The first session of any conference needs to be impactful and memorable – and this one certainly was. Chaired by Kathy Hurst of The Wire, the very charismatic speakers approached the theme from three very different and thought provoking angles.

The keynote speaker, Dr Roger Palmer of Henley Management Centre, explored new approaches to marketing and peppered his talk with interesting facts and figures (did you know that the first TV ad in the UK was for Gibbs, or that if we were all American we would need 2.5x the world to support us all?). His very interesting paper explored how creating sustainable competitive advantage has developed over time, and looked at the future challenges facing marketeers.

Roger divided the development of marketing into eras – the first, between 1955-84, is termed the industrial economy where the marketing focus was clearly on the product and its production – the consumer and their requirements were secondary to the needs of the company. This approach changed with the technology revolution – consumers became more demanding, (marketing) confident and aware of their rights. Marketing approaches began to take note of the ‘customer experience’ and now, most successful brands try to connect with their target customers, creating a relationship and (hopefully) loyalty and customer value whilst also managing the product range – the information economy.

So what is next? What is clear is that, throughout this time, the marketing (and market research) function has increased in importance within companies, and is set to continue with the development of the next era. Whist in its infancy and still evolving, marketeers believe that co-creation of value is beginning to emerge as the new, dominant economy - termed ‘service dominated logic’. Organisations, markets and society are becoming concerned with an exchange of service – it is no longer enough to offer a ‘product’ on its own, instead the way in which the product is delivered is becoming increasingly important, and this method of delivery in itself needs to add value to consumers. This shift is driving a real change in practice, attitudes and culture within companies as they explore what is sensible (rather than stick to established ways of doing things) – and is placing more demands on market research and intelligence in uncovering and delivering insights into what consumers value – it is about the experience, value creating and entering into a dialog with customers which will help position and ‘package’ the product in an appealing and motivational way. Customers don’t want choice, they just want exactly what they want. 

Roger Sant, Millward Brown Optimor, then delivered a presentation on the importance of incorporating ROI thinking into research which left everyone (including Roger!) breathless! He argued that, in an environment where financials are increasingly important, linking improvement initiatives to financial returns is the best way to secure investment (and demonstrate the long term value of that investment) – encouraging companies to regard and use market research data in a more effective and integrated way. He showed how creating and using a ‘commitment profile’ for business to business customers can help businesses prioritise improvements and identify the effect of different actions (or inaction) on the bottom line. Roger acknowledged the difficulties involved in getting the correct data, but argued that, even if not perfect, ROI calculations can nonetheless be a useful and informative business tool. The model should include all brand influencers (from a customer point of view, engage a multi disciplinary team (to engage the business and involve the different points of view/ data sources) and be conducted regularly and diligently.

The final paper in the session was from George Knight, Penumbra Consulting. George began with challenging companies who think that they are customer centric to consider whether they really are delivering on this promise. The two main barriers to achieving this are the internal silos that exist within companies (often along functional lines) and the short term outlook that investors often take – effectively the way in which organisations are shaped in itself hinders their ability to focus on their customers. In order to change this, organisations need to consider the platform upon which they compete – are they truly organised around their customers or are they clinging to the traditional, function orientated structure? And who actually ‘owns’ responsibility for the customer at the board level, or is customer responsibility kicked around between different functions?

George argued that marketing, sales, operations and customer services are not discrete functions, but rather need to be considered together and work co-operatively in order to deliver an integrated, consistent and well thought through customer experience – a bold step as this requires a huge internal culture change in order to allow the company to deliver an increase in customer centricity that is real, rather than just lip service.

Three hugely entertaining papers – and ones which stimulated thought and challenged debate amongst the audience – a great start to the conference

The rest of Thursday morning was devoted to clients. This included a joint presentation on ‘Boardrooms, Briefs & Banks: a research client perspective’ fromtwo banks, RBS and HSBC, followed by a panel session with Sinėad Jeffries (Royal Mail) & Stavros Kyris (Nokia) adding their industry perspective.

Of all the sessions at BIG 2008, this was the one I was most looking forward to. It promised much, but would we really hear the ‘client perspective’ and would the speakers really be ‘the client’?

