Have we lost our EDGE?

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M

arketing used to be an edgy business. Back in the Mad

Men days, marketing was new and marketers were seen as the creative superstars that would go beyond the obvious to move people, brands and business. Watching the Mad Men series, one could conclude marketers were living on the edge: there’s the drinking, the smoking, the sex, the martini lunches and the big creative ideas that wow the clients.

Back then, linearity ruled; linking the present with the past was a winning trick. There is this famous Kodak projector scene, where Don Draper (the lead character in the series) fills the slide projector with old family pictures showcasing the device’s power to transport people back in time and connect them with old memories. The executives are amazed and Don Draper ends up winning the account.

The same campaign thinking was used for the Twin Pop “take it, break it, share it, love it” campaign where Peggy (Don Draper’s (first female) copywriter) draws the nostalgia card - with great success by saying “When I was little, my mother would take a Twin Pop and break it in half and give one to me and one to my sister”.

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Š YouTube, Mad Men

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Marketing was scarce (as were the available media channels) and defined by craftmanship. Back then, developing a creative campaign corresponded with a bunch of men brainstorming with a bourbon in their hands. There is this moment in the series where they are having a eureka moment when discussing college pranks over bourbon. While working on the Nixon campaign, this led them to flooding the market in the marginal states with ads for one of their other clients so there would be no space left to buy for the Kennedy team.

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Since the ’60s, not only have we witnessed the first man on the moon, women entering (all levels of) the workplace, the introduction of the personal computer, the rise of digital media‌; we also moved from a world characterized by linearity, craftmanship and scarcity to a world defined by acceleration, automation and abundance.

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FROM LINEARITY TO ACCELERATION

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In the past, paths were linear, change was predictable. By looking at the past, you could craft the future, and successfully so. When growing up, you could simply look in the rear-view mirror and copy-paste what your parents had done before you. If your father was a doctor, there was a fair chance you would follow in his footsteps. People copy-pasted what was done before, even in business. Marketing plans of year X were often simply a copy of marketing plans of the year X-1 with some minor adjustments.

This was how it worked; you would look at the past and slightly adjust it for the future. And this copy-paste instinct correspondingly shaped consumer brand loyalty, with people simply going back, repurchasing their usual brand when in need of a replacement. Reason for our copy-paste behavior: it brings people a feeling of security and peace of mind.

Yet today, copy-pasting from the past is no longer an option. We live in exponential times. The speed of transformation is at its ultimate high, with change no longer being linear nor predictable. Just consider Moore’s law, defined in 1970 by Intel’s co-founder Gordon E. Moore, stating that the overall processing power of computers would double every year. While this was the rule in the past, this is no longer valid.

Due to the rapid rise of technology, CPU speed currently doubles every year or less. Research by Adobe has revealed that 76% of marketing professionals believe marketing has changed more in the past two years than in the previous 50. The expiration date of brands is shortening, with products being copied faster than ever and these replicas even outperforming the originals. In no time, new entrants can change the rules of the game and disrupt the market. Just think of how Airbnb has transformed the hotel business, how Waze disrupted the car navigation market, how Facebook entered the marketplace business and how Google started offering marketing research services.

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CASE

How Volvo is redefining car ownership Alongside the launch of the 2018 Volvo XC40, the compact SUV by Volvo, comes the new ‘Care by Volvo’ subscription service. This smartphone style subscription plan provides all the benefits of car ownership without the administrative hassle. Focusing on access rather than ownership, this new package is about to turn over the traditional roles of car dealerships, auto finance firms and insurance operators. By paying a flat fee, everything from insurance to maintenance and repair is covered by Volvo. The service will allow users to replace their car every 24 months and taps into consumers’ changing needs by giving them the option to borrow a different Volvo model (for example temporarily switching to a larger-sized vehicle when going on 08

holiday or on a road trip) when they want. Over time, customers will even get access to a range of digital concierge services such as fuel and wash on demand and in-car delivery.

https://youtu.be/QOJsLcCQNyw

These industry challengers do not only change the trajectory of other brands and of the market, but also of how consumers perceive brands.

Consumers have moved away from the once linear consumption track.

Today our choices in products and services are driven by context rather than individual characteristics and the notion of brand loyalty is losing power. Some even argue that brands will lose all their meaning over time and this thinking is supported by research by Havas Media stating that most people would not care if 74% of the brands they use every day ceased to exist1. Today, consumers are mixing brands to feed their continuously changing needs, resulting in a true ‘catch me if you can’ story for brands to stay relevant.

