Maybe the Problem Is You

Last week I read an article on Greenbook Blog on whether market research agencies produce poor reports. The conclusion was obviously yes, but I had a distinct sense of déjà vu – not only because this lament has been a staple in the industry for as long as I can remember (despite a huge improvement in reports in the past decade), but also because it reminded me of self-help articles like this that suggest that if everyone in the world seems to be wrong, it might actually be you who is the problem, so I thought bring the two together for a fresh perspective with some behavioural science.

Grab a coffee, and spend 7 minutes with me.

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Exec summary for readers in a hurry:

It's not that market research agencies aren't trying hard enough - mostly, they are doing the best they can. The bigger, structural problem in our industry is that the agency business model is entirely incongruent with the client business model which then leads to issues like (perceived) poor report quality, and the current discourse of placing the responsibility on agencies won't help us solve the problem.

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In the article, the authors Mike Sherman and Neil Gains summarise findings from March 2019 NewMR survey of report quality, based on over 500 client- and agency-side participants. My critique isn’t with the article itself – it’s merely the spark that prompted my thinking since these types of complaints have been around for a long time.

The main issues are:

1. Large gap in perceptions between agencies and clients on what constitutes a high-quality report
2. Reports are not concise, practical and insightful – specifically, the issue is that agencies are not seen to take enough time to get to know a client’s business
3. Reports don’t answer business questions – which might be because agencies don’t challenge clients enough to create clear hypotheses at the beginning of the research, and that is potentially due to either not having a business mindset or their business model not allowing enough senior staff time for a project

What is interesting about this article, and the survey data it’s based on, is that once again the responsibility for solving these issues is placed solidly on agency shoulders only. Anyone who has worked in market research for a length of time can probably recall that this is a common way of framing this discourse and allocating the responsibility.

Before I go any further, some caveats: I’m very sympathetic to the challenges client-side researchers face in their work (stakeholder pressures, budget cuts etc.), and by no means is this a critique of any particular clients I’ve had the pleasure of working with – it’s simply an attempt to reframe this recurring discourse in the market research industry. #notallclients

To illustrate the comparisons, I’ll follow the structure of the self-help article.

Is it You?

It feels like we could just replace the human relationship with the words “supplier” or “agency” in the above list:

• Most of your agency relationships are disappointing
• You have very few favourite, trusted agencies, or the agency relationships you have are very shallow
• You have a difficult time interacting with your agencies
• Time and time again you think to yourself, “what is wrong with research agencies?!”

These are common client laments in the market research industry – I’ve seen them echoed repeatedly in conferences, articles and surveys over the past decade. Yes, everyone feels like that at some point in their working lives, but if it feels like this is an on-going, endless problem then… maybe there is something wrong with the way we are collectively looking at the situation?

Humans tend to believe that we see the world around us objectively and that anyone who disagrees with us is probably irrational or plain wrong (naïve realism). It’s simply easier for us to see the biases in other people’s behaviour or judgment than it is to see our own (bias blind spot), especially as we also tend to have a higher opinion of ourselves (ego-centric bias).

But while this kind of motivated reasoning is perfectly natural, blaming agency-side ad nauseam is not likely to solve the issues – it’s just making all of us sick of the situation.

Let's turn to the Psychology Today article for advice on what to do:

Having the insight and objectivity to finally realize that perhaps the real problem isn’t with everyone else. The problem may be with how you’re interacting with the world and how you’re perceived by others.

Acknowledging the Problem

According to the Greenbook article, one of the main issues is that reports are not concise, practical and insightful:

"Reports Are Too Long And Lack Practical Answers: The most common complaints about reports were that many are too long, with too much data and not enough insights. Or as one Australian researcher wrote, “the report met the client’s stated needs” but was “boring, paint-by-numbers, way too long, not actionable”.

"A New Zealand client echoed this, sharing “Despite a solid briefing in writing and face to face, the writer had not really taken the time to understand the specifics of our business, so the findings and recommendations were not 100% relevant”.

Specifically, the issue is that agencies are not seen to take enough time to get to know a client’s business. The uncomfortable truth is that in the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world of ever-shrinking budgets, few clients pay an agency enough so that they can afford to take the time to get to know the specifics of a client's business.

Just like it’s a fact of life that research budgets are shrinking, it’s also economically unviable for many agencies to spend the amount of time clients expect them to get to know their business – especially as there is rarely an actual guarantee of repeat business, so every new client is a gamble where the investment may or may not pay off.

Basically, a chicken and egg problem.

Of course, from the client’s perspective every new agency should do this, but unless an agency has external funding that allows them that risk taking, it’s often literally impossible to justify senior staff spending lots of time understanding the client business because it all adds up. So, we try our best, but of course it’s never going to be the same level as the client who lives and breathes their business – remember that an agency needs to do this for dozens of clients.

