September 2019
Difficult Conversations - Winning Pecha Kucha piece
The Magic of Execution
Carmen Vicelich
RAY POYNTER’S
Point of view on Conference 2019
New Horizons and Old Delusions By: Carl Davidson
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Sue York (New MR) on
Chatbots Hot or Not
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WORD FROM THE BOARD By Galina Mitchelhill
I’m writing this the morning after the close of Conference 2019 New Horizons exploring the frontiers of a changing landscape. For me personally, this was one of the most exciting and inspiring conferences I’ve attended, and based on the levels of engagement of speakers and attendees, I’m confident that I’m not alone in that assessment. I say this every time, but I’ll say it again: The level of talent and knowledge in this industry just blows my mind! And I don’t just mean among those of us who are starting to get a few grey hairs. The next wave of talent that is emerging in our industry is absolutely stunning. Sure, the keynote speakers were always bound to impress, but the 24+ speakers and presenters also challenged many of our assumptions and opened our minds to the market opportunities that are either already here or well on their way to becoming part of the new mainstream.
On mornings like this one, I can’t help my mind going to the big questions. What now? What actions can we all take to build on these new insights? How can we, as RANZ leaders and members, build our industry and promote the services and talents we bring to clients, employers, and customers? It behoves each of us to think about how we can build better business cases for market insights, insight projects, insight teams, and better integration of insights into everything we do in our various businesses. As RANZ, we will be ‘championing insights genius’ as per our refreshed organisational purpose.
Publisher: The Research Association of New Zealand The publications dedicated team includes: Editor: Ishita Mendonsa Ad Coordinator: Kia-Mae Beniston Copy Editor: Lauren McKee Layout and design: Charmaine Fuhrmann We thank our many contributors for your time and efforts
Images are copyright to their owners and should not be copied without permission Copyright (c) Stock.XCHNG Photos, 123RF Stock Photos, RA. InterVIEW is published four times a year by an enthusiastic subcommittee of the Research Association committee. The views expressed are not those of the Research Association. We welcome your input and your requests for advertising space. Visit us: www.researchassociation.org.nz
Galina Mitchelhill
Email us: ranzinterview@gmail.com
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Ishita Mendonsa
TEERING OUR CANOE
This is a special issue for me, and I hope for our readers too – hot off the heels of the Research Association of New Zealand’s 2019 New Horizons conference. It is noteworthy because of the calibre and wisdom of the speakers at the conference, and how incredibly inspiring this conference was by all accounts for researchers, agencies, clients, and thought leaders alike. While we would have liked to run all of the papers presented, a few conference speakers have been featured in this issue where, most notably, Ray Poynter of New MR takes us through his key conference takeaways. We hope that some of these articles, images, and first-person accounts allow you to dip your feet in this wellspring of galvanised thinking. In this issue, we explore new ways of considering the way forward for our industry in an economy that only seems to get tougher, and with a climate that is unyielding for both clients and agencies to boot. Whether it is Carl Davidson’s piece on digging deeper into human behaviour, Jon Carapiet’s piece on the value of nostalgia, Emily Bing’s piece on mobile consumers, or Sue York’s pertinent discussion of chatbots – what we learn from these perspectives and those presented at the conference is that we need to be (1) pushing ourselves further and (2) thinking more strategically. As Andrew Cannon of the Global Research Business Network mentioned in his opening talk at New Horizons, to gain a sense of competitive advantage we need to think of ourselves less as librarians and more as strategists in order to embed insights into the lifeblood of organisations, whether this means revamping data collection methods, organising ourselves better, or, thinking about what this means for those whose data we harness, Ray Poynter summed this up best when he said that there are profound changes we need to consider now with respect to the ethics of MR, people development, and how we leverage the myriad skills we have to offer. Carmen Vicelich echoed these thoughts when she talked about realising that as an industry we now need to think about how to disrupt, or be disrupted – the key being people. As Vicelich said, “the people on the boat are going to help win the race to new horizons.” So in the end, in other words, our canoe will be steered towards new horizons by the heartbeat of our organisations, our people – the people we work with, the customers we work for, or the people we collaborate with.
Ishita
Apart from being the editor of InterVIEW, Ishita is passionate about studying human behaviour, as a market researcher, strategist, and former academic. Last year, Ishita was a New Zealand Young Researcher of the Year finalist and has previously won the International Journal of Diversity’s Scholar of the Year Award. Ishita welcomes any feedback or thoughts you might have on the < conte magazine, potential comments and contributions.
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The rise of today’s mobile consumer
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Written by Ray Poynter
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Word from the Board with Galina Mitchelhill
Editors note - Steering our canoe
New Horizons conference 2019 award winners
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AN OUTSIDER’S VIEW OF THE 2019 RANZ CONFERENCE
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New Horizons and old Delusions
Contents
The Mysteriously expanding Mrs MacNaughton Alastair Gordon
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New Horizons conference 2019 highlights
Colin Yee - Jolly good fellow!
Books in brief By Duncan Stuart
Do you love the market research industry and want to spread your wings? Does rubbing shoulders with some of industries brilliant minds interest you? InterVIEW magazine is looking for a volunteer editor to work with our passionate team. Please email Claire at secretary@researchassociation.org.nz for this great opportunity to get involved!
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The Magic of Execution
Chatbots - Hot or not? By Sue York
Carmen Vicelich
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For the greater good Horst Feldhaeuser
Difficult Conversations
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Escape - How history traps us in an invisible cage
Mysteries of the unknown RANZ Conference paper judging
60 Seconds with Tianyi Luan - NeedScope
Nostalgia
Still as good as it used to be? By Jon Carapiet
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The Research Association of New Zealand would like to thank the following volunteers who have been an invaluable help and support in putting together our 2019 conference, New Horizons Kavindi Gunarathna Robyn Moore Wing Morgan Yan Ma Suraj Nair Grant Innes Charmaine Fuhrrmann Sarah Payne Helen Jarrett Jamie Chiang Paul Hitchfield Andrew Pearce Nicholl Oblitas-Costa Jackson Humphries
THANKING OUR SPONSORS
Additionally, we would also like to recognise the volunteers of the RANZ Executive Committee during the past year: Ishita Mendonsa Kris Mayo Taija Peach Penny Turner Rachel Prendergast Sue Cardwell George Wilks Jenni Anderson Lauren McKee Kia-Mae Beniston
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In case you missed it, here are the winners for The Research Association of New Zealand’s New Horizons conference for 2019: Best Paper Winner (sponsored by ESOMAR): Next Generation of Insights Professionals: Using Marketing Research to Give Back Dr. Catherine Frethey-Bentham, University of Auckland Business School and Paul Gilberd, The Housing Foundation David O’Neill Award for Innovation Winner: Blockchain Technology - The New Frontier of Data Trading Kathryn Topp, Yabble People’s Choice (Sponsored by Big Picture) Winner: Fear and Love and White Noise - Michael Goldthorpe, Hunch Powered by Pecha Kucha (sponsored by InfoTools) Winner: Iris Krzyzosiak - Kantar, Auckland Pecha Kucha finalists: Daniel Brownie - Colmar Brunton, Wellington George Wilks - Needscope, Auckland Alexis Ryde - Colmar Brunton, Auckland RANZ’s Newest Research Fellow: Colin Yee, Glasshouse Consulting Rising Stars Panel Alex Jones - Big Picture Deirdre Conroy - Colmar Brunton Michael Chan - Colmar Brunton Tianyi Luan - NeedScope International
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WHAT DID YOU THINK Compiled by Ishita Mendonsa
2019 HIGHLIGHTS With most attendees basking in post-conference inspiration, we decided to ask a few conference goers what the highlight of this year’s New Horizon’s conference was for them.
DR. CATHERINE FRETHEY-BENTHAM The University of Auckland “For me, the real highlights were the wonderful keynote speakers and all of the fantastic young researchers. I think that our industry is in very good hands going forward!”
JON CARAPIET Colmar Brunton “The diversity of topics was great to see. One key theme is the ongoing increase in technology having a counter-trend in the need for qualitative insights to really understand what the data is saying and how to connect with people.”
