Iphones, BlackBerries and dongles – a few years ago, would any of us had any concept of what these things might be, let alone the impact they would have on our working lives? This after-lunch session, chaired by Sinéad Jefferies, gave us three different perspectives on the changing world of work.

First on stage were Keith Bailey from Nokia and Andy Dexter from Truth, sharing some of the insights they’ve been uncovering in a global study on ‘The Future of Work’. As Keith explained, Nokia’s handsets facilitate all aspects of business, therefore it’s key to their future success that they understand how they are increasingly integrating into people’s work and home lives, and how that is continually evolving.

Keith and Andy shared with us their framework for the project, speaking to people from end users through to technology experts. One of the trends they identified was ‘nomadism’ – those workers who are entirely self-sufficient and can take their working life with them wherever they go – be that an airport, a train or Starbucks. They also looked at the importance of the human element –the need for basic human interaction.

Keith was just summing up using familiar words from the telecommunications industry – ‘The future’s bright....’ when the lights went out and neatly punctuated the end of the presentation!

The next speaker was Charterhouse Research’s Sara McFadzean looking at ‘Virtual Reality’ – how businesses are changing the way they operate. Sara had a particular focus on very small businesses and how the virtual office is opening up new opportunities for them – and presenting more research challenges for us.

In looking at the challenges and opportunities of a virtual business life Sara shared with us some videos featuring those who have experienced this first hand, and also business services providers who are benefitting from supporting this growing trend. We clearly have some thinking to do to ensure we provide appropriate solutions to researching the virtual business audience.

Gamely taking on the challenge of presenting the last paper was Richard Hepburn from Munro Global. As well as highlighting a spectrum of different typologies of remote workers, Richard explained the importance of documenting clear ways of working for remote workers, and thinking about the security issues of someone remotely logging in and working with client data, while not operating directly on a secure office network.

The first session on Friday morning looked at different aspects of the impact of new techniques on B2B research.

Matt Burn (ICM Research) and Nick Bassett (Vodafone) told us about Lions’ Lair – an innovative project which had involved marketing teams from Vodafone pitching their ideas to a panel of SME customers in a similar fashion to a similarly named BBC TV programme. The challenge was to help Vodafone understand what it felt like to be a small business. The project involved workshops, senior stakeholder interviews, ‘speed dating’ sessions with those who support small businesses and site visits by Vodafone marketers.

The final stage consisted of Vodafone client teams pitching their ideas for 10-15 minutes to a panel of small businesses with, finally, both the teams and the ‘Lions’ interviewed about their experience.

The next session, from Neil Swan of RS Consulting discussed how we are adapting in a B2B context to the things which are happening in the B2B digital space. He talked about the issues which might be holding us back and the solutions – for example participant recruitment which is being overcome by the increase in specialist B2B panels. Other areas we should be looking at are users’ forums and online communities as a starting point for accelerated learning.

Finally, Catherine Shovlin from Synthetron talked about social brainstorming, or how to harness the positives from water cooler discussions – an environment in which it’s informal, easy to chat but without the negatives associated with water coolers. Catherine explained how social brainstorming groups work with participants connecting to a moderator but also to a wider group (with between ten and a thousand participants). Although connected to other groups it feels like a small conversation.

If a good idea starts, it migrates around the group and the best ideas go a long way.

Three quite different papers but all full of new ideas and a good deal to think about.

Session 5 of the conference, chaired by Pene Healey, presented two very different papers under the broad heading of ‘maxmising the value of research.’

The first paper ‘Can we justify the ROI of market research?’ presented by Jonathan Fletcher of Illuminas, was (as the title suggests) more about demonstrating the value of research than maximizing it. However this was a very welcome attempt to attach a monetary value to the contribution of research. Given the current economic climate it is now, more than ever, crucial to justify investment on research in terms that the MD and FD of the client company will understand i.e. cash. Jonathan had a pretty good stab at doing just that.