Any fears were soon allayed with Mike Barnes from RBS reassuring us - in his opening line - that although he isn’t a researcher, neither is he a conference junkie and he is indeed the one that ‘writes the cheques’. OK, we were off to a good start.

What followed was an insightful and illuminating session chaired by Ruth McNeil of Response Consulting with clients from four major organisations facing such questions as ‘what are the ideal qualities of a research agency’ and ‘how is the client research manager’s role changing?’ But more on this later.

First came the bad news for most of us agencies; 50% of the research budget in RBS Global Banking & Markets Division goes on syndicated research and as a consequence these agencies have their foot in the door for any follow-up research. Others laying claim to the budget include advertising and sponsorship, agencies conducting research on behalf of RBS, consortium/jointly-funded research, internal online interviewing capabilities and so on. 

It was a similar story for HSBC, with Alan Jones explaining that in HSBC, research provides the third point of the ‘triangle’ and is ‘weighted’ by internal data such as MI and CRM output and external data such as competitor intelligence and publicly available economic and financial data.

So, for those of us not currently providing research to organisations such as RBS, HSBC, Royal Mail or Nokia, how do we get noticed amongst the wealth of existing providers? How do we impress enough to work with such companies? 

Nokia’s Stavros Kyris defined his ideal agency as demonstrating ‘listening and understanding’ (the business as well as the brief), while the ‘world’s local bank’ looks for agencies that ‘surprise them’by offering insight that sparks debates, even arguments. For RBS, it is simply to be ‘fast, smart and flexible’ and offer ‘objective rigour’; one of the few things RBS cannot always do for itself. Sinėad Jeffries at Royal Mail advised us not to try to ‘add value’ all the time; quick and dirty really does mean quick and dirty sometimes (whilst pragmatically acknowledging that it is the client’s role to manage internal expectations if this is the case).
So our challenges are to demonstrate these requirements. But what of the client organisations - what challenges are they facing? Well for HSBC and Royal Mail it is not only the dissemination and distillation of information, but making sure any key findings are actioned. So, the onus is on us agencies to work closely with our clients to ensure our reporting is ‘snappy’ and in a format that is easily distributable for our clients, be this presentation slides or DVDs.

Nokia faces the challenge of the integration of the research function further into the business. The research team now sits within marketing strategy, requiring researchers to be multifaceted and competent in both primary and secondary/desk-research. Again, we agencies can help our clients by understanding the pressures this situation brings, and - as HSBC put it so succinctly when asked what the qualities of its ideal agency are – ‘help do their job’.

So what I will take away? Two points, the first is that we should stop worrying about our research getting into the boardroom; we should just worry that the ramifications of our research get there. And secondly to stop being afraid to ‘be opinionated, be strong and have open discussions’

The third session on Thursday addressed the issue of ‘Data Integration’. Data Integration – was there ever a term more guaranteed to make a researcher’s heart sink? We had already heard Alan Jones say that it was there at HSBC when he started his job there (25 years ago) and is still there today – only now it’s much more complicated, because there are so many more data sources of varying reliability. So, it’s been around for ever, and we know it’s difficult, and yet it is at the top of clients’ lists of what they expect research agencies to do for them in order to add value and identify insights.  Data Integration definitely needs a re-branding and re-launching!

Still, at the BIG Conference we like to tackle these issues and make our own, unique, contribution, and in the session we had two papers which shared how, as researchers, we could really develop our data integration skills.

The session was kicked off by a paper from Mark Kingsbury, Bootstrap Insights, who started, reassuringly, by pointing out that desk research is basically data integration at its simplest level. And that most market research surveys integrate behavioural and attitudinal data at some level, and we are quite comfortable with the fact that behavioural databases, like loyalty card data, include attributed attitudinal data from other databases.

So, if we know all of this, why aren’t we taking it further? Mark’s theory is that the people who look after behavioural databases prize ‘accountability’ i.e. what is happening, and those who focus on attitudinal databases are more interested in understanding why things happen. There is a fundamental divide between the two sets of people, which means they find it difficult to communicate.

