It is now almost compulsory for aspiring Planners to disparage traditional market research.  Meanwhile, the Market Research Society announced this week that, in the UK at least, the industry grew by a healthy 6 percent last year. 

Clearly, clients and agencies feel somewhat differently. 

Entertainingly, Campaign magazine turned this into a debate between Ogilvy’s own beloved Rory Sutherland and research luminary Chris Forest last month.  (I remember listening to a talk by Chris Forest almost twenty years ago on how the planner’s job was more detective and less door-to-door enquiries that I still steal.)

Rory’s point is that most market research is “far too narrow. And too preoccupied with attitude and conscious decision-making”. 

He argues that better ideas can be gleaned from “airport reads” like Adam Smith’s ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’, an examination of public morals, than what, say, Millward Brown has to offer.

Chris Forest, unfashionably, stands up for research:  “Clients don’t have budget for “fundamental human nature projects”. You could learn more about the fundamentals of physics from reading Stephen Hawking’s books than from conducting your own physics experiment. That doesn’t mean you should feel disappointed your experiment was limited in scope and the earth didn’t move for you.”

This, surely, is the point, isn’t it?  The research projects agencies undertake with clients everyday should be undertaken in the same spirit as academic research, where each builds on the next and aims to validate or refute previous findings. 

Only then will we get more useful research which will improve its reputation inside agencies.  This would be an excellent role for the ARF, which seems to be searching for one these days.