KAVINDI GUNARATHNA Spark “The RANZ Conference was future focused and covered a variety of important trends that show our market, and the world is changing rapidly at a faster pace than previously. It highlights the importance of bringing together customer data, insights and innovation to prove ROI on how, as Insights Professionals, we can fundamentally inform the conversation of where companies can invest to deliver better customer solutions and experiences.”
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CONSTANCE APELT NeedScope International
ROB BREE CEO, RANZ
“It was great to hear about some really innovative ideas and inspiring examples of work.”
“I really enjoyed Andrew Cannon’s opening presentation on the IMPACT of insights. Specifically his reminder to us all that we need to be “selling” the impact of insights and the benefits to the business in terms of financial and non-financial ROI. It’s something our marketing colleagues are much better at than we are in the insights community.”
NICHOLL OBLITAS-COSTAS Perceptive “I really enjoyed the RANZ conference this year. The highlight for me was seeing the collaboration between Housing Foundation, the University of Auckland and Infotools. I think collaboration between different parties is so important for all professionals in our industry. We need to find new ways to collaborate to make our insights offer stronger to clients so that they can make better business decisions. I also really liked Duncan Stuart’s presentation. It really challenges you to think outside the box.”
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The rise of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mobi
Emily Bing is an Account Director at Pureprofile with experience working in research agencies and data and insights for more than a decade. She loves to chat about research and the future of our industry, so please get in touch if youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to discuss your research needs over a coffee.
Emily Bing
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Y BING
ile consumer I
n today’s world, New Zealanders have become increasingly dependent on our personal devices – 95% of NZers now own a smartphone, and 70% of us feel anxious when it’s not charged. Our phones are uniquely personalised to us and have become such an important part of our lives and how we connect. New Zealanders spend an average of 62 daysper year on their phones, with those aged 25-34 years old spending 3 times more on their phones compared to older consumers. And, use of our phones is growing by 30% year-on-year.
nes sing their pho u re a rs e m Consu ities, everyday activ r fo n e ft o re mo wth areas inro g st e h ig h eys with the ng online surv ti le p m co g in clud ared to is more comp th g in o d % 5 nd (4 ing products a h rc a se re , r) a last ye s (38% growth), email % 0 (4 s e ic rv se t messages, so n a st in d n a ) th). growth usic (32% grow m d n a ia d e m cial ging re also chan a s e d u it tt a Our ificant e seen a sign ’v e W . e m ti r e dov ‘just like spen o h w se o th rise in who phone’ or those y m n o e m ti ing y phone don’t check m agree that ‘if I s something im is m t h ig m I y I worr t how ‘I worr y abou d n a t’ n a rt o p one’. nd on my ph e sp I e m ti much cting of us are restri r e w fe r, e v e w Ho spending on ’re e w e m ti ch how mu ch day. our phones ea
Pureprofile NZ panel data: Total survey completes 2017-2019
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Holder tells us they’re For example, if an Account n feed them more aniinterested in animals, we ca re personalised expemal content, making it a mo rience.
In the last year we’ve seen mobile overtake desktop as the main method of completing online surveys.
In the last year, we’ve seen mobile overtake desktop as the main method of completing online surveys – highlighting the importance of ensuring all our surveys are mobile optimised. Over the last year, we’ve seen data caps increase and the cost of phone plans decrease, as well as faster internet speeds and greater wifi connectivity, so it’s not surprising that we’ve seen a rise in respondents completing surveys on their phone.
As more respondents choose to complete surveys on their phones, it creates some exciting opportunities for researchers using mobile applications. Pureprofile’s technology and app has allowed us to create a community of engaged users who can do surveys on the go. Users download the Pureprofile app, log in and complete surveys. In addition to surveys, we ask them profiling questions and display content that is tailored to their interests, just like their Facebook feed. 14 InterVIEW September 2019
we’ve seen in the deThere are some real benefits velopment of the app: to always think • Firstly, it’s encouraged us mobile, it’s not fit for mobile first – if it’s not n to app users, allowed to be show the size of a target automatically reducing audience ngs so we can • We’ve enabled location setti their location sed on target respondents ba and where they’ve been gaged users who • We’ve got a pool of highly en perience when less ex have an easy and seam th us wi they choose to interact media campaigns • We can run programmatic ong Pureprofile s am for brand uplift studie rposes members for research pu Now that the Pureprofile app has been up and running for a number of years, we’ve started to extend our app technology on to other platforms, which is where we believe the exciting opportunities are. Pureprofile has developed a partnership in Australia with Raiz Acorns) (formally who are a micro savings and investcompany ments with around 200k Memmembers. bers are typically skewed towards younger, affluent males, therefore sense making from a partnership perspective.
It’s a win/win for Pureprofile and the brands we choose to partner with: • Our partners collect a stack of data about their own members, which they can monetise and collected greater advertising revenue, and it gives their members another reason to engage with them
• For Pureprofile, it means we have an extended panel of consumers we can target for surveys and find hard to reach audiences that exist outside of our own panel alone
The Pureprofile app technology is shared with Raiz, allowing members to complete surveys in their own platform and be rewarded in Raiz currency. When members sign up to do surveys within Raiz, their demographics (and location, if enabled) is shared with Pureprofile, along with profiling information to understand more about their members. This is really exciting because we know that sometimes even the biggest and best panel providers can’t provide the audiences we need to research and this is a common frustration within the industry. The power of collaboration with external platforms, such as Raiz and AA Smartfuel in New Zealand, means we’re able to target new audiences (many who are probably not on online panels) presenting a great opportunity for researchers.
Using this technology, we’re able to easily find audiences and answer research questions such as:
• What is the demographic profile of people who travel along the bike path from West Auckland into Auckland CBD during the week?
• What is the brand impact of our outdoor advertising among our target audience?
• How can we measure our customer service among customers who visited us – or our competitors? Growth of mobile is taking over, not only in research but in our everyday lives, and we need to embrace the opportunities that mobile consumers provide us. Challenge your thinking when working with your online panel provider and explore what’s possible < conte to reach your target audience. 15
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The Research Association of New Zealand would like to congratulate our newest fellow ...
COLIN YEE! After graduating from Victoria University in 1981, Colin Yee started his career in the Auto Industry initially with Mitsubishi as a Marketing Trainee and then as a Regional Marketing Rep. Colin moved to Auckland in 1986 and became Product Development Manager, then Marketing Manager for Subaru. In 1988, he was part of the first intake of the newly launched Post Graduate Marketing Diploma at the Auckland University Business School. There, he met Richard Brookes who was a Consultant to MRL Research which had started the Syndicated Research programme for the NZ Auto Industry. Colin was appointed Divisional Manager-Automotive in July 1989 and this was the start of his 30-year career in Market Research. He has spent much of his time with Research International, initially as a Research Director, then as Managing Director from 2000 to 2012. He was also Deputy Chair then Chair of AMRO from 2006 to 2010. In February 2012, he started Glasshouse Consulting as a full service boutique and then Symphony Research, a third party CATI provider in April of the same year. Outside work, Colin is married with two olderaged children and spends much of his free time doing residential house reclads and property development.