How can we have both? Mark went through the main data integration tools – Decision Support Systems, Data Fusion approaches and Intelligent Commerce Applications and showed us how we could use them quite simply to integrate different data sets, and hence grow our confidence to enable us to go onto more complex applications of the methodologies.

And he made the point strongly that, as B2B researchers, we have a greater ability to start taking small steps along the path that integrates attitudinal and behavioural data – because we are used to taking data from different places.

He identified two strands for moving forward: Segmentation involving sample integration (fusion) of data sets, being neutral about the value of the sources and finding insights in the contradictions, and KPI modelling i.e. rediscovering desk research, produce small scale dashboards and back of envelope models to identify lead indicators. These will develop our skill sets and get us ready to take on more complex things.

Mark was followed by a paper from John Connaughton (Illuminas). John gave a paper entitled “Data Integration – learnings from 10 years’ experience” in which he demonstrated how the expectations of clients are changing.

In a survey of CASRO members in 2006, 80% identified the most important skill for researchers in the next five years as ‘the ability to integrate data from different sources’.

For both clients and agencies, capabilities in terms of data integration/data mining are becoming increasingly important in informing marketing decisions. Client demand is for increasingly holistic and creative research-based consultancy, drawing on multiple data sources and technical/sector expertise.  We need to develop our skill set to be able to fill the “complex knowledge based roles that are primarily outward facing and require developed communication and judgement skills” which are the skill sets most important for future competitive advantage.

We talk a lot about the need for partnership between agencies and their clients. This session, chaired by Nick Coates (Promise), consisting of three client-agency presentations showed us how to make partnership happen, and how to avoid the common pitfalls. As well as focusing on the “rules of engagement” for successful agency/client partnerships, participants explored the benefit that successful partnerships of this nature could deliver to the client’s relationships with its own customers.

Starting with a discussion on customer engagement, Laura Godfrey (Synovate) and Claire Rainey (Royal Mail) talked of the development, successes, and challenges of the JEMM (Joint Expectations Management Model), a system designed by the client-agency partnership. This system, which focuses primarily on the relationship between Royal Mail and Synovate has also been instrumental in Royal Mail’s relationship with their own customers.

The JEMM was designed to embed research within the Royal Mail’s own customer relationship management system. Gathering customer feedback, areas of challenge and suggestions for improvement, Laura and Claire argued that JEMM creates a system that takes feedback a step further by prompting action and building relationships. The key benefits of JEMM for Royal Mail include:

• Driving change within the purchasing process (e.g. addressing billing issues, ensuring issues are escalated to senior management)
• Motivating staff through named interactions, recognition and feedback
• Acting quickly to resolve problems due to the speed of feedback

Laura and Claire stressed the importance of in-built flexibility; it is this aspect of JEMM that has enabled Royal Mail itself to use the research to get closer to their customers. Royal Mail staff and, in turn, their customers, use JEMM in a variety of ways, requiring the system to be flexible in its format and application. This flexibility is a key reason for its high profile status within the business.

Having heard about the potential positive outcomes of strong client-agency partnerships, we next enjoyed a lively presentation by John Wicks (MVA Consultancy) and Tom Herring (Highways Agency) discussing the building blocks of partnership and the tools we might use to measure their effectiveness. With an entertaining introduction that thrashed out the need for common objectives, a shared approach and clear responsibilities, here we gained a practical partnership guide.

MVA Consultancy was commissioned to measure the process of partnership working at the Highways Agency. The Highways Agency engages with a huge variety of organisations (MVA found over 2600 partnerships) across network, planning and delivery. MVA were charged with identifying, developing a baseline, and monitoring the success of partnerships. Such a task would also require an impeccable partnership between the agency (MVA) and their client the Highways Agency.

In order to better understand the Highways Agency’s working relationships and set a series of partnership performance indicators, the research commenced with a survey that combined qualitative and quantitative measures. John and Tom discussed the need for their own partnership between agency and client to evolve in order to meet changing objectives and cited developments in methodology and reporting processes. The result of these developments has been to raise the profile of MVA’s research within the Highways Agency. This evolution is critical to the continuing success and relevance of the research. Case studies, good practice guides, video evidence and tailored reports have further broadened relevance, increased research impact, and attracted new research audiences.

