Viewpoint 50,6 MR confidential: anonymity in market research

John Griffiths

What is it with market research and anonymity? The new MRS code is peppered with references to protecting the anonymity of respondents at all costs. Clients also have the right to anonymity unless this conflicts with respondents’ right to know how their information was sourced. Anonymity is embedded in the code like a stick of rock. We’ve forgotten why it is there.

I think it is time to challenge the reasons for anonymity head-on. Because anonymity is becoming a fiction. The question is whether market research can survive its disappearance. Here’s the problem. It is now relatively easy for clients to build vast databases of customers and prospects, and to aggregate demographic and behavioural data. I’m not saying that much of this is integrated but the trend is towards data aggregation. They know who you
are and where you live. While many respondents are still recruited anonymously by fieldwork companies, clients are increasingly opting to use their own lists to reduce the possibility of potentially fraudulent responses instead of dipping their toes into the professional-respondent-infested waters. And then as intermediaries we select respondents for interview on the basis that they can’t be identified by the client company – when the standard method for validation involves a signature and a postcode. The same applies for B2B samples with lists supplied by the client company again. In reality the client doesn’t look and doesn’t want to. But, if this is true, then why make such a fuss over anonymity in the first place? What is all that palaver about at the start of a group with the client sitting behind the glass where the researcher’s job is to play peekaboo: ‘I am required by the code to tell you the client is there, but I won’t tell you who they are and they don’t know who you are – now I’d like to go round and for you to introduce yourselves to the group.’

There are two reasons for anonymity. The first is ethical – that a client company might treat a respondent differently and in a way that was prejudicial to the interests of that respondent if it were able to identify them. Or might use the knowledge to sell directly to that individual. Yes, that is a risk. However, the arrival of the internet and Web 2.0 has shown that people are far more willing to self-disclose and to trade information about themselves than we had given them credit for. The spectre of a corporation losing a CD-ROM of all its customers’ private details in the postal system hasn’t stopped us handing over personal data to companies we hardly know in generous amounts. Most people have benefited from data liquidity – those who have stayed off the system are actually materially disadvantaged relative to those who trade.

The second is methodological – respondents would not be forthcoming if they were asked the same question directly by a client. Hence the need for an intermediary: hey presto, up pops the ‘independent’ market researcher. Perhaps we need to declare an interest here. Has the requirement for anonymity allowed market research to deal itself into the research equation in perpetuity, and is this sine qua non of anonymity really true for research to be effective? Hmm.

Maybe it is time we started to think the unthinkable. What if we were to set out to create research methodologies where anonymity didn’t matter? Where clients could ask straight questions of customers on customer databases or customer websites, and get straight answers back from them? Would their answers be so unreliable?

I am reminded of my induction into digital telephony over 20 years ago, where a technologist explained patiently to the agency team that by going digital telephone companies had found a way to put our voices and computer data into packets that they could send down a wire. Once they had made this jump, the challenge was to find ways to send data faster. Now thousands of people use the same wire at the same time to pass voice and data to each other in both directions in real time. While telephone stayed analogue we needed an operator to make a physical connection between two telephones, and while the two parties were using that single piece of wire no other information could be passed down that wire. That is where I think market research is stuck now. The analogue way to get trustworthy information from a respondent is to set up a separate circuit isolated from everything else. Which makes it clunky, costly and slow. And methodologically suspect.

But what if client companies find that they can indeed get usable customer data without using analogue circuitry. Supposing in the flurry of e‑communication as I send off for a brochure for a new car, I browse websites, watch ads on YouTube and Google Video and answer pop-up questionnaires before and after? Suppose car companies find ways for customers to browse information systems in the showroom to choose their cars and integrate research capture while I am talking to the salesperson? Why, they could be gathering research information at the same time they were selling to me! Unthinkable? Why ever not? This is called duplex information flow. All your digital devices have had it for years. But market research hasn’t.

All I’m saying is that playing peekaboo with identity is a poor way to protect an industry as established as market research is. And that if we don’t actively explore a way round the anonymity issue, we may, like the rest of analogue technology, find ourselves consigned to history. Faster than we would have thought possible. OK let’s go with the flow – let’s consign anonymity to the dustbin. The client can talk directly to customers and prospects, and they willingly talk back, even initiating an exchange. So what was your role again?

John Griffiths is Founder of Planning Above and Beyond

International Journal of Market Research 50(6), 2008

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