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This is even visible in marketing research, where we still wrongly assume that people are sitting in front of their computer filling out surveys (in total isolation). Instead, they are often surrounded by people, exposed to a certain context occasion or on the go. The contextual background consumers are in has an influence not only on purchase behavior but also on (brand) perceptions and hence research results.

In these accelerating times, looking back and doing what you have always done is no longer an option. Whereas in the past marketers could steal from what was done before and use the past as their playbook, today they have to embrace a fresh mindset to surf the wave of change.

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FROM CRAFTMANSHIP TO AUTOMATION

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What would set people apart was the skill set they mastered. Marketers were the creatives ones, the out-of-the-box thinkers, exploring the edges to make people see, feel and hear their message. The basic characteristics of media dominating the Mad Men times (i.e. print, billboards and radio) and beyond required creatives to come up with sticky slogans and designers to create catchy ads to attract people’s attention. Advertising and marketing were all about creativity and craftmanship. Similarly, marketing research could be considered as the art

of asking the right questions. Yet over the past years, more and more skills have been taken over by machines.

The rise of bots and Artificial Intelligence is at full speed, with the human brain being surpassed by smart machine-learning systems. Bots and Artificial Intelligence systems are not only adopted in manufacturing processes, customer support services and medical diagnosis2, but even in more creative and artistic tasks such as painting unique master pieces and composing and performing music3,4. Research by McKinsey Global Institute projected that automation could raise productivity growth by 0.8% to 1.4% annually, which is far more than what the steam engine (0.3%) or the IT revolution (0.6%)5 generated. Furthermore, the report highlights that 30% of tasks and 60% of occupations could be computerized.

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Being outplaced by robots will soon be the new normal as machines are firmly complementing and even replacing humans. According to a study by Oxford University called The Future of Employment, there is a 61% chance that marketers will be replaced by robots in the next 20 years6. The same goes for the job of marketing research analyst.

“AI will replace workers, including many presently highly-paid professionals, and it will provide a means for new jobs. As always, adaptation is the key for survival and success.�

Janet Baker, founder of Dragon Systems7

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These days, marketing is driven more and more by funnel thinking, big data and programmatic advertising, and a marketer’s job has shifted from marketing strategy to operations. Your job might not be under pressure at this very instant, but the increased automation surely does already impact what we do and how we do our work today.

Similarly, marketing research has left the ‘art space’ and entered the technology scene. New platforms and technologies have risen, providing research users with the flexibility to ask questions when, where 12

and how they want, by means of do-it-yourself solutions. These tools, allowing anyone with or without a research background to easily collect responses, might (and probably will) threaten the researchers’ role in its current form. Although do-it-yourself drives speed and democratizes market research, the question remains whether ‘just anybody’ is qualified to set up research and whether this might lead to the devaluation of research. Next, evolutions in technology and neuro-techniques enable researchers to move away from solely using explicit measures, uncovering a new research layer.

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Š Gizmodo / AI robot composes and performing

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FROM SCARCITY TO ABUNDANCE

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Scarcity equals power, it is a natural given. In the past, people would gain power by owning and growing scarce resources such as knowledge and information. Those that stood out were the ones having access to the right data, information and insights. Just think of how teachers were more knowledgeable than their students because they were more literate, or a manager opposed to a starter or politicians compared to civilians. In a pre-Google era, one had to pay or know the right people to access ‘the vase of knowledge’. However, over the past years, information has transformed from being a scarce good to

a commodity to even an abundance. We all have access to massive amounts of information, resulting in students outsmarting their professors, starters challenging their managers and politicians being called off by civilians.

We are thus becoming less valuable as for what we know and are.

Consumers are more knowledgeable than ever and the days are over where marketers could say what they wanted, spreading false claims about their products or services. We are living in a world of too much data, where the true challenge now lies in handling, prioritizing and making sense of it all.

Marketing research has changed from being a primary data source to being part of the mix of multiple data streams available for decision-making. In this data-rich insights-poor world, marketers and (marketing) researchers are being challenged to connect the dots to feed decision-making.

Walmart, for example, the US retailer with stores across the globe, is currently building their ’data café’, the world’s largest private cloud, to process all their data streams. This new system is built to make sense of all the data collected across its more than 20,000 stores and to better anticipate the needs of its 250 million weekly customers. The over 200 streams of internal and external data account for 2.5 petabytes of data every hour, the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress8.