Jonathan touched on a number of difficulties with demonstrating the ROI of research. These include isolating the impact and contribution of research from all the other activities within a business, such as marketing, sales and NPD, that might contribute to profit. There are also many different kinds of research: although research associated with NPD is a bit more straightforward in terms of demonstrating the contribution of research, other kinds of research such as customer satisfaction research and continuous brand tracking are not so clear cut. Moreover it is difficult to quantify the additional knowledge provided by a research project from the knowledge of a market that already existed within a client company. Another problem was that researchers traditionally have not tended to speak the language of cash.

Jonathan’s argument was that a monetary value can be put on research in two specific ways. Firstly using research as a risk reduction tool (guiding clients on what not to do as much as what to do) can link that research to a specific sum of money in terms of expenditure or losses avoided. Secondly research can claim a share of profits for the identification and realisation of opportunities for new or revamped products or services. By this rationale research would claim a royalty, perhaps 25%, for its contribution in this area.

This was an interesting and useful attempt to put a monetory value on research - a bit of a holy grail for researchers.

The second paper in this session was ‘Back to the future: the lost art of desk research,’ presented by the co-author of the paper, Michael Jaxa-Chamiec of FreshMinds (Alistair Leathwood being laid low with a slipped disc).

Among the general themes of the conference two stood out: one was the need to squeeze as much value out of research as possible from research and the other was the search for more cost-effective ways of delivering insight. The previous day of the conference, for example, Dan Young of Legal & General had sung the praises of desk research in general (and Freshminds in particular) as excellent means of achieving those aims. So the scene was set for Michael’s talk on how desk research, broadly considered a lost art, should be reinvigorated for the new milennium.

Michael’s ‘Desk Research 2.0’ certainly looked compelling. The main thrust of his argument was that recent developments, including more sophisticated search and analysis tools on the Internet and the rapid growth of user-generated content such as online forums, blogs and various social networks, have introduced a different kind of desk research, one that has started to blur the line between primary and secondary data.

There are challenges, of course, with issues around verifying the accuracy of information and trustworthiness of sources, and the practical issue of separating the wheat from a huge amount of chaff.

However it’s good to see someone championing desk research (‘a good, old but slightly forgotten friend’) as means of providing market data and insight within a modest budget. Desk research has long been a vital part of the b2b researcher’s toolkit and any attempt to revitilise it has to be welcomed.

This was followed by the BIG debate, chaired by Nick Coates of Promise, on what the future held for B2B research. Tim Britton of YouGov opened the debate by proposing ‘Online’ as the key directional force. Tim presented his argument as a direct battle between online and telephone research, arguing that the increasing difficulty, both practical and economic, of identifying and eliciting participation from key business decision makers in telephone research opened the way for online panels. Daniel Wain’s lively proposition, ‘Brand and Deliver’, argued that attracting and retaining a talented workforce is the key to a bright future for market research. He insisted that, once a brand is established, and the talent enticed through the doors, the employer must deliver on that brand in order to retain and engage its people, and thereby its differentiation. Dave Skelsey rounded off the sessions with the ‘Economic Climate’, giving a run-down on the ways in which economic factors affect the market research industry, which is a “secondary industry” relying on other sectors for its success. A brief summary of the situation painted a very bleak picture of the recession as it is, and as it will continue. But the recession also presents opportunities for market research: a different sort of questioning can establish the relationship between demand and brand; agencies can add value through desk research and sweating data. Dave believes that certain areas of research, such as customer satisfaction studies and small scale qualitative work, have greater value and will therefore see growth in recession conditions.

Time being up, a quick show of hands decided that Daniel Wain’s Employer Branding argument had been the most compelling, closing a varied and interesting debate, that gave plenty of fuel for further discourse over the blackberry smoothies that followed.

The closing session of the conference featured our keynote speaker Mark Stuart, Head of Research at The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM).