A final word to the wise by John and Tom warned us “Romans didn’t build with meetings”.

The final paper talked of the potential challenges of partnership - what can go wrong, and what can we do about it? Judith Staig (GfK NOP) and Jonathan Wibberley (BT) who were working on research input to a project which focused on BT’s objective to ‘put the B2B customer at the heart of everything we do’ shared their own experiences of the agency/client partnership. Together Judith and Jonathan were embarking upon an ambitious ethnographic programme of research to understand the needs of SMEs to understand issues such as how SMEs use technology and what their working lives are like. With such an innovative approach the kick off meeting and establishing of trust was crucial to both members of the partnership. Consequently, it was during this phase that the methodology of depth interviews and videos were discussed, which would yield rich insight and an enormous amount of information, and hand the research agenda to the customer.

So far so good – but Judith and Jonathan found that organisational commitment to the project waned. As high achievers cycled through the project, there was often no permanent stakeholder – no internal champion for the research. We were warned that the culture of the internal customer must be taken into account.

Key lessons were learned, including the need for internal stakeholder mapping; a communications strategy that maintains interest and commitment and an acceptance that “pragmatism beats idealism”

An engaging session that discussed the establishment, development, measurement and upkeep of client-agency partnerships, this practical guide will serve us all well within our own organisations.

A welcome change to the usual session format was Friday morning’s BIG procurement debate. Chaired by Claire Labrum from Strictly Financial, this lively and entertaining session saw Eleanor Shaw from BPRI and Gilmour Research’s Carl Bennett debate the whole area of Procurement from different points of view.

Ellie began by arguing in favour of the process, with her proposal “Procurement – Big bad wolf or Grandma”. She argued that whilst there is the perception that the procurement process is long-winded, prescriptive, price driven and stifles creativity, that actually we should embrace it instead of fearing it. We need it as an industry for our survival, given that other sectors more procurement process savvy can compete against us within the same space. Furthermore, the process will become more and more prevalent, especially given the expected tighter financial budgeting in the economic downturn.

She suggested that we can benefit from a correctly run procurement process as it helps to produce maximum value for money, because all project criteria need to be clearly defined to help budget and ensure that all parties quoting are using the same detailed specification. This, she argued, gives transparency and encourages competitive pricing. Furthermore, it actually gives agencies more scope to win previously unattainable work, as it moves the commissioning away from personal relationships and opens it up to competition.

It also gives us scope to get deeper into organisations, as procurement teams tend to work across silos and may see more research opportunities within the business as part of the evaluation process of research bids. She argued further that it challenges researchers to think more creatively and more innovatively. She finished, stating that the procurement process is well intentioned, like Grandma, and that we need to learn to live with it or regret at our peril!

In drastic contrast to this view, Carl then presented his counter-argument entitled “Creative research and the formal procurement process; or, putting the moron in oxymoron”. He argued that the process specifically within Government organisations was rigid, irrelevant, one-sided and un-commercial. It wastes tax-payers’ money, stifles creativity and is an expensive process for all involved. And rather than the objective being transparency and value for money, instead the objective is compliance.

Research agencies are expected to provide their last three years’ worth of accounts, turnover, profit and loss statements, multiple client references and even signed affidavits from solicitors to prove that the researcher is indeed who they claim they are, and all these cost time and money to produce, and they are required even for speculative projects. And that’s not even including the fact that researchers are also expected to provide detailed contingency plans in the event of nuclear holocausts happening during the focus groups! All of this work is needed when pitching, and small agencies in particular cannot cope with this burden.

He added that procurement departments also often don’t fully understand the research services they are buying and that the research objective always seems secondary to the procurement process itself. Most amusingly, Carl pointed out that many tender process agreements stipulate that the research agency cannot move any dates within the project schedule otherwise they’ll suffer a financial penalty, yet often post commission, the client is suddenly on holiday and all dates are moved – it is a process full of contradiction and one where all of the risk lies with the bidder. When it comes to cost benefits, the commercial advantages are all advantageous to the Government client buying the research, not the agency, and sadly it’s all about cost, not value.