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While the world has shifted to this opposite, marketing (research) seems to be still holding on to the same old principles and values as if nothing has changed. We are fooling ourselves in thinking we are part of this transformation. Instead we are characterized by ignorance, where we keep on chasing the same practices and repeating what we have always done. Although its origins lie in feeding the (Mad Men) creatives with insights to back up their campaign stories, the sole shift characterizing the research industry was related to the medium, with the shift from offline to online. Just think of how marketing research is still holding on to the same processes, its long research cycles not providing the speed and flexibility for fast decision-making. Or how 16

we are still fishing in the same pool of participants and holding on to phony concepts like ‘representativity’. Or how we keep on bombarding consumers with questions, squeezing them like lemons, rather than to focus on smart data integration. Or how marketing and marketing research are still silo-structured, with no ongoing conversation.

If our processes and approaches are not adapted to this new reality, how can we provide meaning to the business and stay relevant for consumers? Is our market at a standstill? Are we creating our own downfall? Have we lost our edge and how can we get it back?

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BRINGING BACK THE EDGE MARKETING (RESEARCH) DESERVES 19

The life expectancy of humans is growing year after year, yet that of brands and companies is declining at an ever-increasing rate. Research by Professor Richard Foster of Yale University has confirmed that while the average lifespan of a company was 61 years in 1958, it is a mere 15 years today.

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The days are over where big brands filled the bulk of consumers’ needs. Based on their personal value system, consumers are willing to pay a premium price for certain products while at the same time wanting to pay less for others. The traditional bell curve has taken on a barbell shape, brands and marketers need to explore the edges as growth opportunity has shifted to these extremes rather than the mainstream mass.

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“The Barbell effect occurs when entrenched, legacy practices are disrupted by forces like new technology, innovations, and shifts in demographic behavior.

Those industry players who fail to adapt to the shift are forced to retreat into the contracting middle, the bar. Those who adapt will prosper in the bell ends, where most customers are going.�

Jim Blasingame, the Small Business Advocate9

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ENVISION

While these fluctuating times drive instant decision-making, marketers and brands should never stop envisioning the bigger picture in order to create sustainable relevance for both consumers and their business.

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IDENTIFYING A LONG-TERM PURPOSE In this rat race of change, the need for a long-term ambition and purpose is present more than ever. Considering McKinsey’s horizon framework, a model for companies to assess growth opportunities, brands should focus 70% on the present (horizon one), 20% on the short-term future (horizon two) and 10% on the long-term future (horizon three). Yet what we often see in businesses is a 90-10-0 distribution instead of the recommended 70-20-10 spread. Many organizations

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still tend to focus most (if not all) of their efforts on the present (first horizon) while in fact efforts should be made on all three horizons, not

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leaving out the longer term.

HORIZON 3

HORIZON 2

HORIZON 1 TIME

Rather than being led by an operation drive, marketing needs to cultivate more long-term strategic thinking. Marketing professionals have grown the wrong habit of jumping on any trend bandwagon. Just think of the Pokemon Go gravitational pull, where brands like Mercedes created so-called ‘lure modules’ near ‘PokéStops’ to attract people playing the game to their showrooms. Yet there is a clear difference between attracting customers through micro-trends and proper targeting where strategy drives tactics. With hypes and trends passing, envisioning a brand’s long-term purpose and strategy is key. This starts with envisioning what will change and, not unimportantly, what might not.

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It may feel a bit counter-intuitive, yet in this era of volatility, part of envisioning the future is to understand what will resist the ravages of time. Although we are living, operating and doing business in a world that is characterized by ongoing transformation, some things simply don’t change (as fast as we think they do). In some ways life has not changed our fundamental human nature, we are still colored by the same underlying needs as our prehistoric ancestors. There is a lot of discussion on whether the old Maslow pyramid thinking is valid - the common argument being that needs are not hierarchical but rather an interactive, dynamic system - yet the need for example for food, shelter, safety, sex, belonging and trust is omni-present. Consumer insights express these long-term consumer needs and frictions within a particular product or service category.

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“It takes more than six, seven, twelve, fifty years for human evolution to change the fundamental nature of the way we think and the way we feel. The technology and media change but the target him- or herself does not.”

Mark Ritson

These deeply rooted, solid principles are what should form the foun24

dation of one’s purpose, the deeper human truth consumers can relate with. These profound human insights should form the cornerstone of brands and guide them in everything they do. Purpose forms the reason for a company to exist and even shows to have a positive effect on profits. Research by Harvard Business School Professors Kotter and Kanter comparing 200 companies demonstrated that purpose-driven businesses have 400% more revenues10. This need for an underlying insight is also essential in marketing research, where the pressure on the now often leads to an ad-hoc focus. Research often falls in the trap of time, delivering on short-term needs, leaving out any long-term-perspective thinking. Yet it is essential to envision what your research should add up to, in line with a brand’s bigger purpose.