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O H NEW
L O D N A In 2005, Seth Godin took a poke at the marketing profession by releasing a book called All Marketers Are Liars [i]. Writing about the book in his blog, Godin said: The truth is elusive. No one knows the whole truth about anything. We certainly don’t know the truth about the things we buy and recommend and use [ii]. While it may seem unfair to single out marketers with this criticism, it’s hard to escape the facts. Somewhere between one third and one half of all new products launched fail to thrive [iii]. The failure rate is even higher for consumer packaged goods, where 75% of new products fail in the first year and only 3% achieve what the Harvard Business Review calls “a highly successful launch”. Given the global spend on advertising alone is over US$500 billion [iv], this does seem like a poor return on the marketing investment. If we were to judge marketers on the success of products, it would be easy to conclude that marketing is much more hit-and-miss than the industry would like anyone to believe. Maybe Godin is right after all? When a product fails, it’s common to find experts to helpfully explain what can be learned from the wreckage of failure [v]. Yet what marketers need is not more wise-after-the-fact hindsight, but better foresight. In this regard, the real problem for marketers might be with their insight partners. After all, the whole point of insight is to give marketers foresight. Put this another way: The insight industry pro18 InterVIEW September 2019
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vides marketers with a series of predictions about how consumers will respond (be it to a new product, campaign, or pricing strategy). But what if they (and us) have been thinking about consumer behaviour in the wrong way? What if our assumptions about how consumers think, feel, and behave have had us all looking in the wrong places and asking the wrong questions? There are two important developments in psychology – two new horizons for all insight professionals, if you like – that suggest this just might be the case. The first is what some have called ‘the behavioural turn’, and draws on behaviour and brain science to offer a very different view of how humans process information and make sense of the world. I, and others, have written about this ‘turn’ in previous issues of InterVIEW. In short, it shows how we are all cognitive misers (who think only as much as we need to), who conserve our cognitive energy by talking shortcuts wherever we can, and who are profoundly influenced by how things are framed and the social context we experience them in. As a result, we all experience a range of what psychologists call ‘heuristics and biases’, which cruelly illustrate how none of us are as smart as we secretly think we are. But it is the second of these ‘new horizons’ that perhaps poses the more significant challenge to those of us in the
insight game. This is the notion of ‘the adaptive unconscious’, which provides a window into how little any of us can really know about how our feelings and attitudes are shaped. This perspective argues that the real problem is that consumers never really understand why they think, feel, and act in the way they do. Even more damning, this line of research suggests that the explanations people provide for their feelings and behaviour come after the fact, and are interpretations rather than clarifications. Fiery Cushman captured this best when he said “we are shockingly ignorant of the causes of our own behaviour… the explanations that we provide are sometimes wholly fabricated, and certainly never complete” [vi]. Cushman labelled these pseudo-explanations ‘confabulations’. The notion that we are (in the words of the title of one of the best summaries of the research on this topic) ‘strangers to ourselves’ seems preposterous [vii]. The explanations we offer for our attitudes and behaviour by definition feel right. But the evidence is clear that we’re just fooling ourselves, and that we’re all hopeless confabulators. Perhaps this is really where the insight industry has largely failed marketing? What the evidence from psychology clearly demonstrates is that people are
very poor at understanding their current feelings and behaviour, and lousy at predicting how they will feel and act in the future. And yet so much of market research continues to be based on simply asking people questions, treating the answers to their questions not as commentary but as gospel. Taken together, these two new horizons demonstrate that human behaviour is much more enigmatic, and far less certain, than we previously believed. They also show why we need to constantly innovate in the way we collect and interpret insights. ________________________________ [i] Godin, S. (2005). All Marketers are Liars. New York: Penguin Group. [ii] Godin, S. (2012, October 4). Not Liars, Storytellers. Retrieved from Seth’s Blog: https://seths. blog/2012/10/not-liars-storytellers/ [iii] Crawford, C. M. (1987). New Product Failure Rates: A Reprise. Research Management, 30(4), 20-24. Adams, M. (2004). PDMA Foundation’s 2004 Comparative Performance Assessment Study. Product Development and Management Association. [iv] Sebastian, M. (2015). Marketers to Boost Global Ad Spending this Year to $540 Billion. AdAge. Retrieved from https://adage.com/article/media/marketers-boost-global-ad-spending540-billion/297737 [v] Gordon, M., Musso, C., Rebentisch, E., & Gupta, N. (2010). The Path to Successful New Products. McKinsey Quarterly. Retrieved from McKinsey & Company [vi] Cushman, F. (2011). What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit? Confabulation Retrieved from Edge: https://www. edge.org/response-detail/11513 [vii] Wilson, T. D. (2002). Strangers to ourselves: Discovering the adaptive unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University < conte Press.
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OUTSIDERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S VIEW THE
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R ANZ 2019 CONFERENCE... I was delighted to be invited as a keynote speaker and workshop leader to this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s RANZ conference in Auckland and I wanted to share my perspective as an outsider. I enjoyed the contributions of the other overseas speakers, but since I was already familiar with their work, my attention was particularly focused on the local contributions. The first thing to say is that I was delighted by the quality and passion of the sessions I saw. The second point is that I was very pleased to see the significant contribution from younger researchers. The Pecha Kucha session was perhaps the best combination of four Pecha Kucha presentations I have ever seen. The students working with Dr.
Catherine Frethey-Bentham and Paul Gilberd were amazing (and it was great to see that project win the ESOMAR award). I had the pleasure of working with Nicholl Oblitas-Costa and Jackson Humphries in preparation for moderating the Rising Stars
session, which highlighted four very capable young researchers. The challenge for RANZ and the wider New Zealand market research and insights industry is how to keep these people energised and how to keep finding more rising stars.
The Rising Stars panel discussion, moderated by Ray Poynter < conte Photo Credits: Marcus Bailey, Glimpse 21
THE PEOPLE New Zealand seems blessed with lots of very bright and able market research and insights professionals. The presentations were good, for example, the presentation about Paymark and its segmentation by Darren Hopper and Shaun Fitzgibbon showed how to blend research methodology, data, and a real business need. The interactive sessions during the workshops, and the questions from the attendees showed that New Zealand has many, very capable people. THE SOCIAL/ GOVERNMENT SECTOR I was surprised to discover that the Social/Government sector in New Zealand was so large. I heard the number 60% mentioned, and I was delighted that the Government sector was well represented at the workshops. Whilst I enjoyed presentations like the ‘New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey - exploring the dark figure of crime’ by Dr Tadhg Daly and Kate Preston, it would have been good to hear even more from this side of the business. During the workshops, Sue York and I heard some great examples of work that is being done in New Zealand, so there is plenty to shout about.
the world are trying to do and it was great to see so much happening in New Zealand. I guess the next step is to ask what more can be done. How can other disciplines be involved and other institutions be added to the mix? BUSINESS ISSUES Carmen Vicelich was a great addition to the programme and she got the conference off to a business-focused start. Some speakers talked about New Zealand’s tall poppy syndrome, but Carmen showed why we need to highlight and praise success. The Future of Research Summit on Wednesday morning spent a large part of it’s time focusing on business issues and, in particular, the need for market research and insights to ‘follow the money’ if it is to stay relevant to businesses. One potential weakness in New Zealand is there does not seem to be a forum where clients can meet and talk to clients. This is an increasingly common arrangement elsewhere in the world and helps increase the business focus of market research and insights.
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One of the most inspiring presentations came from somebody outside the normal realms of market research and insights, Jess Molina, a social media “influencer”. Jess was an inspiration in terms of showing how the new modes of communication can readily be leveraged to great effect. I like to think I am pretty switched on in the area of social media, but I learned plenty from this presentation. REGIONAL AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES When people in Europe think of New Zealand, and people in organisations like ESOMAR think of New Zealand, we think of it as part of the APAC (Asia Pacific) region. We assume that New Zealand is contributing to and benefitting from its regional compatriots, and beyond that, contributing to and benefiting from global market research and insight networks. To some extent this is true, the achievement of Infotools in providing the global hub for so much of Coca-Cola is amazing, but many of the researchers I spoke to had a quite New Zealand-centric perspective. AN APPETITE FOR LEARNING
LINKS WITH ACADEMICS Another area the Conference stood out was in terms of links with academia and, in particular, the University of Auckland Business School. This is something that research organisations around
LOOKING BEYOND RESEARCH
Carmen Vicelich speaking at ‘New Horizons’. Photo credits: Marcus Bailey, Glimpse
I have a passion for learning and for sharing and it was clear that many market researchers and insight professionals in New Zealand share that passion. The conference attracted people from all over New Zealand,
MY SUGGESTIONS Here are some specific thoughts about the future: • Be confident, New Zealand has the people to make an impact • Treat developing the next generation as the key priority • Create a forum for clients to talk to clients – this is common elsewhere in the world
• Expand the learning opportunities, looking at channels such as the universities, online courses, webinars and future self-funding workshops
This conference was great, and that is all thanks to the vision of the organisers and the hard work of the volunteers.
