Strategic Insight

StrategyOne, Inc., a full-service strategic research firm owned by Daniel J Edelman, today announced that the company was ranked 45th among the Honomichl list of top 50 market research firms across the United States, as published in the 37th annual business report of Marketing News, an American Marketing Association publication.

This is the first year the company has been included in the Honomichl 50 firms since StrategyOne was founded in 1999.

“This award is a mark of distinction and honor in the market research industry and represents our significant growth over the past five years,” says Neal Flieger, Chairman of StrategyOne. “We are pleased to enter the Honomichl 50 and believe that our aggressive growth plans will significantly raise our ranking next year.”

Honomichl identified the top 50 market research companies based on their 2009 U.S. revenues. StrategyOne, listed at number 45, reported U.S. revenues of $12.8 million, up 4.9% over 2008. This is in sharp contrast to the Honomichl 50 average, which saw average revenue declines of –3.5%

StrategyOne also grossed $1.7 million in total revenue from outside the U.S., bringing its total worldwide research revenue to $14.5 million.

“At StrategyOne, we have a focus on providing our clients with research that is insightful, actionable, easily communicated and measured,” says Laurence Evans, President of StrategyOne. “This, along with our focus on data-driven reputation and communications research among influential stakeholders, is what sets us apart from our competitors.”

The "Top 50 U.S. Market Research Ranking and Review" is a report published by the American Marketing Association (AMA), North America's largest professional marketing association, and Inside Research(R), a one-source authoritative report founded in 1990 by Jack Honomichl, the leading market research industry authority.

The international Association of Measurement and Evaluation Companies (AMEC) kicked off its 2nd European Summit on Measurement in Barcelona today, where two hundred delegates from 33 countries have agreed on the following 7 Guiding Principles of Measurement:

1.Goal setting and measurement are fundamental to doing PR

2.Goals should be as quantitative as possible and address who what when and how much the PR program is intended to affect

3.Measurement should include representative traditional and social media as well as target audience changes in awareness comprehension attitude and behavior as applicable.

4.Aves are not the value of public relations

5.Social Media Can and Should be measured

6.Measuring Outcomes is preferred to measuring media results

7.Business results and outcomes should be measured whenever possible

(KD Paine provides the sub bullets to each of the 7 principles above here)

If you want to follow the discussion on Twitter: #AMEC10

Simon outlines the transition from the "Asking Epoch" defined by the survey, to the “Listening Epoch” defined by observational analytics (social media “lifestreaming”, MROCs, co-creation, etc.)

For more on the Market Research evolutionary stages visit the Future of Insight blog.

From Robert Moran at the Future of Insight blog...
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Reading Joel Rubinson’s excellent post over at his ARF blog, recalls some futuring I’ve been doing around the likely evolution of the industry.

Rubinson takes a look at the evolution of the ad agency and applies this evolutionary footpath to MR with media buying the analog to the data collection side of the business and creative the analog to the full service, analytics side of the business. It’s worth a read.
In my thinking about the future of the MR agency, I have developed at least five (5) plausible futures (not mutually exclusive):

1. Army of Davids: In this scenario, the larger firms keep consolidating and attempting to buy their future by acquiring hot new companies, but the systemic change and “free agent nation” overwhelms them. The goliaths are killed off by the Davids. The carriagemakers can’t adjust to the age of the automobile, and they are overhwelmed by new entrants, new technologies, new approaches (social media listening, etc.) and agile specialty firms.

2. Whuffie-Driven Free Agency: A second and more extreme “Army of Davids” scenario, Whuffie-driven free agency develops when individual researchers band together under a kind of digital guild in which each is rated by his-her clients. The resulting client score, their Whuffie (hat tip to Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the MagicKingdom”) roughly determines an individual researcher’s compensation if and when they are chosen to do the work. Sound fantastical? Hardly. Consider: (a) eBay feedback profiles and (b) the mechanical turk. Now assume that a community of credentialed researchers (think PRC or similar) build an elance site on these principles. Insights rockstars, as opposed to large companies or even specialty firms, dominate the scene.