CASE:

Unilever Axe altering definition of Masculinity11 Unilever is a true purpose brand, it’s been seven years since they installed the Sustainable Living plan across the organization as well as its brand portfolio which focusses on improving health and wellbeing, reducing environmental impact and enhancing the lives of millions of people. As a brand, the mission of Axe - or Lynx in certain parts of the world - is to help guys look, feel and smell their most attractive. Yet over the past years, masculinity has evolved.

The rules of attraction have changed, having moved to connection rather than conquest; the notion of beauty through individuality has grown. Although the bigger need for men to feel and look attractive has not changed, the meaning did. Axe connected with their audience to better understand this changing dynamic in order to keep serving their purpose with meaning.

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BUILDING STRUCTURAL CONSUMER CONNECTIONS One of the key characteristics of a good insight is that it is steady in nature, resisting the test of time. Whilst a need or insights does not change much over time, the actualization (i.e. how the need can be ful26

filled) may well alter due to changing consumer and market dynamics.

Therefore, brands need to embrace an adaptive attitude in the execution in order to keep servicing the same need relevantly. More than ever brands need to keep a finger on the pulse of what drives their market and their consumers, making the need for ongoing consumer understanding very real. Yet, instead of relying on input coming directly from consumers, marketers tend to primarily depend on their own gut feeling, talks with colleagues or advice from experts on the matter.

A CEB study with nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies shows that the customer’s voice is only incorporated in 11% of marketing decisions12. Truth is, if brands wish to stay in business, they need to invest in an ongoing consumer connection.

Installing a structural consumer connection can be done in several ways, from launching a Facebook page where you exchange thoughts with your target audience to engaging interesting and interested consumers in structural research projects. Interesting refers to those that can bring relevant and valuable input to your organization. In marketing research, we tend to focus on ‘national representativity’ as a key criterion for research validity. Instead of focusing on having a mirrored distribution on age, gender or product usage, it might be more interesting to learn from those not using or heavily using your brand and product or from those having a certain affinity with the category. Interested refers to those wanting to share their opinion, those that want to help a brand further, help it grow.

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Although many agree that consumers form the heart of their business, marketing professionals often lose track of the real consumer reality.

Yet to stay relevant, brands need to have a real feel of what is driving consumers and of the market on the long and short term. This can be reached by going ‘gemba’. Gemba is Japanese for ‘the real place’. For marketers, gemba is where your consumers are, real consumer immersion. It is the act of submerging internal stakeholders in the consumer reality. In marketing research, this can be reached through contextual and ethnographic research, where you have consumers provide you feedback when they are in relevant context occasions.

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CASE

How SkyPriority goes ‘gemba’ As an association of twenty airlines, SkyTeam’s mission is to create a seamless travel experience through operational excellence while maintaining a customer focus. To become truly customer-centric, a network of high-value customers provide real-time feedback via a proprietary mobile application. Using geo-location technology, feedback is prompted at relevant occasions (e.g. when customers enter an airport), allowing passengers to review each journey touchpoint (e.g. check-in, boarding…). Next to completing these short surveys, passengers can report their experience through pictures and bottom-up comments, ensuring feedback is always embedded in a real-life context. Rath28

er than the traditional feedback loop of days, weeks or months, all SkyPriority managers can access a customized online dashboard with real-time response data - survey figures, stories and photos - allowing them to continuously have a finger on the pulse of their high-value customers. A back-end system notifies relevant stakeholders of critical incidents, allowing them to address these immediately. By embedding these continuous feedback loops, SkyTeam moved from a ‘push’ to a ‘pull’ approach, with 83% of the SkyTeam managers stating the program allows them to better understand their customers’ needs.

But this ongoing, structural character should also be present within the company walls, where you create a habit of consumer listening across all company stakeholders. This must go beyond the traditional research sphere, where a consumer connection is only set up when the business shows to have a direct research need. Instead, consumer centricity means involving the consumers’ voice in everything you do. We often box all consumer collaboration requests as ‘consumer research’ whereas the need to interact with consumers also occurs outside the classic research funnel. Just think of when you are having a discussion with your colleague and you would like to quickly check your hypothesis or run something by your consumers. Or when you are preparing a pitch for a new product and you would benefit from that one statistic to support your business case. Or when you are about to enter an ideation brainstorm and would like to get some consumer inspiration. Consumer centricity exceeds classic research projects, it is about installing an ongoing consumer connection.

By building these structural connections, brands, marketers and other stakeholders get a closer feel of the reality beyond the company walls, allowing decision-making to be fed by the consumers’ voice whilst keeping track and envisioning the greater need and purpose it serves.