• Try to play a bigger regional and global role. Emphasise the success of New Zealanders who do well overseas, seek to export more ideas and services
Ray is the founder of NEWMR.org, and Managing Director of The Future Place. He is also an accomplished author, notably of The Handbook of Mobile Market Research, and The Handbook of Online and Social Media Research. He is also Editor of the ESOMAR book ‘Answers to Contemporary Market Research Questions’.
FINAL THOUGHT The final comment is a big shout-out to all the volunteers that made the conference possible, starting with Galina and Geoff, but extending to everybody who played a role. Other conferences have a small army of paid people doing most of the hard work.
This year Ray was a speaker at The Research Association of New Zealand’s 2019 conference, ‘New Horizons’ and delivered a talk titled, “The State of the MR Nation in 2019.”
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all seemingly bursting to find out more, and many people also attended one or more days of workshops. The questions asked and the examples shared show that there is a real appetite for learning, not just among the students at Auckland University, but right across the industry.
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Duncan Stuart
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Duncan Stuart Fellow RANZ
Who is the average person? Two books query our long-held fascination with the Average Person. The Averaged American. Surveys, Citizens and the Making of a Mass Public. 2017
This is a good one if you’re interested in sociology or conduct social research. Sarah Igo, an academic, has deftly managed the task of telling the history of modern opinion research in a lively, engaging manner, arguing that the interaction between the 24 InterVIEW September 2019
public and surveys on politics, race, and sex behaviours (think the Kinsey studies) resulted in an America that, over the 20th century, defined for itself the standards of what is socially normal and acceptable. One problem is the view shared by pollsters of a single society, the result of which has been the promotion of the aggregated mean and the marginalisation of those outside the average white mainstream. As she puts it: “Proclamations about ‘Americans’ could not be made without suppressing the voices and experiences of some, and here surveyors more often perpetuated than challenged the assumptions of their day.” Sarah Igo has recently published the excellent The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America. Todd Rose’s focus is not so much on statistics as on education, but his core argument is that society’s systems (health, education, welfare) are each based on the concept of the average citizen. After all, if we administered an IQ test, we’d see a bell curve of results. But people are not uni-
dimensional, and the kid who is ‘below average’ in their reading tests may have amazing social skills or an impressive command of science.
In fact, Rose argues, there is no average person, we’re multivariate creatures. I found the argument gets hammered a few too many times here, and the volume focuses on reforming the education system, but the central thesis has relevance to the way we design and analyse surveys. Are we simply looking for, and assuming there exists, a mainstream of average Kiwis, average customers, and average attitudes?
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SPOTTED AT NEW HORIZONS CONFERENCE 2019
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The Mysteriously
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Or a warning on the distortions of Weighting By Alastair Gordon
28 InterVIEW September 2019
A couple of years back, Anne MacNaughton, a 66-year-old married resident of Ngaio, Wellington, received a telephone call from a nice market research interviewer who asked her a bunch of questions about cat food, insurance, and politics. She quite enjoyed giving her opinion on all these important subjects, so when her son told her that you could do online surveys on a regular basis and get rewarded for it, she happily signed up with an online panel and soon found herself clicking radio buttons and giving her earnest opinions right left, and centre. “Good old Mrs MacNaughton, I wish we had more like her” you are probably thinking. But there is one interesting thing here: In the telephone survey, Mrs MacNaughton was but one of many 65+, Wellingtonian women who happily agreed to be interviewed, while on the panel, she was the panel manager’s dream – a rare older woman who didn’t regard internet surveys with suspicion and dread. So, of course, when the raw data came in, the earnest experts in each research company (with the help of a weighting algorithm) assigned a weight to her responses correct for the excess or lack of women like her. In the telephone survey our Anne was ‘downweighted’ to 0.63412, while in the panel her opinions were weighted upwards by a factor of 2.99654 – so very obviously in the second survey her ‘opinions’ had a much higher impact on the results. Clearly Mrs MacNaughton is ‘made up’, but the example is based on weighting levels I have seen in two real, recent surveys. But so what? Weren’t both companies (or their sample providers) just doing their jobs ‘balancing’ their samples? Well, maybe, but only if the researchers in each company understand some of the basic issues involved with weighting survey data, and only if we don’t use weighting as a lazy mechanism to avoid confronting more basic issues with our raw samples. In another example I’ve seen weights for a key demographic group varied markedly between two rounds of a tracking study, introducing a real possibility of differences in results being exaggerated by weighting effects.
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Based on other examples I’ve seen, and feedback from other RANZ Fellows, I’ve become concerned that our weighting processes have become over-automated and under-considered, and that this is, in some cases, impacting the quality of results we provide to clients. In this article, I’d going to outline in a non-technical way some of the key issues researchers need to consider about weighting. There are several methods of weighting, but for simplicity I’ll concentrate on the most common, creating a weighting matrix based on key variables (typically age, gender, and region). Essentially this looks at the extent to which the proportion of respondents in each cell matches what we’d expect to get based on population statistics. A weight is then applied to each respondent’s answers, effectively adjusting the ‘raw’ number in each cell to the ‘expected’ number. The first thing to note here is that weighting is predicated on accurate information on the ‘expected’ number in each cell. This is one more reason why issues around the last census are important to RANZ members – if the census is wrong, our weights will be wrong, and if the weights are out, we are likely to produce a lot of seriously skewed survey results. Weighting is a subject of surprising controversy among statisticians, with some arguing that it has, in fact, no place in survey analysis. I certainly wouldn’t go as far as that – properly applied, it is a legitimate defence against imbalances that could mean that the answers of some groups are left simply unheard. But there are (at least!) five key issues to be considered in applying weighting. 1. If you have ever told someone that “your sample is weighted to make it representative of the popu lation,” then you are, I am afraid, misleading them. Weighting may help protect some results from being artificially unbalanced, but the quality of your sample is about your raw sample – you may have effectively ‘cloned’ Mrs MacNaughton’s answers, but you haven’t created any new respond ents. Weighting does not magically make your survey ‘representative’. 2. Weighting reduces sample efficiency and con founds standard sampling error statistics. Effec tively a weighted sample of 800 people is ‘worth less’ than a ‘good’ unweighted sample of the same size. The extent to which this matters varies depending on a number of factors (AMRO has produced a great guide on this and related subjects), but in reality any +/- error rates we quote should be adjusted for quota, panel, and weighting effects. 30 InterVIEW September 2019
3. Weighting assumes the respondents you did interview in a particular cell are ‘like’ the ones that you could not contact. In other words, Mrs MacNaughton is pretty much similar in attitudes and opinions to other 65+ women in Wellington. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess reason why this might not always be the case. An older woman who joins an internet panel may well have different types of social connections, education, and even personality than others in her age group. Similarly, a teenager male who has the time and inclination to answer a telephone survey may differ in other ways from his contemporaries. Weighting always has the potential to end up exaggerating hidden biases in our samples. 4. Confusing interaction effects occur and weighting impacts can get exaggerated as you analyse smaller sub-groups (e.g. using a 3–4 way cross-tab), or where you analyse by variables that are themselves correlated to the weighting variables. Think about attitudes to teaching te reo in schools, for instance – if you analyse that by age and region, you’d expect to see some effect, but if these are also weighting variables, and some cells are heavily weighted, then the level of differences may well be distorted. 5. Weighting by basic demographics does not fix all ‘representation’ issues. It’s mostly of help if you want to understand results at a general population level. So, it can be useful if you want to know the incidence of car ownership, but it doesn’t automat ically create a good sample of car owners (or likely voters, etc.). In an ideal world, weighting is based on the variable you are interested in studying; for instance, many pollsters experiment with weights based on past voting behaviours or likelihood of voting. This, of course, raises its own problems, as such weighting variables (e.g. recalled last vote) may be far ‘softer’ than demographics. So, what to do? Abandoning weighting, given the levels of non-response in many surveys, is probably not an option. But there are at least three key areas where we need to do more. Firstly, it’s the duty of researchers to examine the weights applied to their samples and understand their implications. Do you have a lot of individuals with high weights (over 2.0)? Have you got any specific cells where the average weight is high? If so, you need to watch analyses and recommendations that rely on the data from that group.