The audience was very engaged, and after some interesting questions and empathic comments, delegates were asked to vote on the crux of the debate of “Does procurement help both clients and agencies obtain best value?” and to Carl’s delight, the “Nays” had it. A thoroughly enjoyable session and hopefully a format that will be repeated next year, with another equally hot topic for delegates to vote on!

The final session on Friday morning, chaired by Pene Healey (P H Associates), introduced us to the idea of B2B networks and communities. The first paper was a joint contribution from two companies within the Munro Global Group. First off Richard Hepburn (Munro Global) talked about the development of the theories of networks from the Swiss mathematician Euler through to the mid 20th century using mathematical techniques. He looked at three generic networks:

- random network, which follow a Poisson distribution
- scale free networks which follow a power law (like Pareto)
- and small world networks where small groups interact together (think of the Kevin Bacon game)

Paul Tinworth (Maven Research) moved on to a case study looking at the launch of an accreditation service where they wanted to establish the social network effect of a firm’s decision to obtain accreditation. The survey revealed that those who have accreditation themselves are much more likely to know others who have accreditation – the survey results mirroring a small world network effect. He went on to explain how this knowledge can be used in, for example, the marketing to different groups (best not to do mass marketing to small world networks, or exploiting scale free networks by using trade associations).

He also talked about the potential for use of networks in other B2B areas using modelling to see which network typology is the best fit and what the likely distribution of the network you want to research is. Paul concluded by reminding us that it’s an evolving discipline but one that we should look at to see whether it adds value.

The second paper – The Business of Business Communities – from Nia Emlyn-Jones of Freshminds looked at making the most of online networks, using the opportunity to get close to the respondent, to get them involved. She talked about customer-building online communities for B2B clients, helping to overcome difficulties of reach. There have been learnings from consumer communities but there are differences with B2B being less about fun and socialising, more about helping people to do their jobs better.

These online communities can then be used for online groups, tracking and ad hoc studies, video uploads and customer forums or to upload diaries. Nia talked about the importance of moderation, balance and flexibility. There need to be clear rules but also enough flexibility to allow the freedom for people to discuss what’s important to them.

For respondents there are incentives but the experience of taking part is also important. The hope is to get long-term respondents taking part. But there are caveats: watch out that they are who they say they are. Good screening is important and there needs to be the right balance of participants to reflect the profile needed. Also, this type of forum can encourage people to be more critical than they might otherwise be and that needs to be taken into consideration in the analysis.

Business Networks are something which I suspect we will all be hearing more about in the future with lots of agencies already looking at the possibilities. These two papers gave a very useful and thought-provoking introduction to the subject.

The Conference was rounded off with a keynote presentation from Mark Earls entitled “If ‘we’ not ‘I’, then what?” which promised us thoughts on some new directions for B2B Marketing and Market Research, and did definitely not disappoint.

Mark Earls is a leading thinker on Brands, Marketing and Consumer behaviour, and he reckons that this is the most exciting time to be in our industry because our practices, ideas and organisational structures are about to change. We are at one of those points in history when a discipline changes direction.

The old paradigm: that we are individuals thinking our own thoughts and making our own decisions, being influenced by external forces (like Marketing) is being replaced by the new: that we are less individuals and more interconnected social beings sensing, copying and doing things with other people.

We live in a snakes and ladders age where change can happen suddenly and whole industries can be completely blind-sided by change, for example the music industry did not anticipate the impact that downloading from the internet would have on sales of music.

We’ve begun to realise that it’s very hard to change people’s minds, no matter how much we spend on communications or change management.

But if we change our perspective, stop thinking that we can influence individuals and start to see humans as social creatures, then lots of things start to make sense. If we stop asking “Why do people do stuff” and instead ask “How does stuff spread” – then we start to see some answers.

It used to be thought that it was the size of our brain that differentiates us from animals, but the theory now is that our brains grew in order to enable us to live in larger groups, i.e. to facilitate social interaction rather than for thinking.