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DIGEST

In this increased acceleration, automation and abundance, the true challenge is to derive meaning. We are living in a world of too much data and too few insights. In order to make sense of it all, digestibility is key, on the one hand by dealing with different, smaller, bite-size challenges and embracing iterative and consecutive learning and on the other hand by taking a step back to derive meaning by including different perspectives.

SURFING THE RIVER OF TINY INSIGHTS To increase digestibility, many refer to the notion of agile marketing (research). Agile is buzzing, with words like scrum, backlogs and sprints increasingly being part of a marketer’s and even a marketing researcher’s glossary. Yet agile is often merely linked to speedy processes, while in fact it goes beyond adopting a scrum approach. In order to embrace digestible thinking, marketers should be ‘kaizen’.

Kaizen is a Japanese business philosophy and originates from the words ‘kai’ meaning ‘change’ and ‘zen’ which is ‘good’, literally meaning ‘change for the better’ or ‘continuous improvement’. Basically, it means marketers need to step away from the classic, rigid marketing plans and embrace a constant learning mindset. Instead of thinking big campaigns, large innovation funnels or extensive brand planning, it is about incorporating a more adaptive and experimental approach. Crucial in this incremental thinking is to approach change starting from a ‘minimal viable product’, by dealing with a business challenge in small steps: you try something on a small scale, you learn from the experience, results and feedback and only then do you develop the next version.

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In marketing research, this means moving away from a plan-set-optimize-launch-learn research approach to a more ongoing do-learn mentality, by working in short iterative cycles and incorporating instant feedback to deliver fitting solutions. Rather than defining a whole research track upfront, you work iteratively, where you start a project with a few questions and move towards the next loop based on learnings or additional questions from the previous loop. Applying this more adaptive and experimental approach in marketing research will allow organizations to react to instant inspiration and validation needs on both tactical and more strategical business challenges. This way, research is fueled by what drives the organization at certain moments.

Next, the agile mindset shortens the (traditionally long) research cycles, allowing to fuel fast decision-making. Yet the benefit also lies 32

at the participant side, where an iterative approach forces marketers and researchers to let go of the omnibus mentality where they bombard research participants with questions to capture all their research needs.

Organizing change through small strokes and surfing the river of tiny insights gives brands and marketers the opportunity to organize research at the pace of the business and digest and incorporate the direct result of their actions. This would result in increased consumer centricity where the voice of the consumer is embedded in marketing decisions beyond the classic research funnel. Yet this iterative approach can come with a certain side effect; there is a danger that this emphasis on the now could result in a single-shot focus. When

concentrating too much on tactical executions, one stops creating insights. This can be countered by building a learning plan, where internal stakeholders define what they want to learn throughout all their research activities. These learning needs should be taken along in all projects, where you analyze results while taking this bigger scope into account. By connecting the learnings from all research pieces, one can define meta learnings and build intelligence. Researchers and marketers thus need to avoid falling into the ‘agile trap’ by keeping track of the greater purpose and ambition.

TAKING A STEP BACK

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Digest also means making room to take a step back and look at things from a different perspective. It’s about taking a helicopter view, where you maximize interpretation by looking at your data from all possible angles.

As people, we tend to see the world through our own lenses, and rarely do we see more than our mind allows for. It’s in our nature, our brain is programmed to recognize familiarities. This programmed filter allows to easily pick up and digest signals from our surroundings, yet it also forms a great bias. Just think of visiting a beautiful place on holiday;

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you can take a mental shot of the surroundings, yet nothing beats a picture to capture it forever. And the interesting fact is, when looking at the picture later on, you might spot things you didn’t see when you were there. This mental bias is present in everything we do, also when interpreting results, brainstorming on new ideas, developing a new brand strategy, defining new usage moments‌ yet it can be countered by taking a step back and interpreting things from a meta perspective.

You can do so by taking a helicopter view and considering the mental model your brand uses. Depending on whether you are following the classic, penetration, influencer or relationship branding religion, you will digest things from a different perspective (see Brand Religion 34

paper). But this is also done by involving different people with different roles and backgrounds. By making research and insights available to all stakeholders, you will get a more complete, 360° view of reality, as everyone will look at things from their own perspective, through their own lenses.

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GLUE

Whilst an iterative approach involving different perspectives helps increase digestibility, it also leads to more insights and data points. Combining these with the abundance of data sources available, one might get lost in translation.

Only by gluing data and people can we generate connected wisdom.

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GLUING THE DOTS In the past, primary research formed the core source of consumer and market insights, yet today it is just the tip of the iceberg and a minor part of the data mix surrounding us. Only by connecting the dots between the diverse streams of data can marketing (research) reach the augmented view essential for future-proof decision-making.

