Its 2020 – I still eat food but have not yet had a 3D printed Ice cream; What research needs to do is to Drive Empathy with People rather than Sympathy for People

In 2005, the renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that by 2020 it will be possible to consume nanabots that will be capable of nourishing human body cells. That would mean that we would no longer need to eat. Having just returned from a holiday in Goa I can tell you that the famous Goan Sausages continue to be consumed in copious quantities while the nanabots are still not on the menu.

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”. John Kenneth Galbraith

Predictions gone wrong - Every market researcher knows that making predictions is a difficult task and fraught with risks. It’s made even more difficult when you throw in factors like development of the technology, the legislative environment, whether you have an entrepreneur with the ability to commercialize the technology etc. That’s probably why futurists prefer round numbers like 2020 or 2025 which are ideally around a decade out – not too far out but reasonably far out.

So come 2020 and there are plenty of predictions with expiry dates looming. A leading management consultancy had predicted that by 2020, 3D printing would spur a second industrial revolution with print at home food and a range of products including toys. Well this Christmas I had to make do with toys from “Toys R Us” (its still up and running in India) since 3D options are not available. And yes, while I continue to enjoy Ben & Jerry’s Ice cream, I am yet to taste a 3D printed Ice cream. The failure of 3D printers taking off seems to be attributed to them being not user friendly. Irrespective, 3D printing is still not leading to a second industrial revolution.

There are some predictions that have proven even more woefully off target. In 1967, the American Noble Laureate Glenn Seaborg predicted that “by the year 2020 it may be possible to breed intelligent species of animals such as apes that will be capable of performing manual labor”……….

Missed predictions should not be taken as a failure. Inventors should absolutely continue to dream of a better future. Because we don’t have perfectly smart homes or haven't complexly figured out driver less cars does not mean we never will. Technology has indeed made rapid progress – just look at the field of medicine and the number of life threatening diseases from the last century that have now been tamed. Technology crawls forward at a steady pace – look at the development of mobile phones over the last 20 years. It is only once in a while that we see a giant leap forward like the i-phone that then spurs new innovation.

“Predictions are very difficult. Especially if they are about the future”. – Niels Bohr, Noble Prize Winning Physicist.

Market Research missed a prediction - In the last decade, the Market research industry has, quite rightly, invested a lot of resources (manpower and financial) into adopting the latest technologies. The industry has made massive progress – look at the adoption of neuro techniques ranging from EEG to Skin conductance to facial coding to IAT’s.

Despite all the technology at play no one predicted two of the biggest global (democratic) political events of the last decade – Trump and Brexit.

The American society has seen increased inequality over the decades. The average pretax income of the top 10% of Americans has more than doubled since 1980 while that of the bottom 50% has remained flat. This means that four decades of growth has had no impact on the salaries of half the Americans. The American dream of getting ahead is now restricted to the those at the top end of the income ladder who have a 70 percent chance of achieving the dream. On the other hand those at the bottom end of the income ladder have only a 35% chance of doing better than their parents. Back in the 1940’s the chances of getting ahead were not dependent on where you started on the income ladder.

This rising inequality led to a feeling that the “system was broken” and hence Trump. Ironically, Trump (like Brexit) is the reduction ad absurdum of a culture that tasks elites with reforming a system that they themselves created and benefitted from. Just look at the fact that post the tax changes the 400 riches families paid lower taxes than the bottom 50% of households.

“…the research evidence keeps piling up and points strongly to the conclusion that a high degree of empathy in a relationship is possibly the most potent factors in bringing about change…” American Psychologist Carl Rogers

Research needs to drive empathy with people not sympathy for people - I would argue that empathy with the masses would have helped predict the rise of Trump or Brexit. Research today helps to generate Sympathy for people. By highlighting the suffering and angst of people it generates concern and even sadness for their plight. But it falls short of helping marketers to “feel their feelings”. The problem with sympathy is that it will result in solutions with “tools that caused the issues”. To provide real solutions we need empathy with people.

