PSILOG

We've spent ages in the industry, working with market research and decided to break away. Fundamentally so. The reason is pretty simple and voiced in the most eloquent manner by David Lowden from TNS during the latest ARF conference: "The research company of the future will be a partner with its clients." ???? SO what has it been up till now?

In my book the term client partnering exists from the dawn of time (oh well, maybe a bit exaggerated... the oldest book on Amazon I could find using 'client partnership' in its title dates from 1988). Mr. Lowden just forced the door completely open to any person with a market research ambition, implying ( probably unintentionally) that the only competitive advantage his company has is (the scale of) data collection. This is somewhat sad to see. Market research is an industry with a vast potential, but none of which is leveraged. And no, it's not only Mr. Lowden's company, it's structural. All major players suffer from the same disinterest in what clients really want as well as what the primary source of 'data' really wants. Respondents, as they are called by the industry. People as we like to call them. We've made some clear statements on this at the Esomar Win Meeting in Valencia ( see Research World issue of  april 2007 and it's subsequent related podcast.

Instead of whining about declining response rates and charging higher fees for recruitment ( in a nice client partnership relation that is :-) ) we are actually working hard to come up with smart simple solutions.

We call them Intuitive Response Systems. Stay tuned and yo.

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