On the flight from Washington I had some time to think and finish reading Rachel Botsman’s new book on “the rise of collaborative consumption.”
Botsman paints a sweeping landscape of consumers cooperating in their purchase and use of products. It’s an excellent read.

Her book makes me think that one way to look at the change coming to market research is to segment these changes by endogenous change coming from within marketing research and exogenous change coming from the outside (something Smith and Raspin in their book Creating Market Insight call the “remote environment”.

As an industry we have quite a bit to be proud of, especially when it comes to recent innovation (MROCs, mobile, neuromarketing, the stuff BrainJuicer seems to cook up daily, etc.), but it certainly does feel as though a significant piece of the change is coming from outside.

And, when it comes to external change, the world Botsman paints suggests some extreme levels of change in product innovation (crowdsourced), branding (from status to purpose and me to we), product usage (shared) and product lifecycle (longer). It’s no exageration to say that the future she paints would turn marketing and marketing research upside down.

If Botsman is right, then those of us in marketing research are more likely than ever to run/manage/moderate insights communities (MROCs) and design communities (see HYVE). We’ll track the discussion of purpose-driven community clusters in real time, tightening the feedback loop.

If she’s right, brands will become much more about shared purpose and passion. And, they will be built or destroyed by a corporation’s reputation. But, this reputation element will no longer be ethereal. As I’ve noted before and as Botsman states in her book, by the end of the decade we are likely to have a kind of online reputational currency for both people and corporations (she calls these “reputation bank accounts”).

This creates in us a sense of urgency and we want to point out how these futures are already happening (in a small way) today.

In this regard, Leonard Murphy at the GreenBook Market Research Blog does us all a favor with his piece titled:

The Future Is… Now

Here Murphy outlines how many of the things Ian Lewis (research in 2020) and I are thinking about as future trends already can be found in small efforts, experiments, and new tech ventures today. For example, I believe that “serious gaming” will become a serious research tool, and Murphy points out how BrainJuicer is already experimenting with serious games for MR — today.

The challenge that we all have in thinking about the futures is that while we see the weak and strong signals for a future today, we are often at the lowest phase of the S curve looking up. As many have pointed out, the S curve appears to be a dominant pattern in all kinds of physical phenomena, including changed states and this applies especially so to technology adoption. At the beginning, adoption is slow and increases at an almost arithmetic rate, then it hits a critical mass and the adoption of that technology increases at a lightning pace. Once adoption hits near ubiquity, it levels off. Our challenge today is that in analyzing the futures of market research, we are looking at weak and strong signals for the future in the very early stages of the S curve. We expect change to come quickly, but the futures may keep us waiting longer than we would like.

Murphy does us all a favor in identifying the weak and strong signals today that will lead to change tomorrow. His piece gives us concrete examples of how the things we are talking about are not as far-fetched as they sound, and he helps us better understand where we are on the S curve.

As I’ve noted in a previous post, I think the word is being used in a general way to mean “thinking ahead of the curve” and not in the specific sense used by professionals working in “strategic foresight.”

I do think that market research will become increasingly forward leaning and future-focused and anticipate that “anticipation” will be the next buzzword in this area.

But, where will MR need to go to truly harness foresight?

Method:
In terms of method, I think MR will adopt something like the framework developed by Peter Bishop and Andy Hines in their book Thinking About the Future. MR will do this by integrating existing research techniques with the creation and analysis of possible, probable and preferred futures developed through a STEEP analysis.

Tools:
Here I anticipate the mass adoption of prediction markets, realtime Delphi panels and crowdsourced futures engines like the ones being tested by the Institute for the Future.

Conclusion:
This may ultimately result in what I’m calling “futures dependent strategy”. FDS creates multiple futures scenarios based on the social, technological, economic, environmental and political drivers operating in the present. Then it requires that these futures are mapped in two dimensions – expected likelihood and potential impact. Once this is done, strategies can be developed to (a) achieve preferred futures, and (b) avoid or mitigate unfavorable futures.

But, this will challenge market research, because as many have noted “there are not future facts.” Stretching our thinking from the now into the future will move MR into a different space, well beyond our current comfort zones defined by surveys and focus groups.