3. Convergence: Under the convergence scenario the MR industry is renamed, rebranded and redefined by a much larger collection of data-driven strategic consultants, including: management consulting, social media listening and analytics firms, predictive markets, game modelled consumer behavior research, foresight practices and IBM. Under this scenario, the first to combine all fields in an integrated way gains a significant advantage. The deepest pockets are the most favored here.

4. Incredible Shrinking MR: In this scenario the market research industry retains its current, distinctive, identity. It is not reinvented or transformed. Plenty of new innovations come along, but they’re not part of MR. MR labors on, like the dinosaurs after the first asteroid strike, oblivious of their doomed future.

5. DIY: Google, Facebook and future social media platforms enter the consumer research business by offering unimaginably massive panels of their users-members. With MR now a simple page on these social media sites, the era of DIY research is fully unleashed. Need a quick, global survey of fashion conscious, well-educated women? No problem. GoogleSurvey will collect data for you in 30 minutes after you have posted your (mandated) 5 questions or less survey. Need some collage-based qual done in 20 countries on a new tourist destination? No problem. 3 hours. Survey quality suffers, but the data is abundant. Insights? Well, those are a bit tougher to come by.

From Robert Moran at Future of Insight.

Will 50% of the work being done at market research firms today become “unnecessary” in three years?

Marshall Toplansky, President of WiseWindow, explores this question and scans the horizon of market research in a new MRA Alert article. For those MRA members, I highly recommend reading Toplansky’s article titled “Measuring the Future of Market Research.”

Reading this article reminded me very much of the things I’ve been writing on this platform and in my white paper (“Insight’s Future; From Market Research to Strategic Insight”) and I’m glad to see others thinking along similar lines.

One area of considerable agreement is what he titled “the new expectations.” Here Toplansky is, at base, writing about organizations’ increasing “need for speed” and how this is impacting traditional market research. Think James Gleick (of Faster book fame) meets Simon Chadwick.

As Toplansky colorfully puts it:

“To today’s CEO, a six week qualitative study to find a simple answer is a slow moving elephant in a race for gazelles.”

I believe that clients now have 8 demands of market research:

1. Strategic Recommendations
2. Concise Deliverables
3. Deeper Insight into the Whole Consumer
4. Speed
5. An Integrated Understanding of the “Infoverse”
6. Truly Understanding the Role of Emotion in Human Behavior
7. Insights Management
8. Value

And speed is #4 on my list.

Given the compressed decision making cycle in corporations, there is certainly a need for faster data collection, analysis and reporting of insights. Of course, “fast” and “deep thinking” are difficult to combine. And, there are limitations on how quickly good research can be conducted. But, there is strong client demand for speedier delivery of research based insights and firms that can work quickly, using a 24 hour “global clock”, will be at a significant long term advantage.
As I noted in my white paper, this threatens the large traditional suppliers who do not appear to be built for speed. For them it will be imperative to argue for a deliberative process that tests assumptions as well as hypothesis. But, when it comes to speed, these large suppliers will be at a disadvantage relative to smaller, nimbler firms.

Of course, Toplansky takes his speed argument further and merges it with the emergence of what some have called social media “listening posts.” Here he rightly argues that mass analysis of unstructured, “unsolicited and unexpurgated” comments across social media platforms can provide organizations with a new kind of real-time tracking system – a trends and insights stream.

I generally agree with Toplansky’s argument. We have certainly seen a rapid development of social media research tools, and in time these will become incredibly powerful. To my thinking there are two key hinge points in the development of social media listening. The first is improvements in the analysis of unstructured text. The progress being made here is impressive, but the human element is still needed. The second is the representativeness of social media engagement. We assume that social media usage will continue to explode and eventually become ubiquitous across generational, gender and SES lines. This seems to be a solid assumption, but we’re not there yet and participation frequency rates can differ dramatically. I freely admit that projectability in the survey sense may not be a valid critique in this instance. My second concern about participation rates is the privacy issue. In my scenario building for the futures of market research, at least one scenario has privacy concerns reversing some of these basic assumptions and challenging the development of “listening posts” altogether. In fact, Jeffrey Henning is giving a speech on this very issue today at the CASRO Technology Conference. The title of this speech is “Um, We Didn’t Know You Were Listening.” As Henning puts it in his synopsis, “Unlike the traditional ethnography, consumers have not given researchers explicit permission to study them online. "What do individuals think about this?” Good question.

