ESOMAR Congress Was A Pivotal Event For MR
Last week I had the great pleasure of attending my first ever ESOMAR Congress, which by a stroke of serendipity was right here in my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. This was the 65th Anniversary of ESOMAR and their first ever Congress in the United States, so it was a pretty big deal on multiple fronts.
If you’d like a “blow by blow” breakdown of the conference, our own client-side blogger June WestHolland shared her perspective of Day 1 here. ESOMAR has extensive coverage via multiple bloggers on the RW Connect site here and Jon Puleston captured all of the buzz topics in his summary here. Of course, the “Newspaper of Record” for the MR Industry, Research-live.com has detailed coverage on their site.
My overall take was that it was an excellent event at all levels. ESOMAR knows how to produce exceptional conferences with high production values, great content, extensive networking opportunities, and first-class venues. But there were a few things that surprised me at this one and that I think, when taken together, will be looked back on as pivotal moments in the future course of the market research industry.
The first was the very fact that the Congress was in the US, and the acknowledgment that the United States now comprises the single largest segment of ESOMAR membership. Globalization is alive and well and it appears that ESOMAR is very much positioning itself as the global unifying organization for market research, a “United Nations” of MR if you will. I have my doubts about whether that is possible (there is an immense amount of politics involved between trade bodies) or even desirable since the conditions on the ground in various countries and regions can be so radically different from the European perspective that is ingrained in ESOMAR, but I applaud the effort to build some level of cohesive global framework for the industry. Ultimately I suspect more collaboration between organizations will happen, but not “one ring to rule them all.”
In the future the norm will be an increasing global and borderless focus for the industry as a whole, and this will be reflected in our trade bodies, media, and events. It will be interested to observe how the needs of constituent countries will impact the agenda of these initiatives, and similar to the world stage I think we’ll see an increased tension between the priorities of the US vs. the rest of the world. That will most visibly play out around issues of privacy I think, which brings me to my next point…
I was privileged to be asked to be on a panel discussion called “White Hat vs. Black Hat: Ensuring the Future Growth of Market Research”. Here is an excerpt from the summary by Erika Harriford-McLaren:
Privacy in a changing world was the underlying theme of this panel session. Opened by Judith Passingham, Congress Programme Chair, the panel session featured Dave McCaughan of McCann World Group, Lenny Murphy, GreenBook, Sjoerd Koornstra, Heineken International, Mike Cooke, Global Panel Management and Reg Baker, Consultant to Market Strategies International and the ESOMAR Professional Standards Committee.
Each panelist gave a brief presentation providing their unique viewpoint on how privacy regulations are pushing the industry to a focus on social science and stats in a time where new entrants are creating pressure to expand the sector to meet growing and widening client needs.
I suppose I was the resident “Black Hat” on the panel, but the reality was that none of us were very far from the same position: new competitors, changing technology and cultural norms, and most importantly evolving client needs are all massively transformational for the research industry. Where we differed was on how to deal with it. I chose to drill down into what the new competitive set looks like:
Page 1 of 3 | Next page