Mark feels that the recession will go on for a year or two or even longer and then took a vote from the floor on who was optimistic about the recovery happening soon, and who was pessimistic. The Optimists won by a short head, but then MR does tend to come out of downturns early – so both parties could be right!

CIM’s own research shows that companies that ring-fence their marketing spend in a recession, or even increase it, tend to do better in the long-term, than companies that cut marketing expenditure.

CIM has identified six areas/reasons for maintaining marketing spend in difficult times.

1. Visibility
   Reducing marketing spend reduces visibility and could indicate (to customers) that the business is vulnerable. After 9/11 the major airlines assumed that people would stop flying, and they retrenched. Ryanair took the opposite, counter-intuitive, view and developed an aggressive marketing strategy, which led to growth compared to competition.
   
   
2. We’re on your side
   Customer Centricity/affinity has never been more important than now. And empathy doesn’t have to mean discounts. It means: Understand what customers really want. Can we learn from Tesco’s Value, mid-range and Finest concept?
   
   
3. Differentiate
   Keep track of competitor’s strategies: but don’t copy them – come up with something different.
   
   
4. Adapt
   Even when the recovery comes: ‘normal’ won’t be familiar. Businesses are down-sizing – offer a new service to down-size their IT function appropriately?
   
   
5. Don’t count on Discounting
   Price reductions today compromise price sensitivity in the future.
   
   
6. Technology
   Develop an Opt-in culture, rather than an Opt-out one.

Mark rounded off with some key tips:

• Keep communicating
• Buyer psychology is complex
• Adapt (but ring-fence Marketing budget)
• Reconsider your core offering in the new climate
• Resist the temptation to cut prices
• Don’t be afraid to innovate
• Think creatively not defensively
• Measure everything, (to prove [to senior management] that what you’re doing is working)
• Don’t slash the marketing budget

There were three interactive workshops, which were well-attended.

Seeing the wood and the trees – in the context of a landscape
Neil McPhee, Nuance Research Ltd

Slap bang in the middle of a conference which surrounded the delegates with the move from analogue to digital and from personal contact to cyber enabled, Neil McPhee gave us this timely reminder of the human being inside every business respondent.

With the aid of an impressive range of sound bites from, among others, Mission Impossible, The Simpsons and (everyone’s favourite - Airplane) Neil put forward the argument that our persistence in treating the purchasing decisions of business respondents as wholly rational was wholly irrational. He also suggested that to use one respondent to reflect the opinions and buying intentions of a large organization was just plain “silly” and “mistaking the wood for the trees”, and that in assuming that these respondents can speak for their organizations with objectivity and lack of emotions we are falling back on techniques which are 25 – 50 years old.

To the strains of “Nothings Gonna Change Their World” Neil asked us to consider human decision making as an iceberg with 85% of all decisions (business and consumer alike) made by the unconscious mind. The unchangeable ones to whom he alluded were the clients who believe that in B2B research respondents don’t respond to “soft” questions and that the empirical answer will be there if only we can ask the right questions. The image of the client who insisted on reading discussion guides word for word struck a cord with the experienced qually practitioners in the workshop and prompted a quick round of agreeable moaning and client bashing.

Neil pointed out that these strict quantitative approaches were at odds with the clients need for “INSIGHT” and that in order to get the best out of a B2B respondent we had to create a context for our questioning, establish a rapport and put emotion and human values back into the interview. He also suggested that his wasn’t the completely “low tech” approach of using an experienced interviewer to elicit good responses but that there were a whole raft of new techniques which could be employed including measuring peripheral vision and blink rate and analysing doodles left by respondents in focus groups.

A lively discussion ensued covering different methods for implementing discussion guides, different approaches to the buying behaviour of different sizes of companies, whether qualitative researchers should ask any numeric questions, and the impact of culture on decision making. Budgets, of course, were also mentioned.

The workshop produced a list of factors to be taken into account when conducting B2B qualitative interviews; these included Multiple sampling; Big Company v SME; Question format; Timing; Culture; Client’s needs and Human relationships.