For key analyses, look at the raw data to check you have enough ‘real’ people, not just clones of Mrs MacNaughton.
posed to represent, especially when weighting cells are broad (are all your ‘65+’ group actually 66–68 for instance, with no genuinely ‘elderly’?).
Secondly, track weighting levels over time. If your weights for a cell vary wildly between survey rounds, it can easily impact results. On the other hand, if you are consistently getting a cell that has to be up-weighted significantly, it is a sign of a sampling problem that needs to be addressed with your fieldwork provider. You also need to start doing some QC analyses on those up-weighted cells to check that the people in them are indeed ‘typical’ of the group they are sup-
Finally, I strongly suggest having your (or your sample provider’s) weighting scheme, and its impact on a few key studies, evaluated by an independent statistical consultant. This will probably throw up some issues and cause some intense discussions on quality versus costs. But if, as I suspect, there are some key surveys out there where results and recommendations are being impacted by weighting issues, it’s better to know that sooner rather than later!
Alastair is a managing partner in Gordon & McCallum, a consultancy that works with end clients and MR agencies to implement improved market research processes and help solve complex research problems. Prior to setting up Gordon & McCallum, he had a widely varied international career with the Nielsen Company and Survey Research Group. This included managing research companies in Taiwan, Philippines, and Malaysia, and global NPD and management roles with Nielsen. Alastair’s key research interests lie in helping understand underlying emotional responses to marketing inputs, and how that impacts consumer decision-making, especially in the context of innovation, communications, and shopper research.
I'm excited to announce I've joined the Department of Conservation working on Visitor Strategy and Insights based in Christchurch. It is a big change that allows me to contribute and make a difference on a larger scale, with the aim of making a difference for future generations of New Zealanders. I appreciate the work we’ve done together over the years to strengthen our industry, as well as the QZONE work I’ve done with colleagues and clients. I've learnt heaps and worked on great projects with amazing people. I'll continue to consult on some QZONE client projects and you're welcome to get in touch if you would like me to contribute to what the industry is working on.
I’m grateful for the support and advice some of you have given over the years, whether project or business related. Please feel free to stay in touch and let me know if you have any questions or you want to chat through anything. Until we connect next.
Jesvier.
Jesvier Kaur – FRANZ
QZONE Insights & Innovation Specialist. E: jesvier@qzone.co.nz P: +649 3608351 M: +6421 777323 W: www.qzone.co.nz < conte 31
1 The Magic of Execution Carmen Vicelich is the founder of two successful businesses. This paper titled ‘How to Stay Ahead in the Age of the Consumer’ was presented at New Horizons, the Research Association of New Zealand’s Conference 2019. 32 InterVIEW September 2019
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We all know we need to innovate, transform and embrace digital solutions in order to deliver to the Age of the Customer. Change is happening fast all around us and it’s no longer a ‘nice to have’, but essential to our survival stakes to be able to deliver the seamless and relevant solutions our customers expect. But how do we actually execute and deliver on these ambitions? With more and more data, changing technology and increasing speed of customer expectations, we need to leverage the things that make us go faster. These are data and technology. But on their own these do not enable us to deliver and execute. The key is the unique combination of people, data and technology. Here are the top three things to focus on in order to execute:
1
It’s classic Simon Sinek, that people aren’t driven by what you do or how, but why you’re doing it. Digital transformation doesn’t begin with a data or technology “transformation” project. It starts top down, culture first. Having the right people that are customer obsessed (not technology or data obsessed), that have a passion for change and transformation, and an agile mindset – ready to embrace the unknown, go outside their comfort zones (including ongoing learning and development) and importantly being able to pivot when they need to in order to factor in learnings along the journey towards the execution of the strategy. With inflexible mindsets, over cautiousness, ego and power plays, execution fails as the wrong coaches are leading the team. Attitude to innovate is everything and our success in both Data Insight and Valocity is born out of the right people who are customer obsessed with a passion for innovation and transformation, and a relentless pursuit to continue to focus on the problem we are solving for our customers.
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For many, digital innovation begins with a data ‘lake’, big data warehouse, or project setting up a ‘centre of excellence’. These are all good things – but the key is actually actioning data to drive data driven decision making and turn the data into a story that empowers strategy, while then measuring the execution and progress along the way.
Though increasingly everyone recognizes data is an asset that has a value, true value is only created when data is turned into something actionable and meaningful that then creates tangible results – not just more reports, more data and more spreadsheets which no one then converts to meaningful outcomes.
3
Technology is changing rapidly and the key to digital execution is ensuring you are leveraging micro services that enable you to future proof to be able to seamlessly switch out to different products and tools as they evolve. Gone are the days of multiyear projects that are then outdated by the time they’re finished from the business needs and the newer technology that’s available. It’s now about ensuring you hardness technology to make it work for you as your enabler. Think cloud, design, open source and future proof.
The answer to digital execution lies in the unique combination of people, data and technology. One of the best examples I’ve seen is DBS who wants to be GANDALF: G: Using open-source software like Google A: Running on cloud platforms like Amazon N: Using data and automation to scale, and provide personalised recommendations like Netflix D: DBS as a digital and data bank of Singapore A: Design like Apple L: Be a learning community like LinkedIn and push for continuous learning F: Become more collective like Facebook The key cultural shift required is to remove siloes, products, ‘innovation teams’, ‘digital teams’, and focus purely on the customer. Everything is digital – everything should be innovative, and you cannot innovate in isolation – or you’ll never succeed in delivering to the customer across all your business. In summary, the key is that people are the path to execution. Leverage data and actionable insights, harness technology and partner with like-minded businesses and suppliers, and then never stop starting – as innovation is never done! https://datainsight.co.nz/ Data Insight empowers and accelerates the use of data for business to help them become data driven https://valocityglobal.com/ < conte Valocity transforms the mortgage and valuation process for banks to help deliver a more seamless and relevant experience
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CHATBOTS?
HOT OR NOT
Interest in using chatbots as a research tool is growing and researchers are conducting pilot studies, tests and research-on-research, exploring questions such as: • How to use chatbots in research; • The strengths and weaknesses of this mode; and • The opportunities that lie ahead.
CHATBOTS 101 To understand how chatbots can be used in research it is necessary to understand what a chatbot is. IBM, one of the leaders in the field, suggest the following definition: “A chatbot is a computer program that uses AI to have a conversation with humans. Users can ask questions, make requests and respond to chatbot questions and statements using natural language. A chatbot could support text input, audio input, or both.” (IBM Cloud Education, 2019) Not all people are in agreement with the idea that chatbots use AI. However, this disagreement largely relates to what their definition of AI is. If you are thinking of using a chatbot to conduct research with participants - you are likely to be using some sort of adaptive programming or scripting. For the purposes of clarity, we will accept IBM’s definition that this is a form of AI. Another important thing to keep in mind is that chatbots are used more extensively outside research than within. The application of chatbots to research represents only a very small proportion of all the situations where chatbots are being used. WHAT HAVE RESEARCHERS LEARNT SO FAR? Drawing on a number of studies that explore the use of chatbots in research including Ayoub (2018), Reid (2018), Wizu (2018), York & Powton (2019) it can be seen that some of the key learnings so far are: • Participants report greater satisfaction and engagement; • Chatbot surveys tend to take longer for participants to complete, but this is not seen as a negative by the participants; • Chatbots elicit longer open-ended responses than traditional surveys; and • Adaptive probing increases the likelihood of both meaningful and flawed interactions. It is important to remember that most of the research-on-research has been conducted on relatively short chats (or surveys) and more work is needed to explore the use of chatbots in longer research surveys. 34 InterVIEW September 2019
WHAT ARE THE MARKET RESEARCH USE CASES FOR CHATBOTS? The use case for chatbots is strong in the following three situations. Where the content of conversations is relatively predictable, as is often the case in areas such as customer satisfaction, experience surveys, and user experience testing. In situations where survey fatigue is high and where the risk of participants becoming alienated or bored is high, chatbots may be a useful tool to attempt to combat these issues. For participant groups for whom conventional surveys do not appeal, the option to take part in a chat style survey may be a better match for their normal online behavior, and therefore be a more appealing way for them to participate in research. (York & Powton, 2019) WHEN NOT TO USE CHATBOTS? The use case for chatbots in market research is weaker in the following situations: Where the research is exploratory and the language of the topic is not well understood or where the response alternatives are not already clearly defined and are difficult to predict. In situations where the actual time (as opposed to perceived time) taken to complete a survey is important, for example, in-the-moment or exit surveys, the additional time that chatbots take may not be acceptable or viable. In situations where inappropriate probes may risk significant negative reactions, for example, when researching sensitive topics, chatbots may not be the research tool of choice (yet). TO CHATBOT OR NOT? The arguments against the use of chatbots in research include the belief that they are not yet suitable for research, in the sense that there are methodological concerns and further testing and research is needed. In addition, there are implications for samples and sampling that need to be considered and for those who use benchmarks these will need updating. This, of course, is a process that research has dealt with before, for example, the transitions from paper to CATI, CATI to online, and online to mobile have all required these issues to be addressed. Despite the arguments against the use of chatbots in research, NewMR think the case for their use is compelling. Chatbots are growing in popularity in the online ecosystem. For examSue enjoys working at the intersection of research, innovation and technology. She is a co-author of “The Handbook of Mobile Market Research” and co-editor and curator of the ESOMAR book, “Answers to Contemporary Market Research Questions”. Sue is one of the founders of NewMR – an online knowledge network that engages with the global market research and insights community. Sue has a high profile in new market research, and is a regular conference and workshop presenter.