One way to make it work is indeed to push more work down to junior team members (as some participants suggested) so that the costs stay manageable. Unfortunately, this leads to a vicious cycle where clients don’t pay the agency enough and when they are disappointed, they conclude that it's not worth paying more because you don't get that much out.

It’s much like most people’s relationship with tequila: the first time people try it they don't want to spend much, so they buy something cheap and invariably nasty which then colours their perception. Yet, there is a whole world of sophisticated, enjoyable aged tequilas out there - if you pay a little more, you get something so much better.

The lack of actionability might also be because agency-folk doesn't have enough time to get to know the client's business, or they don't really tell the agency much. Agencies often operate in more or less darkness with a tiny torch while the client has an LED floodlight. The curse of knowledge also means that people unknowingly assume that others have the same background to understand what we are communicating to them, which can unwittingly lead a client to assume that we hold the same knowledge as they do – and accidentally omitting some important background details.

Or the agency researcher might have also spent a lot of their creative energy negotiating with the client to find a story that works in the political climate of their organisation, or even removing some of the insights the agency has generated because an important stakeholder deems something unpalatable (and then the agency might be seen as not having delivered anything new).

But how do we move beyond this stalemate? Let’s see what the Psychology Today article suggests:

Perhaps the problem is more ingrained, however, and a part of our personality. That requires more work on your part to see and change it (qualities that are a part of our personality are especially difficult for us to “see” objectively). You have to take the first steps toward change — nobody can do it for you.

Working on Changing You

As the Psychology Today article optimistically notes:

The good news is that if the problem is indeed you, then the solution also lies within you. That means you can change the direction your life is taking for the better. But it also means you have to consciously choose to change.

In this last section, I’ll talk about some things that we could collectively do to improve the dire state of affairs. The Greenbook article notes: "As shown below, we found a disturbingly large divide between clients and agencies, with a 33% gap in perceptions. Report creators think that 64% of their reports are ‘Very good’ or ‘Excellent’ compared with 31% of report receivers."

One reason for this might be that when you work agency-side, you rarely see other reports than your own. Unless someone has career-hopped or freelanced at 10+ agencies (which might look bad on a CV), they are unlikely to have seen as many types of reports than any given client-side researcher who regularly commissions projects. Of course, there are challenges in sharing work done by other agencies but seeing more of what a particular client sees as “excellent” could help significantly in improving things.

The Greenbook article concludes: "It’s time for agencies to improve report quality with more insight, practical answers and focus on the business outcomes. It’s not enough to be “readable”, they must also be “actionable”.

Honestly, it’s not like agency-side folk are not trying.

We try our very best, given the circumstances. Few people want to do bad work and having that insinuation hanging over our heads year after year is depressing to say the least. This is a good example of the fundamental attribution error, which is the tendency to explain behaviour with dispositional, trait-like reasons (agencies don’t want to/can’t do good work) – the belief that what people do reflects who they are – instead of thinking about what in their circumstances could be influencing their behaviour.  

Key takeouts and recommendations

We might have a chance of finally reaching the last page of this never-ending story if we asked agencies how they feel about this, and what would need to happen for them to resolve these complaints. Why not open that conversation with your agency and see what happens?

Encourage them to be honest, even if they are scared of losing your business - because I can guarantee that fear keeps up directors and agency founders up at night. We don’t sometimes/often challenge you because we feel the responsibility to look after our staff and pay their salaries, and that human responsibility overrides everything else.

Just so that this doesn’t end up being another complaint piece, I want to end on a constructive note and offer some recommendations – these are by no means comprehensive, and I’m sure every agency could add to this based on their experience. But here goes:

Recommendation 1: Be specific about what “excellent” looks like for you and share that with your agency in as much detail as possible. Share work from other agencies and why it was so excellent. Tell your agencies exactly what you are looking for in terms of visuals, length of report etc. It's better to be overly specific!

Recommendation 2: If you want agencies to take time to know your business, and that senior researchers spend considerable time bringing their expertise to it, pay them enough to do it – or adjust your expectations.

Recommendation 3: Be generous with your time when it comes to sharing about your business to the agency and make it easy for them to understand the context of the project, as well as the key things they need to understand about your business. Agencies never have access to as much information about your business as you do, so please help them.

In the words of a client who read the draft of this post:

'It's only too easy to blame the agency for projects which go wrong, and often it can be an easy way of guarding our own credibility with our marketing stakeholders. The best clients though invest time upfront with their agency to help them understand the challenges, the commercial reality and the business performance - if we don't do that, we can hardly blame the agencies for not writing reports which are truly actionable. The key word in all of this is 'partnership', and it takes both the client and the agency to invest time in this partnership to really get to great results.' - Paul Thomas, Global Head of Insight at Asahi