The sweet spot - customer understanding
26 September 2014

With the predictability of a stopped clock that's right twice a day, there will always be at least one voice forecasting the death of market research.

To me, this is like obsessing about the end of the horse drawn carriage, or the demise of sugar. These are delivery mechanisms. People will still need to get from A to B, and we’ll always want sweet stuff.

For my part, I predict that future organisations will still want to understand their customers, whether to increase revenues or decrease costs. Methods will change but the motivation will remain the same.

The depth and sophistication of customer understanding will become ever more significant as a competitive differentiator.

Data aggregation and DIY research are useful but don’t automatically deliver customer insight. If you don’t know the right questions to ask of all that expensive data, particularly as increasing regulation ratchets up data handling costs, you will waste a lot of money.

It is a privilege here at MRS to be able to bring together and present the collective experience and understanding of one of the largest and most sophisticated markets for customer understanding in the world.

In the past, we have smashed together artists, scientists, psychologists, political and social commentators and business leaders all focused on expanding on the ‘how, why and what’ of customer understanding.

Which leads me neatly on to our call for contributions to MRS Annual Conference 2015. A highlight in the research calendar, it is your contribution that attracts a record breaking number of attendees every year.

So this is when we give the sector a collective squeeze and extract the best, the boldest and the most transformational ideas, case studies and methods.

You might call it the sweet stuff.