Thinking is actually less important than we think: ‘human beings are to thinking, as cats are to swimming’, i.e. we can do it if we have to – but mostly we prefer not to. There are lots of experiments which show that our brain instinctively gets on with things before we ‘tell’ it to do so.

Much of our brain capability is about understanding people and copying others: we are heavily influenced by other people. ‘Influential’ people are obviously more important than others – but we are influenced by everyone around us. (Perhaps, said Mark, if you want to stay thin you should think of ditching your fat friends!).

However, our minds are designed to give us the impression that we make our own minds up. People are really bad witnesses of their own lives. We post-rationalise everything to give ourselves the impression that we decided by ourselves. B2B practitioners are way ahead of consumer researchers on understanding this aspect of human behaviour, because we understand that B2B decision-making is communal and complex – and in fact this is true generally.

The questions we need to be asking as marketers and researchers are: How do things spread and what kinds of networks are being used to spread things. And in order to help things spread we need to be lighting lots of fires, and making behaviour visible so that others can copy (e.g. Amazon) and finding the fire-raisers and helping them!

Mark rounded off the conference perfectly, he amused and engaged us and gave us lots of new food for thought. We can ask no more of a conference than that it should stimulate us to really reconsider our world.

“Speaking the Customer’s Language”

An intriguing thing about the Conference workshop run by Di Tunney of The Best Organisation, was that “Speaking the Customer’s Language” turned out to be as much about listening as it was about speaking. Indeed hearing was shown to be as important as listening.

Her first point, that ‘The meaning of communication is the response you get’ reminded me of the questionnaires one sees where the response to the question “Sex?” is “Yes, please”! Ask a silly question and you’ll get a silly answer. Frame a question in the respondent’s language and the greater the chance of obtaining a worthwhile and actionable response.

As for ‘Language should always be customer and not product or service focussed’, it seems this is a message I have been trying to get across to our product marketing people forever. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) got off to a slow start; now that we refer to the ‘Mobile Internet’ and consumers can understand what we’re talking about, we’re starting to see it take-off. 

When Di asked ‘Are we really speaking the customer’s language?’ I was reminded of some of the dreadful on-line questionnaires I’ve been receiving lately with truly abysmal translations into English. But how often do we inflict something similar on our overseas respondents? I’ve always said that a questionnaire is a curious document in that it is conversational language committed to paper. Many a translator, used to translating the written word, makes the mistake of rendering a polished piece of text that sounds dreadfully formal, if not stilted, when read out by an interviewer. Historically we’ve been able to count on a competent interviewer to correct or smooth out the worst Americanisms or mangled grammar, but these days the ‘Net is not as forgiving!

Working in pairs, we were asked to get our partners to talk about a recent business purchase and what had been important to them. We were told to take notes and the exercise proved the importance of careful listening and detailed note-taking. ‘Price’ in a list of motivators says one thing; “Oh, and price too, of course” says something quite different. We saw how easy it is to begin interpreting what is being said against our own understanding and opinions without actually hearing what the respondent is saying.

Thinking about marketing communications, Di looked at consumer behaviours and whether they could be classified as ‘toward’ in terms of what the product/service helps the customer achieve, or ‘away from’ with a focus on what it lets them avoid or eliminate. So positive language would be appropriate for the benefits that will accrue from having a savings account, for example, whereas an insurance policy might use more negative terms about what might be the consequences of not taking out a policy.

With only limited time available it was inevitable that this was a necessarily brief look at the importance of the language we use. Maybe it’s just the cynic in me (some might say BOF…), but I couldn’t help feeling much of this was ‘motherhood’ and the sort of stuff we should all have covered in questionnaire-writing or moderator skills training. However, the attitude and enthusiasm of other participants for the exercise and what it had showed them confirms the value of revisiting ‘constructive listening’ and other basic techniques.

Web 2.0 with Ray Poynter of Virtual Surveys

More Master class than workshop Ray took us on a tour de force of web 2.0, what it means, how it works and what you can do with it. Crucially for someone who belongs to the ‘Over 30 and wondering what the **** I’m doing on Facebook’ group – this session came with clear instructions on how to get started in this brave, new(ish) world.

