Modern Marketing Information and Analysis (Week 10)
“The UK economy remains in the doldrums, and the research industry with it. But while cost pressures and rising inflation keep growth to a minimum, Brian Tarran digs in to the annual UK industry league table and finds a business in a state of flux”.
Stagnant. That might seem the right word to describe the UK market research industry says Tarran, Research-Live (2012). In compiling its annual league table, the Market Research Society estimates the industry size at £3.088bn - based on agencies’ 2011 turnover. That’s growth of 6.74% on 2010’s figures, but strip out inflation of 4.48% and we are left with net real growth of just 2.26%.
“What you’re seeing is a structural change,” says
Phil Rance, UK managing director at YouGov. “Traditional, labour-intensive
offline research is getting harder to make money out of - although it was never a great money spinner,
frankly, unless you go high-end. Companies like Truth, who are very
consultative, can command a fee for what they do, but if you are just trying to
make a margin doing traditional ad hoc research, that’s getting harder and
harder because there are people out there who can do it cheaper”.
2012 hasn’t performed much better and market
conditions are due to make no change in 2013. But to call the UK industry stagnant would be to overlook the changes
that are going on within clients and agencies. Rising inflation mixed with
falling budgets mask this to some extent - but digging into the league table
data shows an industry in flux.
The flux is
mainly due to hundreds of thousands of UK businesses and organisations taking
full advantage of online technologies. They’re cheaper and they’re faster.
Methodologists might still argue over whether online is a better way to do
research, but the people holding the industry’s purse strings have already
decided that at the very least it’s fit for purpose.
Even the
methodologically conservative social research field is starting to accept
online.
“We’re seeing an increasing preparedness among clients to consider
mixed-mode rather than pure face-to-face projects,” says NatCen chief executive
Penny Young. It sounds like a watershed moment. It’s easy to see why clients
are taking to cheaper and faster methods of research. They cater perfectly to the
desire among buyers to get more for less, and more quickly too. That doesn’t
just mean more data - they already have plenty of that. What they’re after is
more insight, more advice - essentially, more than a report, a presentation and
an invoice”.
Sam Gardner, a
co-founder of Boxclever (a past Best New Agency winner), says: “As researchers
we are often unwilling to push the envelope with our insight and use it to
build ROI-based conclusions that can directly influence final business
decisions. This is because the purist gene within us sees all of the
assumptions and imperfections required to reach this end state and pulls us up
short.”
Click the table below to view the full "MRS research and insight industry league table" in PDF format.
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| MRS Research and Industry League Table, 2012 |
Source: http://www.research-live.com/features/the-uk-market-research-industry-reviewed/4008652.article
Overall, there are different types of market research; Primary and Secondary & Quantitative and Qualitative. To find out more about Quant & Qual, please follow the links below;
Editor's Note:
After looking into the impact of change in market research, further, I have found a brilliantly written article on how the research industry faces major threats due to so many fresh sources of data on offer with more being introduced constantly. Alan Mitchell from Brand Republic explains how the sector must adapt quickly or it is at risk of a downward spiral. To read more, please follow the link; http://www.brandrepublic.com/features/1135766/
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