ple, in marketing, customer service and customer experience. Chat functionality is for many potential research participants a more natural interface than the approaches that are currently being used e.g clicking on radio buttons, and helps provide a fit with modern communications style and modern life. SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE USE OF CHATBOTS IN RESEARCH There are lots of chatbot platforms and many more will be launched. Chatbots are being used for qualitative research, particularly in the area of online and mobile qualitative research. There is strong interest in using chatbots for qualitative research conducted at scale in conjunction with using AI for analysis. There is also interest in using chatbots as an alternative to traditional online quantitative surveys. Many chatbot platforms do not fit historic workflows in the research process and this will require adaption and work-arounds in the short-term. Some considerations for the future are: • How chatty should a chatbot be? • How human should a chatbot be? • What are the ethical issues and approaches that are needed? • Issues of representation – Who are the new people we will reach? And who we will we no longer reach? So in short, what’s the verdict? Chatbots are hot. Chatbots are coming to research – are you ready? REFERENCES: Ayoub, R. (2018). Chatbots. It’s not what they say, but how they say it. Retrieved from https://www.slideshare.net/RayPoynter/chatbots-its-not-what-they-say-but-how-they-say-it IBM Cloud Education. (2019). Chatbots. Retrieved from https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/chatbots-explained#tocwhat-is-a--zVvrPI7A Reid, J. (2018). Chat Surveys: How they compare to traditional online surveys and their impact to research experience and data quality. Retrieved from https://www.rivaltech. com/chat-survey-research-on-research Wizu. (2018). A Wizu Research Paper: A Comparison of AI Conversational Surveys and Traditional Form-Based Surveys. Retrieved from https://www.wizu.com/customer-casestudies/conversational-surveys-vs-traditional-surveys/ York, S., & Powton, M. (2019). Feedback on the NewMR Chatbot Experiment. Retrieved from https://www.slideshare. net/RayPoynter/newmr-and-wizu-survey-chatbot-experiment
Sue is an active member of the market research online community, and is a familiar face on Twitter, where she tweets as @1Sue3, mostly about research methods and related innovations. Sue is a Fellow of AMSRS (Australian Market and Social Research Society) and is Chair of the AMSRS Professional Development Committee.
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This paper was presented at New Horizons, The Research Association of New Zealand’s 2019 Conference.
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Before statistics was invented, the world was seen as a more random place. Since the 1700s, however, scientists and social engineers became more enchanted by the idea that one could measure things and explain trends or common patterns.
HOW HISTORY TRAPS US IN AN INVISIBLE CAGE BY: DUNCAN STUART FELLOW RANZ
By the mid-19th century, for example, many externally measurable phenomena were subject to statistical analysis. Crime rates, life expectancy, scholastic ability, physiology, beauty – all these things became fair game for statisticians. For polymath Francis Galton, the late 19th-century world was teeming with things to be measured, so he developed weather maps and a beauty map of the UK (London was the epicentre of female beauty according to his measures). These measures became the reference point for the way we design and plan the society in which we live – now we had a reference point for what is normal. Governments have built whole infrastructures around the bell curve and the concept of the average citizen. We still seek the average measure in order to design everything from chairs and ergonomic appliances to examinations and the way we stream and teach school pupils. By and large, most things in society are designed around averages. We measure average wheat production, politicians still talk about the average man on the street, and we assess our own progress against the average. Am I earning higher than average? Will I live longer than average? Average is an interesting thing to focus on. For one thing, we understand it as a reference point. We’re somewhere on the bell curve – either above or below average – but most people, we assume, are around average. Average is where the guts of society dwells, isn’t it? Cue Todd Rose’s book The End of Average. The author questions whether ‘the average person’ even exists. We all have quirks and characteristics that tip us away from the norm. Average, he says, is an abstract idea that only works if we look at one variable (height, say) at a time. But even if Rose is wrong, is ‘average’ where the action is? Or are the market trends and innovations coming from the outliers? Have we been focusing on the wrong thing? Is our fascination with the mean score misguided? That’s what led me to go back and study how our most common survey measurement tool (the Likert scale – 1932) was invented.
36 InterVIEW September 2019
One hundred years ago, there were distribution curves for height, weight, IQ, etcetera – all outwardly manifested dimensions, but there were no reference points on such attitude questions as “what is the average level of racism in the USA?” or “what does the average American feel about getting into a war with Germany”? But in the 1920s, social scientists and social psychologists were starting to get into this area, and in so doing they pioneered a lot of what we do today in surveys. In 1932, Rensis Likert responded to the unwieldy Thurstone scale of 1928 with a slim, intuitively elegant response – basically, the standard 5-point scales (Strongly Disagree/ Strongly Agree) that we use today. Rensis Likert engineered it around the idea of the normal distribution curve with an average or neutral mid-point.* I doubt he ever meant this format to be the universal questionnaire band-aid that it has since become. Usage of the Likert scale was not all that widespread even by the late 1940s, but today the thing is ubiquitous. The problems or challenges with Likert-style questions include:
•
They are statistically extremely blunt. You can’t in honesty do much with the data
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They are suited to testing and measuring belief statements (e.g. “I prefer eco friendly products.”), but not at all suited to developing fresh ideas, concepts, or insights
•
They don’t reflect how people make decisions. A battery of 15 Likert-style questions doesn’t tell us which of the statements (maybe just 2 or 3) are the ones that make all the difference. They don’t take account of the heuristics or even illogicality of the respondent
•
They are a lazy option. We get sucked into using these questions as a framework in questionnaire design. Indeed, operators such as SurveyMonkey strongly advise that people stick to this format of question
•
They make us focus on where the bulk of the scores are: the mean score or maybe the top-2 boxscore. They draw little insight about the exciting stuff that may be going on at the edges
My argument is that we’ve been trapped by habit. There are times we can do better and that we should think seriously about escaping from routines and start developing different scales for different purposes. At the conference I posted one or two examples, one of which incorporated not only the degree of liking a brand, but an element that also shows how the brand is trending – up or down. There’s a wider aspect to the argument as well. A focus on the average man on the street may have been appropriate during the rise of mass society from the 1850s through to the 1960s (think mass media, mass production, cookiecutter education systems), but we are moving into an era where the talk is about inclusiveness, intersectionality, and mass customisation, and where, thanks to the commercial imperatives of innovation and change, we need to focus not on the average to generate new ideas, but on the people who don’t regard themselves as normal.
*Strictly speaking, a Likert scale is a battery of statements each measured on the Strongly Disagree/ Strongly Agree scale or similar.
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“
This research project was honestly the coolest assignment I’ve had to do in the four years I’ve been at uni”. “I like that we got to work with mentors who work in the market research industry.