Toplansky outlines the three “seminal” methodologies that he sees driving a “new era” of market research. I’m glad he uses this “era” terminology.

In my thinking on the futures (thanks to Peter Bishop at the University of Houston) of market research I have segmented market research into historical and evolving eras and epochs. The “Data Collection Epoch” which we are now exiting, began with face-to-face interviewing, advanced to telephone and then advanced again to online. I have also named this epoch the “Asking Epoch” because it was defined by the utilization of the structured survey instrument. But, there are now two epochs on the market research horizon. The first is what I call the “Listening Epoch” and the next I have termed the “Simulation Epoch.” The “Listening Epoch” is defined by observational analytics, a movement away from the survey instrument as the primary research vehicle and a significant shift to social media analytics and other observational technologies (such as fMRI, eye tracking ,etc.). The “Simulation Epoch” is defined by anticipatory research. It is this market research epoch that I am most excited about. I see the “Simulation Epoch” as one defined by mass simulation gaming, predictions markets like those designed by Inkling, MROC Delphi panels and strategic foresight. In fact, when market research enters this era, I believe that the survey instrument will be replaced by the online game and that market research game designers will replace today’s survey writers. This may sound a bit strange, but consider that this would mesh with the gaming behaviors of younger people today and would be more observational and less intrusive. One company that may epitomize this new Simulation Epoch is Simulex.

In essence, the “Asking Epoch” was about the survey instrument. The “Listening Epoch” is about real-time observation, and the “Simulation Epoch” is about modeling future behavior. One could argue that this progression takes us from a focus on the past (reported behavior in surveys) to the present (observed behavior and social media sentiment in real-time) and on to the future (gaming, prediction markets and scenario building).

Finally, Toplanksy discusses marketing eras. His thinking very much tracks with that of noted futurist Jim Dator and author Virginia Postrel. I think his taxonomy (industrial to information to relationship) is excellent, although I would not name the current marketing era the “relationship era.” Instead, I would christen it the “, "dream" or “experience” era. Market research, neuromarketing, fMRI and behavioral economics are significantly chipping away at the notion of the “rational man” and instead revealing the power of the creative and emotional elements of the human psyche. Toplansky gets at this in his piece in a shorthand way.

This post comes from the Edelman UK Technology team's blog The Naked Pheasant, and is based on new research conducted by StrategyOne.
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We love data here at Edelman. Technology floats our boat and aguably we’re pretty interested in Social Entertainment. You might have noticed that we like Trust as well.

So is there anything more awesome than a presentation of data that shows the relationship between the Entertainment Industry, Social Networks and Trust? We think not. Except perhaps bacon sandwiches. We like those as well.

AP-GfK
5/7-11/10; 1,002 adults, 4.3% margin of error
Mode: live telephone interviews
(AP-GfK release)

Do you favor, oppose, or neither favor nor oppose increasing drilling for oil and gas in coastal areas around the United States?
50% Favor, 38% Oppose

Which is more important to you as you think about increasing drilling for oil and gas in coastal areas around the United States?
49% The need for the U.S. to provide its own sources of energy
47% The need to protect the environment

Approval/Disapproval on Handling Oil Spill
Obama: 42 / 33
British Petroleum: 32 / 49

Party ID
35% Democrat, 26% Republican, 25% independent, 14% Don't know

Zogby
4/16-19/10; 2,018 likely voters, 2.2% margin of error
Mode: Internet
(Zogby release)

2010 Congress: Generic Ballot
44% Republican, 42% Democrat

Obama Job Approval
49% Approve, 51% Disapprove

Gallup
4/12-18/10; 1,600 registered voters, 3% margin of error
Mode: Live telephone interviews
(Gallup release)

2010 Congress: Generic Ballot
46% Republicam, 43% Democrat

Rasmussen
4/12-18/10; 3,500 likely voters, 2% margin of error
Mode: Automated phone
(Rasmussen release)

2010 Congress: Generic Ballot
46% Republican, 36% Democrat