Thought Leadership and Profitable Growth – How do they co-exist?

Recently, several articles and papers have been published bemoaning the dearth of talent in the research industry relative to its size and diversity. They focus on two key areas – the lack of basic ‘craft’ skills and the inability to deliver clear and concise insights in the client’s language. One of the root causes has been put down to the increasing homogenisation resulting from the concentration of the industry into fewer commercially driven mega-agencies, where increasingly more of the leadership (unlike in other fields) has a background from outside the profession itself.

As MR has become more business-like in the last 25 years, many would say that the average level of talent or product quality has not changed, which is at odds with the generally improved margins and overall ROI.

LET’S NOT BE IRRATIONAL ABOUT EMOTIONS.

I’m getting increasingly emotional about all the loose talk about emotions going around the market research fraternity these days. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited about some of the new methods for measuring emotional response that are coming out of the areas of cognitive psychology and neuro-science. These offer exciting possibilities. My concern though, is about the over-use and indeed misuse of the term “emotion” in the research context.

Sometimes it takes more than a smile and a positive attitude to get them in the door! (c) A.Gordon 2007.

We risk confusing marketers, and encouraging faddish and poorly thought out research practices. I have three gripes about this. Gripe #1: “Emotional response” is a term so vague that it actually indicates very little of marketing significance on its own. Emotions come in many flavours, strengths and durations of effect. We need to develop considerably more nuanced ways of measuring and understanding these effects.  Gripe #2: Emotion we are told regularly is at the heart of “90%” of  human behaviour”. Yet, if emotion is in effect “everything”, then what is it explaining? Again, emotion as a concept is only useful if we can identify how various types of emotions interact, contradict each other, and interface with rational thought to produce specific kinds of behaviour. Gripe #3: The Freudian fallacy still casts a long shadow over discussions of emotion. Emotional response is too often represented as somehow being necessarily “deeper”, “more important”, or “harder to uncover” than anything from the frontal cortex. This is simply untrue, and unfortunately leads to marketers often taking a simplistic approach to targeting consumers. It’s this third gripe that I want to focus on in this post.