The question now of course is how to summarise this, as you really did have to be there. But I’ll do my best.

We started with definitions: Web 2.0 is about the move from one way, broadcast style communications to a two-way dialogue. This means that communications are no longer simply ‘from’ companies ‘to’ customers, interaction is now involved and user generated content is becoming the norm. Consequently consumers / customers / respondents (be they B2B or B2C) are starting to expect to be a part of the interaction, to shape and control it, as opposed to being passive participants in a process that we (the researchers or marketers) direct.

An integral part of 2.0 culture is sharing: sharing information, content, thoughts, programs etc. This is what Wikis are (formalised sharing structures). Participants do ‘give’ but they expect to get things back for ‘free’. Ray suggested that the commercial winners in 2.0 are leveraging what they can give away or provide to be shared, into other paid for services (see www.commoncraft.com as an excellent example). Researchers need to remember this as we enter into this world – research needs to provide something ‘free’ as part of the exchange.

Further, 2.0 is about people coming together (to talk, play, exchange, organise) and research is happening in the resultant online social spaces. There is a polling  application on Facebook (for $26 Ray ran a poll that predicted the correct winner of the London election – not accurately, but he got the right result – for a little bit more, The Evening Standard got exactly the right result with YouGov, but that is another story). There are things called ‘Peanut labs’ that enable you to test concepts with interested consumers, quickly and cheaply. There are blog watch services that will collate information for you. The overall point I took from this is that online spaces, where interested parties come together on a subject, are a very rich source of both qualitative and quantitative data. In other words online, social spaces will be very important to the future of research and B2B researchers need to understand them.

This does raise methodological questions over sampling as 2.0 is a fundamental shift from researchers deciding what the target population is and sampling accordingly, to respondents self selecting due to their interest in the issue under consideration and thus becoming part of the sample. This is a huge and contentious area which we hardly scratched the surface of in the workshop and I do not pretend to do it justice here. But the modelled response vs. random sample debate is at the heart of this and I suspect will be in several papers at a conference near you over the next year or two.

The other thread of the workshop was the huge mine of information that can be found on blogs and news services all over the net. This is clearly a rich resource for what we used to call desk research, but one in which it is easy to drown. An excellent starter kit was provided on this. In short, if you do not currently harvest RSS feeds (and if you don’t understand this last sentence you are in good company – but you do need to find out what it means and take the following steps):

1. Set up a Google email account
2. This provides you with an Igoogle account that gives you a home page
3. On this home page you can set up your Google reader to pull in and organise the news  / RSS feeds you are interested in and display them in a way that you can keep track of (without totally clogging up your inbox)

You can then take the bits you are interested in, run them through TagCrowd and…………….OK I really have to stop now, there so much you can do. As I said you had to be there. 

The point is that Web 2.0 is changing the way that we can collect our source data. We have to be prepared to get involved with it and move with it over time. It is here to stay and if we don’t use it, someone else will.

Transitioning Survey Modes in a B2B Context
Deftly addressing the potentially headache-inducing topic of mode transition, this “conversation with slides attached” was led by John Bremer, Head of Global Representativeness at Harris Interactive. [Co-author of the workshop was Stacie Greenfield]

Beginning with the premise that each mode being examined – telephone, face to face, postal and online surveys – has its own advantages and disadvantages, John moved the conversation to the basic questions anyone must ask before transitioning survey modes. First, is it critical to maintain the data trend? Second, is there a difference in sample source? Third, will the questionnaire remain the same? John then introduced a basic conceptual framework: when transitioning a survey between modes, data consistency will be maintained so long as the same questions, understood similarly, are asked of the same people at the same period of time.

Going into each of these areas in detail, he addressed a variety of issues including some specific to the B2B context such as the impact of the interviewer particularly for surveys of high level executives. John gave an overview of the potential impact which changes in mode can have and what the possibilities are to limit the impact through sample and questionnaire preparation, during fieldwork and in the resulting data.