“…the worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it…” Oscar Wilde

Driving empathy for people - At its core, empathy requires putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and feeling their feelings. Psychologists define two kinds of empathy – cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy is about being able to look at the world through someone else’s eyes – a bit like how an actor visualizes a character. Emotional empathy on the other hand is about being able to experience the same emotions as the other person leading to compassion and subsequent action.

Psychologists have found two factors that can hinder empathy – (1) pressure and stress which stimulate the amygdala thus crowding out empathy (2) “rich persons malady” – it is very difficult for the well to do to understand the feelings of the less well off.

Researchers have extremely busy lives. We can develop cognitive empathy by exploring the world outside the office, observe people in their natural habitats, try new experiences….. Remember my earlier blog titled “Long live insights – its now time for outsights” - click here to read.

Emotional empathy is more nuanced and will require the industry to embrace diversity well beyond the normal dimensions of gender, age and sexual orientation (though we seem to still struggle with gender diversity at the upper echelons – see my earlier blog “Is the market research industry – unconsciously conscious or consciously unconscious of gender bias” - click here to read). The industry will need to embrace “cognitive diversity” and ensure we have people from all backgrounds. This is the only way to foster emotional empathy.

Ultimately we must drive empathy with people, not sympathy for people.

“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come whispering, “it will be happier”.” – Lord Tennyson, British Poet

There are damn lies, there are statistics and there are shitstics (shitty statistics)

Benjamin Disraeli once said - “There are three types of lies – lies, damn lies and statistics”. Today, in the world of marketing and business, we have reached a stage where I have to say “There are three types of lies – damn lies, statistics and shitstics (shitty statistics)” – you read it here for the first time…..

Marketing conferences and the business press are great examples of the adage of “never let facts come in the way of a good story”. The marketing world seems to very susceptible to picking on a few statistics and create a story around it which then leads an entire movement. Most such movements include “death” of something and there seem to be lots of “deaths” in marketing.

I recently read about the Shirky principle which states that “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. Seems like it does relate to the world of marketing especially in how statistics are used. You will often hear about the “death of Television” (I told you there’s a lot of death in marketing) and therefore advertising dollars should move to digital. No surprise that these articles, speeches come from those working in the digital media world.

The spend behind digital advertising has indeed been increasing over a period of time as consumers move online. There is no going away from the explosive growth of digital.

However, the fact is that over a long period of time the total amount of time people spend on TV has not changed much. The TV ad industry itself grew a handsome 4.1% in the USA in 2018. What’s most interesting (in a Brit way) is that the spend by the FAANGS on TV is increasing year on year.

There are 5 different ways I see statistics being abused 

1. “Concealing while revealing” - "Statistics are like Bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital"- Aaron Levenstein. 

If you followed the marketing press around Super bowl, you would have gone away with the impression that TV viewership of the spectacle was tanking (a decline of 5.1%) and that digital was where you needed to advertise (viewership increased by 31%). Let us look at the facts.

TV viewership was indeed the lowest in the last few years. 98.2 Mn Americans viewed the Super bowl on TV in 2019 compared to 103.5 Mn the previous year – indeed a drop of  5.1%. However, the CBS streamed event was also viewed on 7.5 Mn unique devices (increase of 20%). But if you look at people who watched for at least 1 minute (to make it comparable to TV) then only 2.6 Mn Americans watched it online (increase of 31%). So digital viewership was less than 3% of TV viewership – where would you rather advertise?

In my humble opinion, the bigger picture is that the viewership of the spectacle has declined by about 5%. Is that a sign of changing demographics? I suspect this won’t get discussed since it won’t make a good story.

Let me give you another example. Earlier in the year the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki said that the number of YouTube channels making 5 or 6 sum figures has gone up by 40%. Before you decide to make a “career” as a “YouTuber” think hard. A professor in Germany found that the top 3% of channels on YouTube make an average of $16,800 per year. The odds of you making a career as a “YouTuber” with 5 or 6 sums is about as high as you winning an Olympic gold at your current age (none of my readers will be teenagers !!!).

