten years ago. Is it now the turn of research? And how will performance (or value) be measured? Is this an opportunity or a threat?</li>
</ol>
Join us in the coming weeks as we investigate each of these five winds. We promise you a journey that will be fascinating, challenging&hellip;sometimes scary and yet optimistic.
</div>

The Winds of Change

If you are a fan of <a href="http://sethgodin.com/sg/">Seth Godin</a>, you will definitely like his latest book, <a href="http://sethgodin.com/sg/books.asp">Linchpin</a>.  The premise of the book is that we live and work in a hyper competitive world, one that requires us to think very differently about our contribution whether we are the CEO, a manager or a single contributor.   While this statement isn’t earth shattering, as humans we tend to get caught up in the “ignore it and it will eventually go away” syndrome.  So why is it so hard for us to take risks, re-craft our mission or make a course correction before it is too late?   Blame it on our lizard brain – yes, you heard me right!  That lizard brain deep within, and which houses the doubts and fears, attempts to sabotage anything that feels threatening or risky.  Some might call this insecurity or self-doubt.  However you define it, until we identify these fears, resolve to overcome them and take action, we will be frustrated and stalled.
So what does it take to become a Linchpin?  Primarily, Linchpins challenge the status quo, exert emotional energy and make a map for the future.  Linchpins are brave enough to work hard and make a difference.  Of the seven key attributes outlined in his book, three rise to the top of my list as I think about our leadership and strategy.  Linchpins must:
Possess a Unique Talent. Godin states that we don’t need just a positioning statement or a unique selling proposition. We need superpower.  He says, “If you want to be a Linchpin, the power you bring to the table has to be difficult to replace. Be bolder and think bigger. Nothing stopping you.”  In other works, know your strengths, make a plan and stick with it.   When I think of MR companies that exemplify this trait, Communispace comes to mind. Diane Hessan, CEO, <a href="http://www.communispace.com/home.aspx">Communispace</a>, says “We do one thing well and we are relentlessly focused on just doing it better and better and better.” With a past five year growth rate of 580%, Communispace is no doubt the clear market leader in consumer insight communities.
Managing a Situation or Organization of Great Complexity. In other words, when the situation gets tough – the tough get going!  As Godin describes in his book, “Linchpins make their own maps, and thus allow the organization to navigate more quickly than it ever could if it had to wait for the paralyzed crowd to figure out what to do next.”   There is a new class MR start-ups shaking things up, but there are also some existing  MR firms, both large and small, that are continually challenging the status quo.  One example is <a href="http://www.gongos.com">Gongos Research</a>. I spoke with their CEO, John Gongos, a couple of weeks ago and he credits his company’s success to staying nimble with quarterly strategic planning and having a disciplined approach to customer acquisition and account management.  John recently spoke on this topic at a<a href="http://www.casro.org/"> CASRO </a>Leadership Conference in Chicago and a short article will be published in the upcoming CASRO Journal.
Leading Customers. We all know that as markets become more fragmented and consumer connectivity increases, we have to think differently about how we interact with our customer.  Social media, social networks, data mining/business intelligence, neuroscience and mobile are “hot topics” these days, and it will be interesting to see how these methods evolve over the next three to five years.   I believe those companies (some examples: <a href="http://www.blueoceanmi.com/">Blue Ocean</a>, <a href="http://www.revelationglobal.com/">Revelation</a>, <a href="http://www.insightsnow.com/">InsightsNow</a>, <a href="http://www.brainjuicer.com/">Brainjuicer</a>) that connect the dots on new technology and methods with evolving customers’ needs, will master the change that is necessary in new MR era.  The challenge is yours to figure it out!
As business executives, we could get pretty pessimistic about the future of our industry.  I, for one, am an optimist, and believe Linchpins are alive and well in the MR space.  These leaders are out there crafting and re-crafting their business models, staying focused on core strengths and leading customers into the future.  Are you a Linchpin?  From your perspective, would you add more traits to my/Seth’s list?
For more information about <a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/the-team/beth-rounds/">Beth Rounds</a>.
Note:  In full disclosure, some of the companies mentioned in this blog are current Cambiar clients, others are not.

Are You A Linchpin?