Traditionally, research focusses on a single-method approach to gain consumer understanding. Yet this method focus often results in a uni36

fied, often depthless, perspective. Thinking in terms of activities rather than methods and adopting a solution focus, however, allows to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying question or business need. And only by complementing this solution focus with existing data streams can one get a comprehensive picture. In the end, great insights do not only come from what you ask people.

We should thus leverage the data abundance (e.g. behavioral and social data) surrounding us. Researchers and marketers should become smart connectors that uncover better and stronger insights by linking different data streams (e.g. survey or research data, social media data, behavioral data) and connecting the dots. In that sense, marketers and researchers are like bartenders: you select the right ingredients and shake or stir them wisely to create the perfect cocktail in order to fully

grasp the consumer and market reality. There are no real limits anymore, the only limit is your own ability and creativity to smartly connect all the tools and data that are available.

“Consumers are like clouds, they are unique and elusive, constantly changing and unpredictable. Looking at a cloud, from the ground up, it is hard to define its shape. To measure clouds, it is not sufficient to look at them directly, you need to take different perspectives to fully understand them. In fact, it is by looking at the shadow it creates, that one can reveal its shape. The same goes for understanding consumers.�

Tony Costella, Consumer Insights Director at Heineken

CASE

How Philips uncovered the digital footprint of online shopping Philips Lighting is a global market leader with recognized expertise in the development, manufacturing and application of innovative (LED) lighting solutions. Philips Lighting aspires to optimize their online sales of lighting bulbs, luminaires and connected lights by improving traffic to and conversion on Philips-branded web pages on e-tailer properties. This is typically done through customer journey mapping and touchpoint analysis. Yet what people say they do is often not in line with their actual behavior. Hence,

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to identify and map the consumer journey in all its aspects, a multiple-data approach was used. A usage and attitude survey mapped ‘what people think they do’, while a shopper mission revealed ‘what people really do’, using passive metering technology. The latter yielded in a full digital footprint of the online purchase behavior (e.g. website visits, search terms used and app usage). Combining these different perspectives allowed to reveal discrepancies between stated and actual behavior, ultimately leading to a more profound understanding of the shopper mission. The research revealed for example that although 44% of shoppers claim reviews are their main driver for purchase, only 7% actually read them; it also uncovered that reviews rather serve as a driver for where to shop rather than the purchase itself.

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GLUING TEAMS But things go beyond connecting the consumer and the data. The silo mentality is also present within and across organizations. Far too often, clients and agencies work alongside each other, as two separate entities, not keeping the other one in the loop except when a research need occurs. Yet working ‘kaizen’ (i.e. in long-term, iterative loops) requires an ongoing conversation between agency and clients. Clients need to keep the agency in the loop on potential projects that might enter the pipeline, while agencies in their turn need to feed back any results or insights as soon as they become available (cf. supra: bitesize reporting). This continuous flow of communication will stimulate stakeholders to adopt a continuous learning mindset enabling fast decision-making.

Yet it does not end there. To answer the need for speed from the business, both agencies and clients need to reorganize themselves and remove any internal silo structures.

Insight Managers need to position themselves as a structural business partner for all internal stakeholders requesting consumer inspiration or validation. At the same time, they should function as a doorkeeper, connecting the internal business with the agency side. The latter must also reorganize themselves to serve all client needs agilely. Traditional research teams consist of people each with a particular set of

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skills and involved in a subset of tasks. Yet if wanting to cope with the need for speed and taking on a ‘kaizen’ approach, it is important that team members are trained to adopt T-shaped skills, i.e. to be involved in every step of the way or that expert roles are grouped in small cross-functional teams. This requires a new organizational structure, beyond moving from traditional hierarchy to flat-management alternatives. Some companies, such as Freitag and Zappos, found the answer in ‘holacracy’, a framework where the processes are organized in circles and sub-circles with people taking on different roles and tasks.

In this structure, employees are empowered to take a leadership role and make meaningful decisions, feeding organizational agility when a request comes in from the client side.

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Removing the silos both within and across organizations will allow research to follow the pace of the business. At the client side, it will furthermore remove any need for internal stakeholders to do things themselves. This will eventually lead to more connected research, where the business can learn as a whole, thus avoiding any research overlap and also guaranteeing consistent research quality.

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EARN

Traditional marketing was all about buying media and buying attention. Yet today, consumers are bombarded with commercial messages, with between 4,000 and 10,000 brand and advertisement cues reaching us on a daily basis (ads, brand logos, product placement‌). Only a small minority of all this gets absorbed.