Percentages are a wonderful tool to create a shitstic!!!

Another way of “concealing while revealing” is using misleading visualisations. We live in a world of infographics. Well done infographics are great at telling a compelling story by simplifying the data. But the devil lies in the detail and the devil does lie or helps the visualizer lie.

During a questioning of the President of the Planned parenthood a Republican senator showed the graph below and said “In pink, that’s the reduction in the breast exams, and the red is the increase in the abortions. That’s what’s going on in your organization.” The graph itself gives the impression that the number of abortions is disproportionate compared to the number of breast examinations. But look closely and carefully and you will notice that the graph has no defined Y axis. While the number of breast examinations has declined it is still around 3 times the number of abortions. While the example does not relate to the world of marketing its one of the best examples of misleading visualizations that I have come across. 

2. “Abuse of surveys” – Market research surveys will give an answer to the question that is asked to people – doesn’t mean the questions are the right questions or that it was asked to people who will know the answer.

In 2017, budget airline Ryanair declared that 92% of their customers were satisfied with their experience. Having lived in the UK I know that the airline has a reputation for being customer unfriendly. What then, explains the high scores? Well the scale they used was – excellent, very good, good, fair, ok”. I guess 8% refused to answer!!! 

There is a postscript to this story. When the Royal Statistical Society criticized their survey, Ryanair bosses said “95% of Ryanair customers have not heard of the Royal Statistical Society and 97% say they don’t care what they say”. It’s the point when you go ROFL.

“Opinions are free and maybe fact free” – If you ask people for an opinion you will get one – especially in surveys. There is no guarantee of the fact that they have a reason to have an opinion. Neither is there any guarantee that their opinion will triangulate with facts in which case it will be rationalized as “perceptions are reality”.

Earlier this year Forbes reported that a survey had showed that only 19% of adults think that “personalized ads are ethical”. OK how many people do you know who don’t work in marketing and know what a “personalized ad” is?

A study by Gallup showed that Americans don’t believe there is a divide between the “haves and have nots” in America and it’s a trend that has strengthened over the last few years. But the fact is that the income distribution has worsened. 

3. Not triangulating data – The Boston Consulting Group put out a report estimating that 80 Mn Americans use a Augmented Reality device. To put this number into context a recent survey by Pew Research found that only 36% of Americans i.e about 120 Mn use a ride hailing app (Uber / Lyft). Interestingly according to the state department only 36% of Americans have a passport. o 120 Mn Americans use Uber, 120 Mn Americans have a password while 80 Mn Americans use an Augmented Reality device. Is it plausible - I’ll let you judge.

Not long ago we had a major scare in the social media world – the Instagram audience had aged. The story was that while the majority of Instagram users were aged 18-24 in 2012, in 2019 the majority of the users are aged 25-34. Oh well the users have aged 7 years between 2012 and 2019. The real story then is that Instagram is not attracting teenagers anymore but again that does not make a newsworthy story.

A study published in “BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health” found that among straight people, 1 in 5 men had double digit conquests while 1 in 12 women had double digit conquests. With almost a 50-50 split between males and females how does this happen? 

Postscript – the same study found that “athletic women” were 73% more likely to have slept with at least 10 partners, than those who shun exercises. Doesn’t fit into the story but felt like one that I could not leave out.

4. Metrics that don’t matter– The Brits often say - “measure what you treasure and treasure what you measure” but notice that they don’t talk of relevance or meaningfulness.

In the world of start ups there is a massive premium placed on “how much venture capital is raised” with “Unicorn” status being sought after. Look at some of the most successful start ups and how much venture capital they raised – Google – $ 25Mn, Apple - $ 3.6 Mn, Intel - $2.5 Mn, Cisco - $2.5 Mn, Facebook - $2.4 Mn. None of them were Unicorns but you would be hard pressed to argue against the fact that all of them are “successful”.

