Thoughts from the QRCA
By Stacy Graiko
October 15, 2010
I took a break from some pretty intensive fieldwork this week to attend the evening event at the QRCA annual conference in Philadelphia. Because of my schedule I was sadly unable to attend the conference, but with some advance planning and the traffic working in my favor on rte. 95 I was able to make time for the event (I have my priorities after all).
The QRCA evening event is always a great opportunity to meet new people and share ideas. Over cocktails I met some colleges I’d met at AQR/QRCA in Prague earlier this year and we had a lively discussion about the differences between online focus groups and online bulletin boards. I’m thankful I ran into them because they gave me a very helpful perspective based on their experience with these approaches. Over dinner I sat with a group of colleagues – qual and quant researchers – and the conversation turned to methods, specifically the glut of methods market researchers now have available to help us understand consumers. “Qualitative” has expanded to include online focus groups (asynchronous and synchronous), online bulletin boards, ethnography and even online ethnography. “Quantitative” research is now often conducted online and incorporates qualitative chats and behavioral science methods that tap the consumer subconscious. Much of the work we’re all doing incorporates more than one approach; our own work at Sentient tends to incorporate at least two or three approaches.
This led logically to a debate about “the truth” – as in, how do we get to insights that tell our clients exactly what they should do to win more customers and to please the customers they have? What is the method or combination of methods that will give us the absolute truth? In short, what’s the silver bullet for market researchers?
If you think you’re going to get that here, I’ll warn you to stop reading now. Our discussion arrived at a place I think many of us have arrived at before, which is the esoteric view that the only true insight is the one that matters. In other words, I can have 5 insights from a research study, all equally valid, but the one (or ones) that matter are the ones my client chooses to action based on their business needs, their ability to do something about it, and the impact they project it will have on their business. In that case, the insight – whether it was generated in a survey, a focus group or an fMRI study, is the truth. It’s the truth because it’s the thing that moved their business metrics, motivated their employees or delighted their customers. It’s the truth because at the end of the day, that insight made a tangible difference to their business. So why waste energy debating the efficacy of the various methods, when our energy can be better spent figuring out how to use our methods in conjunction with each other in order to arrive at insights that really matter. Through real, engaged collaboration we can apply all our best thinking to our clients’ research questions, and open the doors to novel, compelling and impactful research. Isn’t that why we’re all in this business?
The QRCA evening event is always a great opportunity to meet new people and share ideas. Over cocktails I met some colleges I’d met at AQR/QRCA in Prague earlier this year and we had a lively discussion about the differences between online focus groups and online bulletin boards. I’m thankful I ran into them because they gave me a very helpful perspective based on their experience with these approaches. Over dinner I sat with a group of colleagues – qual and quant researchers – and the conversation turned to methods, specifically the glut of methods market researchers now have available to help us understand consumers. “Qualitative” has expanded to include online focus groups (asynchronous and synchronous), online bulletin boards, ethnography and even online ethnography. “Quantitative” research is now often conducted online and incorporates qualitative chats and behavioral science methods that tap the consumer subconscious. Much of the work we’re all doing incorporates more than one approach; our own work at Sentient tends to incorporate at least two or three approaches.
This led logically to a debate about “the truth” – as in, how do we get to insights that tell our clients exactly what they should do to win more customers and to please the customers they have? What is the method or combination of methods that will give us the absolute truth? In short, what’s the silver bullet for market researchers?
If you think you’re going to get that here, I’ll warn you to stop reading now. Our discussion arrived at a place I think many of us have arrived at before, which is the esoteric view that the only true insight is the one that matters. In other words, I can have 5 insights from a research study, all equally valid, but the one (or ones) that matter are the ones my client chooses to action based on their business needs, their ability to do something about it, and the impact they project it will have on their business. In that case, the insight – whether it was generated in a survey, a focus group or an fMRI study, is the truth. It’s the truth because it’s the thing that moved their business metrics, motivated their employees or delighted their customers. It’s the truth because at the end of the day, that insight made a tangible difference to their business. So why waste energy debating the efficacy of the various methods, when our energy can be better spent figuring out how to use our methods in conjunction with each other in order to arrive at insights that really matter. Through real, engaged collaboration we can apply all our best thinking to our clients’ research questions, and open the doors to novel, compelling and impactful research. Isn’t that why we’re all in this business?
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