The commercial overdose has resulted in consumers filtering out this commercial layer, making it a great challenge for brands to stand out and break through the clutter. The days where brands could yell for attention are over; today, you have to earn it.

This goes beyond what the industry labels wrongly as ’earned media’, the clicks, shares and eyeballs on your pages are not earned at all.

With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming in place in May 2018, the doors to consumers will be locked for good, making it more important than ever to earn their attention and engagement.

Because ultimately, if you earn the consumers, you earn the data and if you earn the data, you earn the future.

EARNING THROUGH ENGAGEMENT

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Researchers and marketers must (re)consider the lifetime value of consumers. We need to earn their attention. Throughout the years, the research industry, just like the marketing world, has taken this for granted, with disastrous consequences. We continue to approach consumers with long and boring questionnaires, causing not only drop-out and low survey quality but also the risk to dry out consumer panels in the long run. Instead, we should invest in engagement in the long term, for example by adapting our research formats to the snappy reality.

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Consumers are forced to make continuous trade-offs on how to spend their time. The new generation has grown up using visual and ephemeral communication, resulting in different expectations of how and when they want to connect with brands (See NextGen Research paper).

In order to stay relevant, we need to move towards more natural consumer connections, by working with iterations of short research challenges at moments which are relevant for people to give their opinion about; for example, during idle times, when people take a break or have some time left or at moments where they just had a certain product or service experience and want to share their feedback.

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Yet increased naturalness also means embracing more contemporary channels of communication. When looking at how people are using the variety of communication channels available, we can see that the most popular online communication is ‘simple chat’. Over 2.5 billion people have installed at least one messaging app, with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat leading the pack. With people using more and more chat-based communication like WhatsApp and Messenger, research should also incorporate these more natural communication settings.

EARNING

BY TAKING RESPONSIBILITY Next, it is important to consider why consumers want to help us, connect with us and share their opinion. It is key to identify what consumers expect in return. We cannot keep taking without giving back in any way.

“Move from marketing to consumers, to mattering to people.”

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David Jones, Former CEO Havas Media

Consumer connections come with a responsibility. It is common to fall into a ‘speed trap’, where the fast decision-making forces you to keep going forward. Yet it will become increasingly more important to take a step back and feed back to consumers what you have done with their input.

This implies a form of mutual trust. Marketers and researchers need to earn the consumers’ trust. This will be even more important once the new privacy legislation is in place. It will become impossible to use consumer data without the consumers’ explicit consent. Nevertheless, this also brings a huge opportunity, because if you earn the consumers, you earn the data.

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The Mad Men days are over and this is probably for the better. Nonetheless, we can undoubtedly learn a few things from Don Draper and his colleagues. Consider one of his famous quotes, “The day you sign a client is the day you start losing him”, which is the plain truth for consumers and research participants as well. The days are over when you could take clients/ consumers/ participants/ people for granted; they are the beating heart of any business. In order to stay relevant in these accelerating, automated and abundant times, we need to retrieve the edge marketing (research) needs and deserves.

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This starts with envisioning the bigger purpose and cultivating longterm strategic thinking, whilst embracing an adaptive attitude by building structural consumer connections. Next, in this world of too much data and too few insights, we need to increase digestibility by embracing iterative and consecutive learning as well as by incorporating a helicopter view. Next, it is about generating connected wisdom by gluing data and people. Lastly, we need to ditch the ‘own’ mentality and start thinking about how we can earn consumer attention and closeness.

The mad (wo)men of the future are those marketers and researchers that embrace today’s future through edgy thinking.

REFERENCES Bolloré, Y. (2017). Welcome to meaningful brands® 2017. Retrieved from http://dk.havas.com/ wp-content/uploads/sites/37/2017/02/mb17_brochure_final_web.pdf 1

UEG Press release (2017, October 30). UEG Week: Artificial intelligence: is this the future of early colorectal cancer detection? Retrieved from https://www.ueg.eu/press/releases/ ueg-press-release/article/ueg-week-artificial-intelligence-is-this-the-future-of-early-colorectalcancer-detection/ 2

Seo, S.H. and Young, J.E. (2017). Picassnake: the painting robot. Retrieved from http://hci. cs.umanitoba.ca/projects-and-research/details/picassnake-the-painting-robot 3

Dvorsky, G. (2017, June 14). This Artificially Intelligent Robot Composes and Performs Its Own Music. Retrieved from https://gizmodo.com/this-artificially-intelligent-robot-composesand-perfor-17960930825 4