In the world of marketing, the “death of creativity” (yes there is a lot of death we seem to encounter) is often illustrated using the chart below. Yes, the TV ad enjoyability has fallen relative to TV programs but that does not mean that TV ad enjoyability has fallen. Remember back in the day there was hardly a handful of channels and even fewer TV programs. The quality of most TV programs was poor, and they survived only since there was no alternative. Over the years the quality of TV programs has improved for sure, but I don’t think the quality of TV ads has fallen.  

5. Making bold predictions without any substantiation – Remember how Amazon Dash buttons was going to kill conventional retail (yes more death). Well as it turns out Amazon Dash buttons are the ones that are dead. Remember the bold predictions on ibeacons (see below) – well don’t seem to hear much about them today.

Probably the most “explosive” prediction which impacted marketing was around the spending power of millennials. It was contained in a book titled “How Teens and Twenty somethings are Revolutionising retail”. It said, “Generation Y, those born between 1978 and 2000 has overtaken baby boomers in sheer numbers and is poised to do the same with incomes by 2017….”. The book offered no explanation for their predictions. Alas, no such thing has happened.

The fraternity of market research can help the world of marketing to avoid shitstics by following the following Ten commandments

1. Thou shalt not ask misleading questions in surveys
2. Thou shalt not ask survey questions to people who don’t have the ability to answer them
3. Thou shalt triangulate data within a study and with other sources
4. Thou shalt not commit the school boy error of confusing correlation and causation
5. Thou shalt not use metrics that are inappropriate
6. Thou shalt not report out meaningless statistics
7. Thou shalt tell the truth and only the whole truth
8. Thou shalt not mislead using visuals that conceal more than they reveal
9. Thou shalt not make predictions without a solid basis
10. Thou shalt not take sides but present facts

Long Live Insights – Its now time for “Outsights”

It’s the time of the year when its fashionable to ring out the old and bring in the new. So here’s my two bit for the market research industry – its time to ring out Insights and embrace a new idea called “outsights”.

The market research industry, indeed all of marketing, has been obsessed with “consumer insights”. Look at the stupendous increase in the mention of the term consumer insights in books since the beginning of the 1990s.

However, the market research industry needs to pivot away from insights for three reasons

1. With signs of the global economy faltering, growth will becoming increasingly difficult and will be predicated on truly differentiated insights
2. Big data has done wonders for the industry but has “dehumanized” the data. We need to “feel the consumers” rather than read about them.
3. With growth becoming difficult, we need to go beyond insights to ideas that could translate those insights to growth

It is my submission that the research industry needs to pivot away from Insight to Outsight. Humor me and read on as I give you three good reasons (good in my judgement 😊) for my view

1. "Confusion over what is an insight” – Probably the most common question asked in any job interview in the market research industry – client or agency side – is “What is your definition of what is an insight”. Look at the search trend for the term “what is an insight” and it shows a steady increase. 

These two facts put together would suggest that there is a level of confusion as to what exactly is an insight. This is manifested in many a discussion around “what is the real insight” or “is that really an insight”.

As a consequence of this lack of clarity on what is an insight, “Insights” have a tendency to be “obvious” or in other words “in plain sight”. This makes them unactionable. Here is one example that was floating on LinkedIn over the holiday period.

Disclaimer – I have cropped out the name of the agency since this is about quoting an example and not debating the individual case.

Is it an insight that disruptive brands are “different from the others in the category”? If you use the definition wherein an insight involves a causality then yes it is an insight. 

Is it not obvious i.e in plain sight that to grow you need to be distinctive? It’s a good example of why we need insights that are “out of sight”.

The fact that disruptive brands are different is an “insight” and not an “out of sight” but the real question is how to achieve differentiation (more later).

2. Market orientation – The whole aspect of “trusting the gut” is based on the gut being in tune with consumers and the market. However, being in tune with consumers cant be basis purely reading research reports, which are a reflection of the questions that have been asked. See the tweet below as an example of how the questions asked can reveal a lack of “empathy” with consumers.

We very often fall for the trap of projecting our lives onto consumers without realizing that we are not representative of the population.

