Editorial: What's the question?
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Market research has traditionally been used to inform, inspire and guide the search for and development of brand and communication ideas. But over the last year or so, there has been an opinion voiced from a section of the account planning community that there is little, or at least less, value in talking with consumers in this way.1 I have to admit that I bristled when first exposed to this view; how could these people have the audacity to believe that they could pronounce on what was best for a brand! Surely the recommendations of account planners should always be underpinned by impartial evidence as provided by market research. But, on further consideration, I have come to believe that there is an important thought underlying this apparently anarchic view. That is, if you do not raise the right questions in the first place, then no amount of consumer research will appropriately guide your strategic thinking. And even if you do raise the right questions in terms of content, they then still need to be expressed in a form that the consumer is capable of answering. So, the research skill-set required of today’s generation of brand custodians and their consultants is more than knowledge gathering, analysis and interpretation. They must also be superb at interrogation. Indeed, this is likely to become the most valued skill of all in contributing to the development of the brand vision. Without sufficient expertise in raising the appropriate questions in both content and form, traditional re-
search methodologies and techniques run the risk of letting us down. In which case, we might well conclude that there is little point in talking to consumers at all. A half-trained fighter is arguably more vulnerable than the untrained man competing on instinct alone.
INFORMATION OVERLOAD In the past I would often find solutions by gathering all the available information about a subject, immersing myself in it for a while, and then emerging with a recommendation that would hopefully solve the problem at hand; what I have come to term as ‘cauldronthinking’. It used to be a pretty effective way of finding an insight, idea or proposition that would powerfully drive a brand. The luxury was that the physical and financial limitations in data collection, provision and dissemination restricted the amount of information available; it was possible to complete the task as defined. Heaven help you if you ask a brand owner to arrange for you to be briefed on everything they know about the market, brands and consumer these days! Truckloads of information arrive in your offices and the email server is severely challenged. Then there’s the need to understand the broader perspective of social, economic and political trends, plus the requirement to compare and contrast with another, say, 40 markets. The amount of potentially useful data available today goes far beyond our available time and interpretative capacity. To find new ideas
䉷 HENRY STEWART PUBLICATIONS 1350-231X BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 8, NO. 2, 93–97 NOVEMBER 2000
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EDITORIAL
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