Manyika, J.; Chui, M.; Miremadi, M.; Bughin, J.; George, K.; Willmott, P. and Dewhurst, M. (2017, January). Harnessing automation for a future that works. Retrieved from https://www. mckinsey.com/global-themes/digital-disruption/harnessing-automation-for-a-future-that-works 5

Beiner, F. (2015, May). Will “Marketer” be Replaced By Robots? Retrieved from https://www. replacedbyrobot.info/3819/marketer 6

TED Guest author (2014, May 17). We asked 3 experts: How will AI change our lives in the near future? Retrieved from https://blog.ted.com/we-asked-3-experts-how-will-ai-change-ourlives-in-the-near-future/ 7

Marr, B. (2017, January 23). Really Big Data At Walmart: Real-Time Insights From Their 40+ Petabyte Data Cloud. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/01/23/ really-big-data-at-walmart-real-time-insights-from-their-40-petabyte-data-cloud/ #22caf1b56c10 8

Danziger, P.N. (2017, October 24). How Can P&G Be So Clueless About What Consumers Want? Retrieved from https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.forbes.com/sites/ pamdanziger/2017/10/24/can-pg-be-so-clueless-about-what-customers-want/amp/ 9

Brand Language Design (2017, March 27). The relation between Brand Purpose and Brand Profit. Retrieved from http://www.agbrandlanguagedesign.com/relation-between-brandpurpose-and-brand-profit 10

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Unilever. AXE. Retrieved from https://www.unilever.com/brands/our-brands/axe.html

Spenner, P. and Bird, A. (2012, August 16). Marketers Flunk the Big Data Test. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/08/marketers-flunk-the-big-data-test 12

Softpedia® News. Fire Drill Gone Bad Shuts Down An ING Bank Data Center for Ten Hours.

Retrieved from http://news.softpedia.com/news/fire-drill-gone-bad-shuts-down-one-of-ing-sdata-centers-for-ten-hours-508189.shtml 13

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Annelies Verhaeghe Managing Partner & Head of Research Innovation Annelies is Managing Partner at InSites Consulting.

She has an interest in consumer insight activation and neo-observational research techniques, such as consumer-led ethnography, and is intrigued by how to get fresh insights out of social media data.

Annelies won the ESOMAR Young Researcher of the Year Award in 2009 and has been a regular speaker at market research events in addition to having several publications in academic and trade journals. She is also in charge of the daily operations at the research hub of InSites Consulting in Romania and has a passion for the region. @annaliezze annelies.verhaeghe@insites-consulting.com 48

Katia Pallini Content Impact Manager Katia is part of the ForwaR&D Lab and Marketing team at InSites Consulting, where her focus lies on research innovation and content marketing. Her areas of expertise are branding, implicit research and making research NextGen-proof. @KPallini Katia@insites-consulting.com

Kristof De Wulf CEO InSites Consulting With over 20 years of relevant experience with world-leading FMCG brands, Kristof helps global brands to unlock the consulting potential that resides in ordinary consumers. He is co-author of the book The Consumer Consulting Board, has been awarded with the MOAward for Agency Researcher of the year 2010 and is a regular speaker at various research and marketing events worldwide. @kristofdewulf Kristof@insites-consulting.com

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Tom De Ruyck Managing Partner Tom is Managing Partner and global expert in consumer & employee collaboration, supporting InSites Consulting’s efforts to make companies more consumer-connected. He loves leading in-depth workshops and chairing events, and has given more than 500 speeches all around the world. Next to that he is Adjunct Professor at the IESEG School of Management. @tomderuyck Tom@insites-consulting.com

B

ack in the Mad Men days, marketers were creative superstars that

lived on the edge to move people, brands and businesses. Since the ‘60s, we moved from a world characterized by linearity, craftmanship and scarcity to one defined by acceleration, automation and abundance. While we shifted to this opposite, marketing (research) seems to be still holding on to the same old principles and values as if nothing has changed. We are fooling ourselves in thinking we are part of this transformation. Instead we are characterized by ignorance, where we keep on chasing the same practices. Is our market at a standstill? Have we lost our edge? This paper will highlight a framework to bring back the edge marketing (research) deserves.

By Annelies Verhaeghe (Managing Partner & Head of Research Innovation), Katia Pallini (Content Impact Manager), Kristof De Wulf (CEO) and Tom De Ruyck (Managing Partner).

ABOUT INSITES CONSULTING From the start of InSites Consulting in 1997 until today, there has been only one constant: we are continuously pushing the boundaries of marketing research. With a team of academic visionaries, passionate marketers and research innovators, we empower people to create the future of brands. As one of the top 3 most innovative market research agencies in the world (GRIT), we help our clients connect with consumers all over the world.

www.insites-consulting.com