Lets look at the UK ad industry whose disassociation from the “general UK public” is well documented. See the following statistics on lack of representativeness of the advertising folk

•  80% of people in the advertising industry are based in London. 87% of UK population does not live in London
• Over 50s account for 47.6% of UK household expenditure. 5.6% of the ad industry in UK is aged 50+
• 51% of UK population are women. Only 12% of creative directors are female.

This results in a completely warped perception. See a few examples on media consumption

	Ad people estimate	Actual data
% of people TV viewing is live	49%	87%
Time spent watching TV per day	161 minutes	215 minutes
% TV watched on other devices	37%	2%

As a market researcher I fully understand that it is normal for people to not remember exact amount of time spent on various activities like watching TV or watching VOD. Hence, consumers overestimate the time they spend watching VOD (for instance). What is troubling is to see the extent to which ad people overestimate the time being spent by ordinary consumers on VOD.

If you have any doubt about the fact that this just a case of self projection look at the chart below. Clearly advertisers and agencies spend a lot of time listening to spotify compared to radio and so project that onto the population, incorrectly of course.

It is critical that the market research industry develops a closeness to consumers and the market – for itself and its marketing clients. This is something that should be cultivated. Go out. Experience the products.

We need to experience things out of sight of our office. Hence, “outsight”.

3. Insights to ideas – The research industry has evolved from data to information to insights. The next stage of evolution is moving towards ideas. I referenced earlier how the need for the research industry is not just to provide insights but ideas on how those insights could be acted upon.

As a student of economics, I am firm believer in Karl Marx’s theory of dialectic materialism. Very simplistically put (I am oversimplifying it for the purposes of this blog) “every thesis will be met with an anti thesis and the collision of the two will result in a new synthesis”. 

What it means for market research is that we need a multitude of perspectives to collide to get to ideas to move from insight to action. The different perspectives can only come from different experiences. 

It needs us to go “out of the office”. Even in a country like Singapore I like to go out to the HDB food courts of Toa Payoh and Hougang and smell the coffee, listen to the conversations, look at the menu. Personally, I find it gives me a very different perspective. It’s a perspective that needs you to get outside and see things “out of sight”.

RIP Insights. Its time for Outsights.

Attention Span of Humans is More Than That of Goldfish

If you live in the marketing world I’m sure you’ve heard about the shrinking attention spans of human beings and that now the attention span of human beings is less than that of Goldfish.

The source of this data is a 2015 report by the Consumer Insights team at Microsoft Canada. The study was based on a survey of 2000 Canadians and also studied the brain activity of 112 people as they carried out various tasks. The statistic on the 8 second attention span did not come from the study. The report quotes its source as “Statistic Brain”. Statistic Brain source all their figures but the sources quoted don’t have any record of the statistic. Its literally a factoid which the dictionary defines as “unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as a fact”.

Interestingly, in the world of neuro-psychology, Goldfish are considered a model system for studying process of learning and memory formation. They actually have a good memory!!!! Coming back to human beings, psychologists will tell you that attention spans are a function of the task at hand. The attention span engaging with billboards is different from the attention span writing this blog.

This unfortunately is not an isolated incident. At marketing conferences or in marketing literature, you may have heard that the human brain process visuals 60,000 times faster than text – again there is no scientific evidence for this.

As human beings we have a tendency to over generalize and this opens up an avenue for creating new business’s and brands. Take for instance the 10,000 steps a day regime which has fawned an industry of wearable devices. The 10,000 steps is a completely arbitrary number which has no scientific basis. To tap into the buzz around the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 a company called Yamasa designed the worlds first step counter device and called it manpo-kei, which translates to a “10,000 – step meter”. So the number 10,000 is nothing but the result of a successful Japanese marketing campaign in the mid 60’s!!! 

As market researchers we must resist the temptation to become instant believers in the latest headline without pausing to check the veracity of the source and the methodology. Lets take the latest headlines doing the rounds in the marketing and business press – “Nike sales increase 31% after Kapernick ad”. Lets unpeel this “growth”. 