Two theories have been put forward to explain the strong attendance at the Friday morning session on ‘building customer value’: (1) an enticing line-up full of Eastern promise (2) a higher proportion of early nights than usual on Thursday. While the jury’s still out on where the truth lies, one thing’s for certain: delegates were determined not only to learn, but also to have a cracking time. 

A.A. Milne once said that “golf is the best game at which to be bad”. This year he had twice as many takers (16) as in 2007 determined to prove him right by taking part in the BIG Golf tournament, kindly sponsored by Insight Research Group (part of Cello). On an afternoon blessed by unrelenting sunshine, the jewel in the crown – the prize for outstanding achievement - was awarded to Tariq Mirza from Intellex Dynamic Reporting for services to the golf ball manufacturing industry.

Tariq managed to lose over 20 balls during his round and probably nearer 30 the following day during another tightly fought battle with Ben Farr from Critical Research. Apart from Tariq, other hazards encountered were lakes, angry swans and over protective geese. Navigating the course with most swan-dodging aplomb was Ben Farr. He beat his colleague Jon Wood to first prize. It took the last player of the day, guest player, Stephen Priestnal, from aptly-named The Oomph Agency to actually hit a ball onto the 6th green and steal the “nearest the pin prize”. Bridget Hunter from Motorola snaffled the longest drive prize while Claire Labrum from Strictly Financial (and chair of BIG) emerged as best lady golfer. Roger Sant from Millward Brown – who won nothing – demonstrated his commitment to conference by finishing his round of golf early and heading in to rehearse his paper on ROI.

Wednesday night kicked off with the traditional first night drinks and dinner, though most were keen to wolf down their supper, dust off their rattles and Chelsea scarves and rock on down to the room laid on for football watching. Perhaps taking advantage of the football-addled brains of a number of delegates, a team including Judith Staig (Gfk NOP), Jonathan Wibberly (BT) and Nick Coates (social correspondent) slew the Orc-like competition in the Critical-devised quiz, mainly by using their tie-recognition skills to identify the president of Vietnam from a photo and deciphering fiendish Dingbats.

On Day Two the return of lunch on the terrace should have been a triumph with the sun beating down, but that ‘country’ aroma was still lingering. However, on a day in which Pat Cash had appeared on breakfast TV naked, a tennis tournament seemed entirely appropriate. Sadly the sun had turned to rain, leading to the sight of a rather bedraggled group of stickily-clad players trooping into the bar to congratulate themselves for seeing it through. Trevor Wilkinson (Purple Research) stole the men’s prize and Helen Wanford (Wanford Fieldwork Partnership) the lady’s trophy. Ben Hogg (e-Rewards Market Research) and Pene Healey (Pene Healey Associates) were the runners up in a keenly fought final.

Some excellent wine sponsored by e-Rewards Market Research accompanied the conference dinner, cheese platters and disco. In a field dominated by booze, booze and more booze (with a light smattering of board games, golf vouchers and kids’ toys, the outliers in the raffle prizes turned out to be a day powerboating on the Thames for two (courtesy of BPRI) and a Teddy Bear and Bracelet from the ever-cuddly GfK NOP. Thanks to Nokia, Keen as Mustard, Penumbra, Illuminas, Wanford Fieldwork Partnership, Response Consulting, Munro Global, New Fieldwork Company, Virtual Surveys, Accent, e-Rewards, Sample Answers, The Wire, Intellex Dynamic Reporting and Perspective for their contributions and to the Marriott St Pierre for donating a night for two at the hotel. A magnificent sum of £832.00 was raised for the MRBA from sales of raffle tickets - a considerable increase on the amount raised in 2007.

Thanks go to all our sponsors - Accent, Confirmit UK Ltd, Critical Research, e-Rewards Market Research, GfK NOP, Illuminas, Insight Research Group, NIPO Software, Research Now, and The Wire, for providing pedometers, torches on key-rings, ipod speakers, and a whole host of other goodies in the sunflower-bedecked delegate bags (courtesy of RP Cushing), in addition to the tea and coffee breaks, pre-dinner drinks, dinner wine and the post-conference delegate questionnaire.

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