”
As part of its curriculum, the University of Auckland Business School works closely with New Zealand’s leading market research industry experts to provide students with real-life projects in the community. Each year, the students work on a research project for a non-profit organisation, which, in 2019, was the New Zealand Housing Foundation. The Housing Foundation is a not-for-profit, charitable trust that assists people in finding affordable, secure, stable, and healthy homes in some areas of both the North and South Islands. Through the organisation’s housing programmes, the Housing Foundation provides options for getting New Zealanders into new homes and helping them manage their finances so that, over time, they can become independent homeowners.
By Horst Feldhaeuser
Why is the University of Auckland programme so important? It not only represents a partnership between the business world and academia, but also has the charitable element of working with a non-profit group. It gives students hands-on experience, gives businesses a chance to work with the next generation of researchers, and gives back to the community.
FOR THE GREATER
THE STUDENTS
Horst is group client director at Infotools. He is a passionate research professional with more than two decades’ experience in market research, marketing, and business consulting. Horst is actively involved in the research industry and is a sought-after conference presenter and contributor to industry publications.
Broken into small groups, around 60 students conduct an intensive 12-week project that brings the process of market research to life, including hands-on work in stages like client briefing, research design, fieldwork (qual and quant), analysis, and presentation of results and recommendations. This gives students invaluable work experience that they can take with them into their careers.
How a Partnership between Market Research Leaders and Bright Student Minds Benefited the Community
In addition, the students work sideby-side with seasoned industry mentors representing a cross-section of the business and market research community. Being a mentee has long been held up as a fantastic way to expand knowledge and skills, gain valuable advice from a more experienced person, and build professional networks. 38 InterVIEW September 2019
The New Zealand Housing Foundation will use some of these data-driven insights in order to help shape future programmes and services. Outcomes also provided recommendations for ways to connect with audiences by addressing their challenges and pain-points as identified through the research. Winning team at MR Day - credit, University of AKL The programme takes this one step further by offering future career opportunities through ‘speed-networking’ interview sessions with the local business community.
real-world scenario that supports decision-making for non-profit organisation initiatives, the students are able to see the results of their labour at work in the community.
Most of all, based on student feedback, we find that they love this opportunity to give back to the local community. They said, “The fact that it was a realworld client with an important mission made the research project more than just an assignment.”
THE NON-PROFIT ORGANISATION
THE BUSINESS PARTNERS The involvement of the business community has been vital in bringing this project to fruition over the last few years. Key industry partners for this year’s programme included Dynata, providing the data collection platform, and Infotools, who made its cloud-based analysis and visualisation platform, Harmoni, available to students for free. Giving the future generation of insights professionals the opportunity to use Infotools’s software platform for market research gives them a leg-up for future employment. As with being a mentee, mentoring itself comes with a host of benefits. Mentoring helps people improve communication and management skills, and provides a sense of fulfillment and growth. Mentors can create a two-way feedback loop, learning from the students just as the students learn from them. Many who mentor say there is a freshness to the perspectives the students bring, as well as a challenge to start thinking about things differently. Students are judged by a panel of both client and industry experts, culminating in the Market Research Day presentation for the three finalist groups. Because they are doing the work for a
The projects resulted in data that the New Zealand Housing Foundation could actually use in order to understand the perceptions and awareness of its organisation in the community, and the housing needs in the region. The data collected covered a wide range of topic areas, including audience profiles for the organisation’s services. Some of the insights surrounded:
• • • • •
Basic demographics such as ethnicity, gender, age, and household income Perceptions of social capital Feelings of safety in current neighbourhoods Likelihood of future homeownership Brand awareness among target audiences
Dr. Catherine Frethey-Bentham, a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland, may have summed up the benefits of this programme best when she said, “We know that students typically attain higher levels of achievement when they are engaged with course material and feel that they can apply their knowledge and skills in future employment. Social and community engagement is a big driver for our university. We are proud of the impact this ongoing programme has both for our students and the participating NFOs, and the research agencies.”
IN CONCLUSION This programme was presented at the most recent Research Association New Zealand conference in Auckland, and won the Best Paper Award, sponsored by ESOMAR. This honour helped bolster the belief that this partnership and programme is on the right track. Because the work that resulted from the partnership supported decision-making for a worthy non-profit, everyone involved will be able to see the results at work in the community. This model can be replicated across the globe at universities and with business partners, all for the greater good.
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40 InterVIEW September 2019
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42 InterVIEW September 2019
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On 15th March, 2019, an attacker entered the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, opening fire. The attack killed fifty-one people and injured forty-nine more, and from the killer’s manifesto it is clear that he was motivated by far-right ideology. In Charlottesville in 2017, marching fascists fought in the street with counterprotestors, which ended with one of the fascists driving a car into a group of counter-protestors and killing activist Heather Heyer. In the wake of this, the president of the United States said that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
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And since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, he has been pushing hard-right, nativist politics based on xenophobia and fear of deviance that has led to the USA running concentration camps on its southern border. It seems clear from these examples that we need to have a very serious talk about fascism. I have strong personal motivations for being the person to initiate the talk. I come from a family that suffered through the Second World War in Poland – a conflict that was brought about by fascist ideolo< conte gies. < contents 43
As a result, I have been active in opposing the far right, most recently in opposing Jordan Peterson’s visit to New Zealand. Jordan Peterson is indubitably problematic: Though he is pretty good at cloaking his views, his fixation on hierarchies, his comments about IQ, and some of his statements about women in the workplace place him firmly in the alt-right camp. The fact that he’s attracted an audience of disaffected white men who are much worse at masking their views than he is, only reinforces this point. Thus, me being myself, Jordan Peterson being Jordan Peterson, and the Left being the Left, some of my comrades and I organised a campaign against his visit. As part of that, unfortunately I wound up in an interview with Sean Plunket. And there I was, a trans person and activist, having the full fury of Mediaworks’s muck-raking division directed at me. I was destroyed like a liberal snowflake – not the most pleasant experience. We definitely made mistakes. My media training was inadequate, and beyond that, hostile media environments are not the place for me. Above all, positioning is everything, as my win in the PechaKucha contest taught me. I could have given the exact same talk to Sean Plunket and his audience, and I would have been ripped to shreds. Nonetheless, when Jordan Peterson takes photos with people wearing shirts that advertise their blatant Islamophobia, it’s worth examining why I ran into such serious trouble when, all being said and done, the facts were on my side. The immediate issue is that I was arguing on the basis of values that Sean Plunket and his audience evidently don’t share. I happen to believe that Muslims, Māori, women, trans people, and any people who are in some way deviant or not a straight white Pākehā man, have the same dignity and right to a full and flourishing life as anybody else. Naturally, therefore, when someone like Jordan Peterson challenges that position, I will oppose him. However, values are not facts. They are just as important (if not more so), but they’re not the same thing. The most important reason that this happens is that we as a society are remarkably bad at identifying what fascism actually is. We fixate on fascist symbols such as swastikas and double eagles and rely far too much on people saying outright “I’m a fascist”. That leads to us creating an image in our minds of fascists as marginal, economically underprivileged white men running around playing at being brown shirts. The problem is that that image does not represent what the original fascist movements were at all, and thus doesn’t represent the current threat all that well. The Nazis circa 1933 were a thoroughly middle-class movement: They consisted of doctors, architects like Albert Speer… probably even some market researchers. 44 InterVIEW September 2019
A more representative view of the modern altright might thus be a group like the one which was until recently called the Dominion Movement. A Wellington-based movement, it was prototypically fascist. The founder publicly defended Hitler on his Facebook page[1], they display fascist symbols on occasion, and they fetishise straight white New Zealanders as being inherently superior to everyone else. Ideologically, they are in every respect a fascist group. Nonetheless, due to their respectable clothing and a thin veneer of simply being “community-minded nationalists”, their activities have largely remained unnoticed, and they’ve been allowed to spread their hateful rhetoric unchallenged for years on end. Let this happen for long enough, and we find ourselves with another Christchurch on our hands.
the same credibility as people with a great deal more moral worth than them. Taken together, all this creates an environment in which fascism can easily flourish.