• When did the growth happen - The articles start with a bunch of opinions on the ad (which I happen to love) and somewhere at the end will mention that the 31% increase is during the Labor day weekend (September 2^nd to September 4^th)  – really a 3 day window!!!   
• Where did the growth happen - The source of the data is Edison Trends which uses a panel to determine online sales. Online sales accounted for 6.5% of Nike sales in 2017. So we are talking of an increase on a very small proportion of total sales. 
• What is Nike’s ecommerce growth – Nike’s online sales grew by 29.7% in 2017 and is growing at 25% in 2018. The growth of 31% appears to be in the same ballpark.

So the growth is over a 3 day window, covering under 10% of the total sales and is in the same ball park as the growth over other weekends – the market researcher in me says we just don’t have enough data to attribute sales impact to the ad. I am sure Nike has information but its just not available in the public domain. And yet the marketing journals have concluded that there was a 31% increase in sales.

Coming back to the Title of the blog – there is no scientific evidence that this is true but if this blog goes viral then I would expect someone to headline this at a marketing conference!!!

Lessons from The French and The British Concurrence that Rescued the Market Research Industry

After a string of horrific polling related mistakes, the market research industry can bask in new found success after getting the French and British election right. For once the British and the French worked in concert and it helped the market research industry.

On the day after the US elections, I remember speaking to a colleague and saying “if only we had a dollar for everytime the opinion polls were wrong we would be laughing our way to the bank”. So on the day Theresa May called a Snap election, I decided to put money on what I thought would be the outcome of the election – a hung parliament. I put £50 with odds of 11:2, odds for a Tory victory was 1:7.

I told some of my colleagues about my bet and was told, in polite language, that I had lost my marbles. Having put my own money I followed the election campaigns quite closely. There are three lessons that that I see being relevant to the Market Research Industry

1. History repeats itself -

“All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes”. Winston Churchill

A quick look at history shows that snap elections have in only half the occasions resulted in a win for the party that called the election. A snap election, however, for a “mandate” has on both past occasions resulted in a hung parliament. Clearly, the British public expect the leaders to go ahead and do the job. They have little respect for politicians who “ask them for permission to do their jobs”. Why would 2017 be different – it wasn’t.

Year	Status	Reason for snap election	Outcome
1923	Tory	Mandate to raise tariffs	Hung parliament
1951	Labour	Increase majority	Tory victory
1955	Tory	Called by new leader post Churchill’s retirement	Tory victory
1966	Labour	Increase majority which was reduced to two	Labour victory
1974	Tory	Mandate to face down miners strike	Hung parliament
1974	Labour	Win a majority – Labour were a minority government	Labour victory

Learning for market research – It pays to look at history to identify learning's that could help in designing the study and more importantly explaining the results from the study. I am not saying that  you cant change the outcome but being aware of pitfalls and opportunities gives you a leg up. To draw an analogy – if you are trying to put a man on the moon it would be foolish to ignore gravity. Acknowledging gravity does not act against putting a man on the moon. If anything acknowledging its presence aids in achieving the desired outcome.

2. Experience does not guarantee expertise  –

“It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad”. Marcel Proust

I ignored the 18% point “lead” that Theresa May had on the day she called the election – why? One reason – Context. 

Context is the reason why more luxury cars are sold at yacht shows than at car shows. If you ask me if I would like a car that can reach a speed of 100mph in 1 second – the answer is yes of course. But that is the wrong question – since I live in London I rarely, if ever, reach more than 30mph and so the feature is irrelevant to me. Brexit was done and dusted, it was not relevant in the elections. People are now concerned about rising prices, the state of the NHS, trains etc - those are what they want politicians to solve.

Learning for market research - Market research is a specialised area where expertise can’t be automated and must not be ignored.

I have not seen anyone who is not a Doctor, looking at an MRI scan and offering a diagnosis or a prescription. But there are enough people who look at a statistic (18% poll lead) and offer a conclusion and advice. I often hear people say “numbers tell a story” but funnily I have never heard number 5 have a conversation with number 9!!!