In the market research field we don’t often look beyond our external key stakeholders to understand why people behave the way they behave. For example, we are so very good at getting at insights related to consumer behavior and relay why consumers behave the way they do. But how often is it that we take that same level of understanding of human behavior and apply that to running a successful Market Research Organization.  There is much to be learned from an organization’s CEO and CMO and how to relate that to running corporate Market Research and Competitive Intelligence organizations.
What do CEO’s and CMO’s do that Market Research departments don’t do?  I will ask each of you reading this as I am sure you have perspective on this and may like to add your thoughts.
One thing that CEO’s and CMO’s do that most Market Research departments don’t do well is have a relentless pursuit of delivering their numbers. They tend to stop at nothing to make sure that sales and profits are delivered.  Do Market Research departments do the same? Do they promise specific sales objectives will be met and how they will help the company?  Do market research departments drive for cost efficiencies with relentless pursuit like CMO’s and CEO’s do? Do Market Research Departments help identify ways to create topline and bottom line impact voluntarily or only when they are asked?
What about in the area of assessing talent?  CEO’s and CMO’s typically look at talent on a regular basis. They look for talent that can solve business problems and drive results. They look for great people leadership. How much attention do we spend on that in the Market Research arena?  Do we try to develop a research person’s business and leadership skills as much as develop their project management and methods knowledge?
So how do we get a seat at the table and create impact?  Might it be that we need to be as relentless on key business topics as our other C suite executives? Don’t we need to know more about the business and less about the project?  Don’t we need to be true business partners in every sense of the word? In my experience that is the case. The CEO of Novartis and other companies where I ran the Market Research and Competitive Intelligence function expected not only me but my team to deliver business value, not just value understanding any specific market research project.
How do you transform Market Research department from being transitional project managers to being true business thought partners?  Love to hear your thoughts.
My fellow Cambiar business partner, <a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/the-team/ian-lewis/">Ian Lewis</a>, and I having created  successful Market Research and Competitive Intelligence functions at such well known companies as Time Inc, ToysRUS, Campbell Soup, Novartis and others.  We have ways to help build world class Market Research and Competitive Intelligence organizations and are here to help you have an impactful seat at the table.
For more information on Cambiar’s <a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/forresearch-department-leaders/">Research Impact Practice</a> and <a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/the-team/monica-wood/">Monica Wood</a>.
by <a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/the-team/monica-wood/">Monica Wood</a>, Partner

Think Like Your CEO: Creating a Lasting Seat at the Table for Market Research and Competitive Intelligence

Nick Johnson (Volante Research) sparked some good debate with his “<a href="http://www.research-live.com/features/insight-is-dead/4002803.article." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Insight is dead</a>” article.<a href="http://www.research-live.com/features/insight-is-dead/4002803.article"></a> Anthony Tasgal (POV, a brand, communications and training consultancy) fired back with “<a href="http://www.research-live.com/comment/insight-–-buried-alive?/4002925.article" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Insight –buried alive</a>?” .  Others weighed in, and now it’s Cambiar’s turn!
Both articles have great quotes, such as Nick’s “A two-hour meeting that consists of a researcher reading a deck of 80 PowerPoint charts and then fielding a few questions is a very poor way to turn research into decisions” (amen!).  But he also says “Insight managers have so much information coming at them that insight itself has ceased to be an issue”, and here he is totally off the mark (IMHO).  I like Anthony’s “Insight should be seen as a process, a way of working and thinking rather than merely an object that can be picked up and counted”.
What’s been missing from the debate is a framework to think about insight.  I organize it into three parts:
<ul>
<li>What is meaningful Insight?</li>
<li>What are the necessary conditions for Insight?</li>
<li>What practices enhance Insight productivity?</li>
</ul>
What is Meaningful Insight? 
I break this into four components:
<ul>
<li>New knowledge or a new understanding that connects to a business outcome</li>
<li>Brought about by thinking outside our comfortable paradigms</li>
</ul>
The next two bullets make the insight meaningful
<ul>
<li>Communicated effectively in the context of synthesized information and knowledge of the business</li>
<li>That influences organizational behavior and creates business impact</li>
</ul>
In other words, meaningful insight leads to a “holy s**t!” reaction from the client that changes the way the organization thinks and acts.
What are the Necessary Conditions for Insight?
<ul>
<li>Insight must influence behavior – or else it is just nice to know</li>
<li>This will only happen if it is communicated effectively, connecting at an emotional level</li>
<li>For this to happen, communication must be in context (i.e. a product of synthesized information and business understanding)</li>
</ul>
What Practices Enhance Insight Productivity?
<ul>
<li>An environment that encourages and rewards curiosity and creativity </li>
<li>Immersion and synthesis</li>
<li>Collaboration</li>
<li>Storytelling</li>
<li>Ownership.  The researcher’s job doesn’t end when the presentation is finished – it just moves to the phase of making change happen! </li>
</ul>
One final thought.  If this sounds hard, it is!  Meaningful insight doesn’t happen when it’s left to one person to do while crunching the PowerPoint deck.  It’s a process, and it’s a team sport.
<a href="http://www.consultcambiar.com/the-team/ian-lewis/">Ian Lewis</a>

Insight Needs An Energy Boost!

Management consulting, M&A, Training and Recruiting Pennington, New Jersey, United States of America.

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