Their use of veiled language and their veneer of respectability have allowed groups and ideas of this kind to spread unchallenged. The prototypical example is the phrase “it’s OK to be white”. While this seems innocuous on the surface, nobody is actually saying that it’s not OK to be white (with the exception of a few rather marginal and unpleasant groups). Saying “it’s OK to be white” therefore implies a persecution complex brought on by the fact that people who aren’t white are getting steadily more say and visibility in our society. That said, it’s hard for these ideas to grow unless they have a fertile soil. And regrettably, New Zealand has far more people than you might think who are susceptible to fascist ideas.
Take, for example, the 2019 Auckland Pride. So long as the queer community was willing to be invisible, to hide, and to pretend to act and believe the same things as the general public, the business community was willing to support us. However, the moment we asked for material changes to be made to the way society was run (in this case, changes to the way the police conduct themselves in marginalised communities), funding mysteriously dried up. It’s understandable that much of the business world didn’t agree with the Pride Board’s decision, but that’s beside the point: If you support marginalised groups only when they say and do things you like, that’s bigoted, not supportive. Marginalised groups are going to do things differently to you: We see things differently, we have different values, and that is precisely the point of giving us greater power. If only one kind of person holds all the power, that leaves the lives and dignity of marginalised groups in the hands of people who don’t much care for us and know nothing about us, which in the face of a resurgent fascism is untenable. The reason is simple: The people in power won’t see what threatens us until it’s far too late.
Take, for example, the case of Radio New Zealand opening its broadcasts in te reo Māori. The ludicrous number of complaints and pearlclutching letters to the editor in response to one of our official languages being spoken on a public radio station speaks volumes. The reason is clear enough: New Zealand still hasn’t reckoned with colonisation and there are massive volumes of anti-Māori racism in the community – fertile ground for fascist ideas. And aside from that, other racist, sexist, and queerphobic ideas also run rampant. Homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and anti-immigrant sentiment are all common, to the extent that you probably know many people in your personal circles who hold those views. And even the people who won’t take sides contribute to the problem: Drawing an equivalence between racism and anti-racism or misogyny and feminism (as Sean Plunket did in that interview) is not only manifestly false, it gives comfort and support to fascists by giving them
So, how does market research come into this? As an industry, we have a responsibility to stem the tide of fascism and fascist ideas: This is, I think, inarguable. We need to do this by making sure that the hardline fascists that lead movements are faced with a hostile environment wherever they spring up, preventing them from growing. And while the business community in New Zealand is good at appearing progressive, it’s markedly less good at actually sharing power with marginalised groups, which is essential if fascism is to be opposed effectively.
At this point in time, neutrality in the face of fascism is untenable and negligent. We as an industry have to act against fascism in a strong and concerted manner if we are to maintain our integrity and protect those whom the fascists seek to destroy. At this time, there’s only one question you have to ask yourself: Which side are you on? _____________________________________ [1] https://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/wp< conte content/uploads/2019/03/JRW-F.jpg < contents 45
T his paper was runner-up for the People’s Choice Award and explores what nostalgia actually is and how marketers are using it in different ways today. The inspiration for the paper was noticing TV ads for banks, telcos, and fastfood companies that were using music and imagery that are not just essentially nostalgic but also sometimes reflect certain values. These values align with issues of sustainability – both environmental and social – that we have previously identified as important to New Zealanders in the Colmar Brunton Better Futures annual report. They are in some ways a response to rapid change and a source of resilience as well as personal action, to make a difference in the face of global challenges around climate and species extinction. This insight on today’s world provides a backdrop for exploring the history of nostalgia and also what neuroscience tells us about how it actually works. It also provides a context for taking a look into the future and questioning what the nostalgic memories of today’s young people will be. This question is particularly relevant for people in their teen years because studies show it is at this life stage that memories – especially of emotional experiences and music – are laid down. In fact, the sensory cues of sound and smell, linked to emotion, are some of the characteristics of nostalgia that differentiate it from other memories, even though the process of bedding down and recall of those nostalgic memories appears to be much like any other memory processing. The history of nostalgia is linked to homesickness and yearning, but its meaning has expanded to cover any sense of a bitter-sweet memory. There are also historical reports of soldiers dying of nostalgia in the US Civil War and of authorities having to ban music that made them homesick, to preserve order. Although it seems like today we don’t have it so bad, it can be argued that the impact of modern life on mental health may be today’s equivalent. There is evidence that nostalgia has a physical effect on the body – which is to make us feel warmer. This is perhaps one example of the evolutionary benefit behind the phenomenon. Another is that feelings of nostalgia can actual help us deal with present challenges and look forward to the future with more hope – recalling that things were once better, and creating a sense that they can be ‘better again’. 46 InterVIEW September 2019
Nostalgia
If that last sentence sounds familiar, it may be because it reminds you of the political call in the US to ‘Make America Great Again’. There are also parallels in the sentiment around Brexit in the UK. There are similar trends to be found in other aspects of political and economic life, ranging from nostalgia in Russia for the perceived stability of the communist days through to calls for a return to the gold standard in an age of economic uncertainty. But this exploration into nostalgia also uncovers the fact that it seems to be all around us, if we care to look. One of the outcomes of seeing the paper at the conference is that the audiences become ‘primed’ to see examples of it wherever we look. It is manifest in fashion and clothing and the retro styles on the street. It is also seen in the design and furniture that present a modern and contemporary vibe but are steeped in previous decades. And, of course, the entertainment industry has a long history or sequels, prequels, remakes, as well as of classic bands from our youth returning on tour ten, twenty, thirty years later.
Nostalgia Still as good as it used to be? By Jon Carapiet
The paper considers examples of how brands engage and respond to all this – ranging from deep sensitivity and authenticity through to humorous and almost paradoxical uses of nostalgic cues. The importance for any brand or marketer is that nostalgia is powerfully linked to emotions and, let’s not forget, it is on the emotional level that successful brands seek to engage. Colmar Brunton is continuing to work on the topic of nostalgia and how understanding nostalgia can be of value to brand marketers. The presentation is being made available to clients with additional insights for their particular category. Although the examples in the presentation focus on service industries such as banks, telecommunications, and insurance, there are also important insights for other players, especially in food and beverage. Colmar Brunton will also be reporting shortly on a just-completed study of New Zealander’s ‘most nostalgic brands’, which holds a few surprises. Watch this space. Jon is a senior qualitative researcher at Colmar Brunton. He has a particular interest in corporate reputation and sustainability, helping to prepare the annual ‘Better Futures’ report. This presentation explores the role that nostalgia plays (and is destined to play) in contemporary marketing, and considers the implications for established brands and new purpose-led brands as they compete for customers.
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SECONDS Tianyi
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This year Tianyi was a speaker on the Rising Stars panel at RANZ’s 2019 New Horizon’s conference. It was a great opportunity to talk to other young researchers and have a voice in the market research community. Tianyi is currently a quantitative researcher at NeedScope International and has been in the industry for just over three years. Genuinely interested in data, she pursued an Honours degree in Statistics to further extend her knowledge. Having done a few papers on psychology, Tianyi also developed strong interests in human behaviour. As someone who didn’t know much about market research before actually pursuing a career in the industry, she has grown fond of her work life. She loves animals (especially dogs) and is enjoying her life as an insight professional in Auckland. Friday night drinks? Meet me at: Saint Alice and SO/ for a special night out Chilled out weekend brunch? Meet me at: Little Sister Café I get stressed out by: Deadlines To relax, I: Watch a romantic comedy InterVIEW is coming to dinner. I’m cooking: Dumplings The music I’m listening to right now: Preach
My dream holiday is: Switzerland An ideal weekend: Is when I get to do nothing People who have inspired me recently: Christine Lagarde The best thing I’ve learnt in my career is: NeedScope The MR innovation I’m most excited about: AI When I win the jackpot, you’ll find me: In Europe on holiday If I wasn’t a market researcher I would be: Probably working in the finance industry The life lesson I wish I had learnt sooner rather than later: Life moves on and whatever’s causing worry now will pass I love my life because: I never know what’s waiting for me ahead The highlight of being part of the Rising Stars Panel was... Having the opportunity to express my opinions in front of the MR community Top tips for future researchers? Be engaged and an open mind
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