This is a far too simplistic account of a much more complex and well produced research workshop.

Stated Preference – the Sky’s the limit
Rob Sheldon, Accent Research

We learnt in this excellent workshop that there are endless opportunities to apply this tried and trusted analysis tool in market research, and that it is a far more discriminating survey technique than simple importance scores. Rob has been using stated preference since the 1970s and has since conducted thousands of studies from £3k to £1m in value, testing a wide range of attributes at varying levels, reaching a record 110 variables in one major assignment. While Rob wouldn’t recommend initiating a study with 100 different attributes to test, it can be done.

In fact, we heard that the technique is at its most effective when time is given at the development phase to refine the list of variables and levels at which they need to be tested. What is the trade off, relative to a customer’s position and requirements? And what are the different levels at which they need to be assessed? Workshops with the client to establish the variables and their respective levels are ideal and, if there is the time and money available, qualitative research up front can be very useful to ensure the survey focuses on the issues of importance. Rob suggested that 5-6 variables with 2-3 levels for each tends to work best for each separate exercise.

Once all the variables and their respective levels have been established, we need to formulate the options that the respondent will be presented with. A crucial requirement here, essential for the analysis to work, is to link exercises (if there are more than one) with a common variable, such as price. Well thought out routing in questionnaire design will ensure that the respondent is only asked to state their preference according to their pre-determined requirements. Responses to earlier questions can be used to limit the number of options you need to present them with and will also help not to bore or annoy respondents with repetitive or irrelevant options.

Following these steps helps make the trade off analysis most effective, to give you results that are actionable. You don’t want to end up with one variable that dominates the utility scores, nor do you want to present findings to the client that will be impossible to implement. The workshop sparked many discussions around the potential benefits and possible pitfalls, such as if the preference options are not designed appropriately. We also learnt how the results could be used to calculate the likely monetary impact to the end client, applying functions of probability and value to the utility scores derived.

Today’s software capabilities help to make trade off analysis far easier to apply compared to the dim and distant past when vast swathes of colour coded paper survey packs were necessary. Hand-held devices, online or telephone research all work very well, the latter option often being used in conjunction with electronic media to visually display the options to the respondent.

At the end of this highly interactive workshop, we were all left convinced of the wide potential of stated preference, how it can add value and insight to our client’s research projects, and are now armed with a clearer understanding of the statistics behind it. Stated preference is already well established in some industries such as health, utilities, transport and communications, particularly among the regulators who in some sectors insist that their regulated organisations incorporate it into their customer research programmes. But there remain a number of sectors where client side researchers rarely consider, or are even aware of, stated preference. Not doing so stifles the ability to design a survey that takes everything into consideration and gets the customer to make the trade offs so that we can derive the relative importance of these attributes, something a basic importance scale cannot do.

You can’t know where to tap, if you don’t know your customer’s map!
Diana Tunney, The Best Organisation

This was a really engaging workshop and was fully interactive with everyone inquisitive about the nuances of body language, the use of eyes in communicating a thousand words and how to truly understand a client’s perspective from the language they use.

The Best Organisation specialises in finding patterns of customer thinking, language and behaviour across multiple research platforms, from quantitative data to qualitative verbatim transcripts, and through the art of non-verbal communication – something that many researchers have difficulty in incorporating into their concrete findings.

We were all asked to pair up toexperience our natural tendency to use our eyes in a certain way to express a variety of factual or concocted accounts. This elicited some great conversations as it ensured we re-engaged with our real/true intentions as opposed to our verbal articulation/and the guises that words can create.

