Granular level insights key to actionable results in market research: TNS Digital Director

Before the rapid proliferation of the internet, it was marketing research firms that acted as beacons of light for companies in understanding the nuances of consumer and market behaviour. 

With digital disruption taking place all over the world, information and data is being democratised like never before. As a result companies are increasingly looking inward by establishing analytics and consumer insights teams to find solutions from their own data sources or third party providers. 

According to the European Union Society for opinion and market research (ESOMAR), the world market research revenues unusually stagnated in 2014 amidst the data upheaval. 

TNS Digital Director for the Asia Pacific region Zoe Lawrence believes that market research firms still have a lot to offer for companies in enhancing their competitive edge in the age of the new economy. 

In an exclusive interview with Daily FT, Lawrence remarked that the emerging digital landscape is posing a new challenge for market research firms as marketers are expected to implement strategies based on granular level insights in contrast to the traditional surface level picture provided by research agencies.  

Following are excerpts of the interview: 

TNS Digital Director for the Asia Pacific region Zoe Lawrence

By Devin Jayasundera

Q: What are the most significant developments in the market research industry in the last five years?

A: I think the single most important development is the availability of data. The transformation of marketing is not being driven by marketers but by consumers. It is being driven by new behaviours as individuals that we have started to inhibit. If we think the way the media or marketing used to work; you knew in the morning you had radio or newspapers to engage with the consumers, in the evening it was all about TV and that was it. Maybe it was another newspaper in the lunch time or billboard on the way to work. The numbers of touch points were limited. 

Now we know people are going through their phones many times a day. In the US it is estimated at 86 times on average per day. In some Asian markets it is even higher. Every time a person uses a phone it is a marketing opportunity for brands. It has made the whole environment much more complex in a way. It has created many opportunities for the brand to be relevant to the consumer at the right moment. That is the single biggest change. It is a real challenge for marketers to keep up with what the consumers are doing. 

Q: How have these changes shaped the role of the market research firms and the expectation from the marketers? 

A: Our role is to help our clients make decisions.  The clients typically come to us with a business or a marketing challenge and it is our job to create a research project that would answer that question. I think that core role hasn’t changed. What has changed is the type of questions they are asking us. They are increasingly asking about how they should approach marketing in a digital world. Such as understanding the best way to engage with their consumers, to know when to move away from TV towards other digital mediums and how to understand the type of returns they might get by operating in a digital environment. At the core we are still supporting them in making decisions.  We are still helping them navigate through the best course towards business growth but in a different context. We need to be well versed in the digital marketing environment and enable marketers in responding to these developments.  

Q: With the influx of data and the establishment of in house data warehouses coupled with analytics teams, companies are looking inward to find solutions to understand consumer and market behaviour. Are market research agencies losing relevancy in this new economy? 

A: Absolutely not, we have changed and continue to evolve the way we are working so we can stay relevant to the new economy. Every business whatever sector they are in, has to really look at their strategy to ensure they stay relevant to the marketplace. And we are no exception to that. When we look at our own strategy from the investment that we’ve made around digital data collection and in understanding the digital space, is part of our response to that. Think about big data for a moment. We’ve never had as much data at our disposal as we have today. 

The challenge for organisations is how to use it. There’s so much noise in that data it is hard for them to find the signal. Partnering with insight agencies can help them in understanding on how to approach and what frameworks should be used to mine the data. We advise clients based on data but we don’t always collect data by ourselves. Sometimes that is third party data or client’s own data. It is our expertise and insights that we bring, based on data where we deliver impact to our clients. We are actually very flexible where the data comes from as long as we have the right data sources in order to deliver the right insights. 

I think another challenge around data that organisation’s hold is they tend to know a lot of information about their current customers but they don’t know much about who aren’t their customers. That’s where research plays a role as well. Businesses grow by increasing spend with their current customers but also by bringing in new customers through innovation in new products and services and entering in to new markets. The data they have can tell a lot about some of those areas and in some areas it just simply can’t. Also research agencies can help companies mine the data they have to increase the opportunity with their existing customers.

Q: How effective is mining social media to understand consumer behaviour. Has it gone beyond just counting the number of posts, clicks and shares to actually providing insights? 

A: When marketers first started looking at social data depending on the country you are in or the type of brand, there was a wealth of conversations being generated. Most of them weren’t very relevant to the brand and it’s wasn’t very healthy to make decisions simply based on the surface level information. So what we do is filter the social data and drill down to find things that people are talking about that is relevant to your business challenges and issues. We focus on what’s relevant and use that to guide our insight development.

In terms of measuring campaigns that’s a different piece of thinking altogether. The industry got stuck thinking about Facebook likes and the number of shares. People didn’t really know what to use the platforms for or what they were looking to achieve from it. We’ve gone through a period of trial to see what they can give us. Now we need to start thinking like real marketers again. We’ve experimented a little bit what social media can or can’t do. We need to take a step back thinking through what is the marketing goal and how social media could achieve that marketing goal.

Q: There is a general criticism levelled at the market research industry in the regard to the gap between insights and actionability. What are your thoughts on that?

A: I think this is something the industry has been very vocal about for a long time. I can only talk in authority on what TNS has done. I’ve been with the business for five and a half years. Since I’ve joined there’s always been a focus about how we make our insights more actionable. We’ve had many different initiatives that has been supported and led by our senior leadership. So we have our own approach to consulting which is called TNS signature approach. This is a training our team around the world has undertaken in order to ensure that we really are focusing on the business issue. We’ve had a lot of emphasis on training, coaching to develop our teams to focus on actionability. 

If I think about digital and social media’s role that play in the shoppers decision making. We will not just advise the client to advertise on social platforms instead we will tell your target audience is very active on Instagram and they are looking for opportunities to make purchases from that particular platform. The advice and guidance will be based at a very granular level.  The other element that we are involved in is thinking about how we can partner with other agencies specifically with media agencies to make the work more actionable. All research agencies do a lot of segmentation work for their clients. 

As we are part of WPP we have partnered with Group M and Xaxis in applying segmentation work to media buying. This sounds like very simple to say but very difficult to actually do. We are applying it to programmatic media buying and we have already piloted it successfully in the US and working to get the technological infrastructure in place to other markets.  Through this we identify target segments for clients and then use a data management platform to do look-alike modelling to identify people who share the same characteristics as those segments. 

Based on this model we identify thousands of other people in terms of attitudes and mindsets to support the media buy. It is a clear way of making segmentation more actionable because it directly has a follow through in to the media buying. We just don’t want to deliver a fat research report to the client, we actually want to make a difference in our clients business. Any research agency that is not going to focus on actionability is not going to be successful in the long run. 

Pic by Kithsiri de Mel