In the market research industry, expertise is required to frame questions and interpret the results. I am not talking about knowing about the interpretation of interaction in contingency tables (also known as the Yule-Simpson effect) – it explains how you can gain share in every segment of a market but lose marketshare at the total market level (I’ll let you think that one through J). Of course, knowledge of the Yule Simpson effect is useful but not enough (or necessary) to qualify as an expert.

A prediction of the future on the basis of the past assumes ceteris paribus which is not a real life possibility.  The tack that Theresa May took i.e strong and stable vs chaos was identical to what David Cameron had taken two years back but the context had changed, hence the result changed.

  

You do need to have expertise to understand the context in which questions have been asked, read the numbers correctly and advice on the basis of that. The research industry needs to reposition itself as the consultants who speak for consumers. The larger question is whether it is a consumer insights industry or a market research industry.

3.  Forecasting works but is dangerous under uncertainty and for the long term –

“You can always trust the untrustworthy because you can always trust that they will be untrustworthy. It is the trustworthy you cant trust” Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Carribean

A year before the French elections Alain Jupe was headed for victory with Emmanuel Macron not even in the fray. How things change in a year !!!

Clearly the long range forecasts were wrong and a lot of it had to do with the volatility. By contrast, once the candidates were chosen for the runoffs, the forecasts were remarkably accurate and consistent over time – probably because of the lack of volatility.

Learning for Market Research  - In his seminal book , The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes said we need to “devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be”. He was speaking about the stock markets but the same holds true in market research when dealing with stable conditions. When we are looking at the 20^th flavor of a well established brand of biscuits or the 15^th color of a sports shoe, its easy to make a prediction.

However, looking at the demand for VR in the future is tough. As a reminder (history teaches us lessons!!!) here are a few famous predictions gone awry

·        “We don’t like their sound and guitar music is on the way out”. Decca Records about The Beatles

·        “The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most”. IBM to Xerox in 1959

·        “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home”. Ken Olson, Co founder of Digital Equipment Corporation. 

If those sound prehistoric remember how Steve Balmer (CEO of Microsoft) wrote off iPhones “....is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good e-mail machine….”

The market research industry needs to assert its expertise to differentiate between situations. In situations that involve volatility precision would demand a range of options rather than a precise estimate. It might be better to be approximately right rather than exactly wrong. 

The French and the British concurred, the reputation of the market research industry has been redeemed and I made a decent sum on my wager. My values, dictated by my small town lower middle class upbringing, makes me equate my financial gain to gambling which is a huge no no. I have hence decided to donate all my "earnings" to charity. 

Is the Market Research Industry – Unconsciously Conscious or Consciously Unconscious of Gender Bias

My hypothesis is that the Market Research Industry is not insulated from  gender bias but the question is whether it unconsciously conscious or consciously unconscious. Let me try and unpeel it from my perspective.

I have never understood why you cant generate random number through deterministic means but I have learnt how you can use deterministic means to combine random thoughts to create a new concept or idea. It’s the “corporate” version of the theory of dialectic materialism at work. So here are three random events which have coalesced into my thoughts summarised in the title of the blog.

Random Event 1 -  Sports is an area that is littered with examples of gender bias. For starters men and women are not paid the same – remember the row over the wages of men and women in tennis. Look at the photographs of the finish line of a marathon and you will find it littered with pictures of men even though women make up a significant chunk of the participants.

Last year before the cricket World T20, the English teams, men and women, went to meet the Prime Minister David Cameron (he was still PM then!!!). After the meeting, the teams went to the airport to fly out to India. The men flew business class while the women flew coach. It did make me realise that gender bias was still real, cuts across geographies, cuts across developed vs. developing economies and cuts across occupations and industries.  

Random Event 2 – Serena Williams recently announced that she was pregnant and within minutes the Twitterati figured out that she had won a Grand Slam when she was 8 weeks pregnant - women are clearly “super achievers”.

