Are market researchers so desperate to recruit new panelists willing to take their surveys that they need MySpace spam to do so? The spam I generally receive on my MySpace account is of three kinds:
- bands who desperately want me to listen to their music
- lonely girls in bikini who desperately want to meet me via webcam
- guys who made millions from home and desperately want to share their secrets with me
Recently, I started to receive friend requests from a mash-up of the last two: a lonely girl in bikini making a fortune from home, including taking surveys. Today, let me introduce you to Aurélie from Planet Panel.
(click on the thumnnails to see the image)
Now the question is: as market researchers, should we condemn the practice, or should we salute marketing innovation? As we market researchers are fighting like anybody else for consumer attention, can we afford to be more candid than other marketers?
Hi Olivier,
Market researchers should condemn the practice of spam or spamvertising and face the truth — that they’re suffering just as much as their clients with their legacy models of interruption, interception and coercion. (Building research communities in MySpace would be interesting, though.) I can’t tell you how much I get spammed by large, “legite” market research companies, in my standard email, not even in the walls of MySpace. Yes, market research can be nothing more than a negative advertising campaign, for the guilty market research company itself, its clients and its larger industry.
When attention becomes the scarcity, information and source choice grows, and consumers simply become elusive, market researchers need to learn new, mutually beneficial ways of partnering with people — the individuals formerly known as the respondents, subjects, sample or panel — to collect data and produce insights. Some of the new rules include:
- increasingly observational
- transparent
- partnership
- mutual gain
- non-disruptive
- choice to opt in or out, and all the gray areas in between
- empowerment
- “real value” for participation
How much innovation has there been, really? Some, but the real insights, value and innovation are occurring more and more at businesses that don’t pretend to be in market research. Google, for example, or the customer-relations management system at E-trade.
Lastly, market research might want to consider losing its name. It’s stodgy and inherently looks to the past, not the future.
Cheers,
Max
Olivier,
One last thing…market research’s problem is not attention scarcity or eroding response rates. It’s irrelevance.
Max
Well, it’s kind of funny: market researchers wanted to go “marketing” and when they eventually do it… they go SPAM?! A sad kind of funny.