We were informed about people’s tendency to:

1. Look up to their left when they remember things from memory, recalling things they have seen before. (Visual Remembered- VR)
2. Look up to their right when they are making things up. (Visual Constructed - VC)
3. Look to their left (ear level) when they are remembering something they have heard before. (Auditory Remembered - VR)
4. Look to their right (ear level) when they are making up something that they haven’t heard, e.g. The voice of Socrates. (Auditory Constructed - AC)
5. Look down and to their left – when you are having an internal conversation with yourself. (Auditory Digital - AD)
6. How when you relate things to feelings, sense or touch you tend to look at the part of your body that remembers/recreates that feeling. (Kinesthetic - K)

What was interesting was the fact that there were several quantitative researchers in the workshop, some of whom felt that feelings/observations/use of certain words or the lack of them etc were not enough to validate solid findings from a client’s perspective. They would need to have quantification of results and then mesh this with the more NLP style to illicit formidable research findings.

In short the session was really refreshing and gave good insight into the multifaceted ways in which we communicate, however we all like to know that our gut instinct/visual observations are based on concrete findings and this is something that The Best Organisation holds in high regard. The Best Organisation model is based on ensuring intrinsic connections are made from disparate pieces of information which when collected and integrated are pertinent and impactful beyond the norm of quant or qual research alone. The primary connective ‘tissue’ in the model is the linguistic analysis – finding patterns in language used by customers that reveals not just their past behaviour but also accurately predicts their future actions.

Out and about on the social scene

A vintage BIG conference is often measured as much by the social scene as by what happens on the platform. 2009, by anyone’s reckoning, was a corker in both regards. When more than 20 people turned up for the opening event, the BIG golf tournament (kindly sponsored by Insight Research Group), the tone was set for an epic struggle of man against the elements. Once again Richard Collins topped the leader board, but other delectable prizes were claimed by Marcus Chillery (also Confirmit), Paul Williams of E-Tabs (longest drive) and Jon Darby from Touchstone (best story in the bar).

But it wasn’t all about the big swingers. Over in the driving range, a new event – beginner’s golf – was also being played out. Twelve people turned up at the Driving Range on Wednesday afternoon for a lesson with the golf professional. It was Phil Rance (Research Now) and Vicki Whiting (Continental Research) who walked away with the Best Beginners prizes– and we will be sure to repeat the beginners golf next year.
The first night Pub Quiz was led by the intrepid Sinéad Jeffries of Royal Mail, who had concocted a fiendish blend of Dingbats, British Olympians and other assorted trivia. One team – the Sangiovese Dogs - blew away the field. Having sensibly left aceing the Dingbats round to the Dogs, the Blonde Bombshells snatched the best name prize from some fierce competition.

On the 14th May the weather was downright horrible. Even so a few stalwarts played in the annual tennis tournament sponsored by Confirmit, with Paul Williams winning the competition overall, with Damon Thomas as runner up. Pene Healey won the ladies competition.

This year’s less racket-obsessed delegates were given a parallel choice of table tennis or a range of everyone’s favourite boardgames in the bar, from Downfall to Jenga, that we dubbed Tiddly Tiddlywinks. And what better way to prepare for the conference’s social epicentre, the Thursday night dinner, which this year had food sponsored by Acumen Fieldwork and wine courtesy of E-Rewards. Few if any managed to defeat the copious (and delicious) chocolate pudding which completed several hours of eating, chit-chat and general merry-making.

This year’s MRBA raffle raised a fantastic £770.00 and we had 21 donated prizes ranging from champagne to a golf day for two via champagne, white burgundy, wine, pink champagne, oh yes ... and more champagne, not to mention goodies from Harvey Nichols and Weightwatchers, Amazon vouchers, Bamz shoe inserts, Nokia mobile phone, soap, iPod, dinner for two, & psychometric sessions. Thanks to all who donated so generously.
The end of the night brought a sudden realisation that dawn was catching up on the last sitting and the last brave delegates crept back to their rooms to prepare for Day 2. The inspired Blackberry break smoothies after Friday lunch were a welcome treat before Mark Stuart, from The Chartered Institute of Marketing, rounded off the conference with its focus on looking at B2B research from a broader perspective. His recommendations were that marketing spend should not be slashed but spent wisely to help companies weather the current financial crisis.