So, for example, Rubinson writes that:

“The ‘mental marketplace’ changes the rules of competition; your brand must vie for attention against functionally unrelated brands including celebrities and games like Farmville. For example, Whole Foods vies in the mental marketplace of “wellness” with Dannon, Kashi, Subway even WebMD.”

I am not aware of really good work in this area (it may already exist), but I can anticipate a service that tracks monthly mindshare in these mental marketplaces. This could be done by aggregating several thousand individuals in a representative online panel and asking them to enter their free associations with brands and companies (and possibly individuals and institutions) in a certain set of market spaces. The data could be coded and quantified and mapped using text analytics to show the strongest connections of one player to another.

For example, panelists could be asked to consider what companies, brands, personalities and institutions they associate with “health”, or “style” or “tropical vacations.”

This turns brand tracking on its head as research participants wouldn’t be rating brands, but they would be telling us what brands (“brands” in a wider sense) are filling specific “mental marketplaces” and how much that “brand” is filling this space.

This could be a boon for the creation of unlikely marketing partnerships among business that are related only by their location in the same mindshare space.

Taking Rubinson’s thinking a step further, a tool that reveals the players in a “mental marketplace” could lead to radically new joint marketing efforts and a dynamic feedback loop that only intensifies the non-hierarchical, “two way world” that Rubinson describes.

There was such a great response to his question (Are the kids alright?) that he revised and extended his remarks.

It is worth reading the comments.

I maintain that there is plenty of young talent in the industry, but that these talented folks in their 20s are in fields that are not (and may never be) associated with “market research”, even though these fields may ultimately replace what we call “market research” today. The next generation of market research may never think of themselves as “market researchers.”

This leads me to a much wider point.

If the industry were my client, I would advocate that they rename and rebrand. For a LOT more detail on this, see pages 7 and 8 of my white paper on the future of market research.

For those interested in prediction markets I strongly recommend David Rothschild’s article in this month’s Public Opinion Quarterly (AAPOR’s publication).

Although Rothschild’s article focuses on “comparing prediction markets, polls and their biases”, the implications of his article stretch well beyond the political world. In fact, from one vantage point, elections are just a useful space to study these markets since they happen at frequent and predictable intervals. But any future event with these similar parameters would do.

One critique of market research is that it is a snapshot of the present and is rooted in present attitudes and behaviors.

This is why I believe strategic foresight and market research will merge (or at least cross-pollinate) in the near future.

Prediction markets are just one example of an area in which this cross-pollination will occur.

BrainJuicer already appears to be experimenting with prediction markets.

But, the two that have most interested me are (a) consulting firms like BCG or McKinsey and (b) large digital platforms that could become uber-panel companies of the future. These two interest me because they occupy the two extremes of the industry: the data-driven strategy providers (high value, non-commoditized) and the data collectors (commoditized but VERY important).

I’ve written and talked about the former quite a bit, but not so much about the latter.

This is why Stan Sthanunathan’s thoughts (click here) on the matter have so intrigued me. I met Stan at TMRE, and he’s pleasure to talk with.

Stan, insights leader at Coca-Cola, poses two questions:

What if…

1. Facebook becomes an insights provider?
2. Google creates a MASSIVE insights panel company?

Thinking about each of these, and looking at the first possibility, it seems obvious to me that Facebook will become an insights provider of some kind. It also seems obvious to me that there will eventually be a privacy backlash of some kind. (As an aside, if Facebook entered the market research supplier market in a big way, it could complicate things dramatically for the MROC builders. In fact, if I were Facebook, I would buy the largest MROC builder. It is a natural fit.)

But what about Google as an uber-panel company? LinkedIn is already far down this path on the B2B side (click here). It doesnt seem to be much of a leap for Google to get heavily in the game.

What if Google entered the market?

1. It would enter in a BIG way.
2. It could offer online sample dramatically larger than the current providers.
3. It might mix in online behavioral data (triggering an eventual privacy backlash).
4. It could create easy-to-use, online, DIY survey tools. This would make surveys much more easy to execute, but would geometrically expand the volume of truly awful research.
5. Assuming this tool could manage the physical geographies of participants (setting geographic quotas), it could kill off phone polling quickly.
6. Tracking surveys could be conducted in realtime, continuously throughout an advertising or political campaign.