On my last holiday to India I met with an old friend. She is an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad (the Harvard Business School of the East) and holds down a high pressure job. She does a full days work, comes home at 8PM and then cooks a hot meal for her family. I don’t recall a single conversation with any of my male batchmates about the need to come home and cook. Yet both genders have the same job specs and same expectations at the workplace. Stereotype or Prejudice?

Random Event 3 – I recently received an invite to attend a Market Research Conference. I looked through the event guide and noticed that a vast majority of the speakers were men. Surely the gender balance in the industry was better than the speaker panel. Why does it matter who speaks at a conference.

At a wedding I attended recently all the speeches were made by men. So I did a bit of research and found that the following is the order of speeches at a wedding

1.      The Master of ceremonies introduces and welcomes everyone

2.      Toast to the Bride and Groom made by the Father of the bride

3.      Response by the Groom and toast to the Bridal part

4.      Response on behalf of the Bridal party by the Best Man

5.      Toast to the Brides parents by the Best Man

6.      Response by the Bride’s Father

7.      Toast to the Grooms Parents by the Father of the Bride

There it is – speeches at the wedding is a “mans domain”.

The “post positivist” part of me says - surely you hear about bridesmaids now making speeches. Well again I did some research and while I did not find any study on the incidence of the bridesmaids  making speeches I found pointers to the fact that it is a small proportion. Here are the pointers

1. On Twitter, #bestmanspeech had 19 times as many mentions as compared to #bridesmaidsspeech. This would indicate that about 5% of weddings had a bridesmaids speech.

2.  Google trends, which is a good indicator of “needs”, shows an index of 40 for “best man speech” and 8 for “bridesmaids speech”. That would approximate to bridesmaids speeches at 20% of weddings.

A quick poll on LinkedIn coupled with speaking to a few people suggests, a number of 15-25% for the proportion of weddings with a speech from a bridesmaid, seems to range between “higher end of possible” to “optimistic” – clearly a minority and a small one at that.

“Traditions” tend to have a tenacity for survival and epitomise biases that we have inherited over generations. Speaking at weddings, arguably the most sacrosanct societal event and steeped in tradition, is a “mans domain”. It epitomises the importance of speaking at public functions (including conferences).

As someone who has been in market research for two decades the principle of epistemology, in particular the need to draw a distinction between justified belief and opinion, is well ingrained in me.  

First up, what is the gender balance of the industry. My friends at TNS pulled out statistics based on LinkedIn Pylon data showing male-female split in the market research industry is 55%-45%. That seems pretty good.

So was the conference I got invited to an aberration. I looked up the websites of major market research conferences and combed through the photographs of the speakers. Across 16 conferences, the average gender ratio was 63%-37% meaning women were under represented. To reassure you I looked at the median and it was 62%-38% i.e no different from the mean. To be fair, and in full disclosure, the last MRS in the UK had a perfect gender ratio i.e 50%-50%.

Basics of market research dictate that we need to “de-average” the data. Yes we do and I did. There is a (slight) difference between conferences in the D&E (67%-33%) and D (60%-40%) worlds but going back to the sports example economic development does not preclude discrimination (or stereotypes).

I looked up 1000 qualitative researcher profiles on LinkedIn (not a census but a reasonably large sample size) and found 19% were men i.e this segment of the industry is dominated by women. To be honest, from personal experience I would have expected the proportion of men to be in single digits but being a constructivist I accept the findings.

In a segment of the industry dominated by women, you would expect, the gender composition of speakers to be more reflective. Surely the feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias would have impacted a woman dominated segment of the industry. I looked at qualitative specific conferences and it is really amazing that only 47% of all speakers were women i.e under representation of women is worse in the qualitative research segment of the industry.

	Male	Female	Female Representation Index
Average Market Research Conference	63	37	82
Qualitative Research Conference	53	47	58

You would expect that as we become conscious of our prejudices we would act to counter them. But maybe our prejudices always seem so rational. Is it a prejudice or a stereotype or is it discrimination? To quote Karl Marx “Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity”