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Conference Feature: Things to Come and Things Gone By
The first 'real' session of the recent BIG conference was all about the business of market research. All three speakers were on message for the conference theme of 'Revolution or Evolution' with each giving slightly different answers to the question. Teresa Lynch reports.
First up was BIG regular Trevor Wilkinson of Purple Market Research who was as good as his word on 'The industry in 20 minutes'. Starting in 1960 with the formation of IMR, Trevor rushed us through the key events to date. His answer to what percentage B2B constitutes of total MR spend was fascinating in that the simple (and often quoted) answer was 10% and the complex answer (which he address using several different sources) was 10% also. His conclusion (RE: Rev or Ev) was that the B2B industry was particularly well adapted to evolution in that it was small scale and adaptable (like early mammals).
Richard Hepburn of SPA Future Thinking was more of a revolution man. Having worked in logistics in his early career, he was vastly in favour of revolution. He showed us the bad old days of shipping and how the time and costs were completely disproportionate to the value of the goods shipped. At worse the unloading could be 65% of the end cost of the goods. He then introduced us to Malcolm McLean, a 1950's trucker who had the idea of putting the truck trailer on a boat and revolutionised shipping by inventing containers. Richard used other examples such as the IKEA sales model and medical expert systems to demonstrate that business research has nothing to fear from intelligent commoditisation.
Rather than revolution or evolution James Sweatman of BPRI was in favour of sleeping with the enemy. His paper saw the future of research in partnerships between client and agency where each company adds a little more to the insight mix. James pointed out that curiosity about the client could lead the agency to 'insight the clients don't know they need'. Currently embedded with a large international consultancy James saw this kind of intimate partnership as the future of B2B.
Having covered the future we found ourselves slipping into the past... past-it television formats that is with 'Research Family Fortunes'. These dysfunctional and frankly somewhat disturbing all-male families were 'The Agencies' and 'The Clients' and the skit was organised in association with The Association of Users of Research Agencies (AURA). Sinéad Jefferies of Opinion Leader was perfect in the role of host apart from the fact that she was obviously too refined to have ever watched the original.
To set up the game, researchers had been asked a number of questions before the conference, including 'What is the most annoying thing about agencies?' and 'What is the most important quality for a researcher?' The Agencies and the Clients now tried to guess the top five answers to each question. The format was a refreshing way of airing a few of the old complaints about costs and scope creep and just like the TV show itself none of this was taken very seriously. Eventually the Agencies won by quite a wide margin - have we perhaps been reluctant to give clients much feedback about what we really think of them?!
BIG have not been as eager as other conferences to introduce these recognised TV formats (MR Idol, I'm a Researcher... Get Me Out of Here etc): however this was well organised and well produced. It also gave the delegates some real talking points at lunch; a meal over which your trencher woman correspondent must draw a compassionate veil.
UK-based B2B research association BIG is online at www.b2bresearch.org , while BIG Conference has its own site at www.bigconference.org .
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