Someone at Google has to be thinking about this.

One of the people that will think about it will be the person with this job.

Food for thought.

A new Boston Consulting Group report supports this thesis.

You can read it all here.

But, I highly recommend the grids in the appendix on pages 27 and 28. Here BCG charts what it sees as the evolution of the MR function:

1. Traditional MR Function
2. Business Contribution Team
3. Strategic Insight Organization
4. Strategic Foresight Organization (see also page 12)

Unfortunately, BCG posits that “almost 90% of companies are in stages 1 and 2″.

In my opinion, this means that over time there will be a much stronger demand for data-driven foresight tools (like Delphi panels and futures markets – possibly loaded into MROCs) in the United States. And this demand won’t be limited to the government and large institutions, as it has in the past.

Why will we see this demand?

Because corporations will come to the conclusion that the only way to jump ahead of competitors (BCG refers to “leapfrogging”) is to (1) study the possible, probable and preferred futures, (2) build plans and future business lines around this futuring, and (3) contingency plan for wildcards – those low probability, high impact events that bring change quickly.

In fact, I believe that at some point in the future most corporations will have small wild card futuring teams responsible for (a) identifying potential wildcards and (b) building contingency plans around them with the focus on turning wildcard events into significant business-building opportunities.

For a taste of what I mean by wildcards, click here.

First, it’s simply interesting. The author has been building game theory based prediction markets for the US government and private industry clients for years, and his learnings in this field (especially, multi-player nation state relations modeling) are fascinating.

Interestingly, the author writes about something closely related to Admiral John Poindexter’s somewhat controversial Policy Analysis Market (PAM).

From a market research point of view, The Predictioneer’s Game is one look into the future. It’s no secret that Delphi Panels (first invented by RAND after WWII), are the historical beginning point for many futurist efforts. But, the simultaneous advent of hosted online communities and prediction markets means that at some point (probably very soon) market research will combine the two in a way that creates a step change in the field. And, this combination is ultimately going to look like much of what the author of The Predictioneer’s Game has been doing for the US government for many, many years.

How will it work? First, market researchers will create an online community that has the features (either in background, skills or purchase interest) that they desire. Then, this group will be given a series of questions. Each question will ask what the likely range of consumer/business/voter responses might be. Then, a prediction market or exchange will be created for this range of outcomes. Trading will commence. If the literature is correct, the outcome of this trading will likely mirror (or approximate) the outcome in the real world. Most interesting to me is that this process is now being tinkered with to design new products and product features.

In the world of public affairs, a common research approach is to poll a random sample of policy elites and use this data to understand how future scenarios might sort out. StrategyOne used this approach with its Beltway Barometer to better understand what might happen with the initial bailout bills in the fall of 2008. In fact, we found support for the first bailout slipping quickly and this is exactly what happened. But, a more powerful complement to this survey based approach will be the creation of exchange driven communities of policy elites or influencers. This may just be the next “killer app” in the public affairs space.

RPM

And the fact is that it isn’t really our choice anymore. With most populations migratng from landline to mobile, many surveys are going to get smaller and simpler (quickly!).

But, how about online research?

Welll, one thing I can guarantee will NOT be the future of mmarket research is the awful survey design Bad Research; No Biscuit identifies here:

http://researchrants.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/another-fine-matrix/

Ouch!

This entire discussion is reminiscent of an excellent presentation on online research formats given this fall in Las Vegas at TMRE. All kinds of new, interactive online formats are being tried in an attempt to make the survey process more interesting and less painful.

And speaking of pain, the Bad Research; No Biscuit highlight is what the folks at my firm (StrategyOne) refer to as a “deathgrid.” No normal human has the patience to fill out a “deathgrid” and no non-incarcerated individual should be forced to do it.

But, this entire episode raises a good question?

How do we make online surveys more engaging and “fun”?

One radical answer may come from the gaming world. What if surveys began to resemble games? What if a “survey” became more of a “simulation game” with respondents as “players”?

Play and the need for play is hardwired into humans. Filling out “deathgrids” is not. It may well be that some day we all have game programmers working for us.