The #MRXHero interviews are being published daily this week in reverse alphabetical order. To find out more about the #MRXHeroes week, and why we’ve put it together, check out our other post here.
Tom Ewing, Digital Culture Officer at Brainjuicer, is one of Research Through Gaming’s 5 Heroes of Market Research this week. But what’s made us choose Tom Ewing as an #MRXHero?
In my relatively short time working in the research industry, I’ve seen that Tom speaks/tweets with that honest tone that most of us wish we could muster up. That honest tone without the PR attached to it. I’ve seen/heard Tom vocalize the problems he believes are effecting the market research industry, even if his thoughts don’t coincide with the route others are taking. But Tom is not set out to being controversial (at least Tom, I don’t think you are?) but I guess someone has to challenge popular opinion or ask the tricky questions if you genuinely want to see better research conducted, and Tom is one of those people. Tom shows us that you can really fit in a full-time job with a host of other activities even if he thinks his time management is “abominable”! Tom writes and reviews popular culture with his team at Freaky Trigger, and Tom also writes for his research related blog BlackBeard; all this while also being a family man and going to work each day like the rest of us, but I get the feeling that Tom doesn’t see a lot of what he does as ‘work’. As a female entrepreneur, I often hear about how women are akin to human beings with super-powers; juggling family life with work. Tom, and indeed our other #MRXHeroes this week, celebrate how both men and women in our industry handle a huge amount of spinning plates. But this isn’t a gender thing. Tom Ewing is an intelligent and witty writer (his recent Christmas Carol piece on Greenbook had me chuckling) and his voice, whether in 140 characters or over Radio NewMR is always interesting to listen to and helps progress research. Tom always says the things you wish you had the nerve, or intellect to say! When I first met Tom at some conference or another, I felt like I was in front of a celebrity, “better not say anything stupid” I thought. But Tom didn’t make me feel like an imbocile, thank goodness 🙂 Tom is such an interesting person. If anything, I used the #MRXHeroes week as an excuse to find out more about him too, and indeed our other #MRXHeroes. Does that make us nosey? Or does that make us ethnographers? Who knows!
So here is the first of our #MRXHeroes, interviewed by our previous intern and award-winning researcher, David Wiszniowski.
– Betty
D: Tom was kind enough to answer some questions I had regarding the industry, his take on it, and what I can expect to achieve as a young researcher. I’d once again like to thank Tom for allowing me to interview him.
D: How did you get into the market research industry?
T: I stumbled into it. I’d been working selling second-hand books, decided I needed an actual career, and a friend told me that research firms had graduate schemes which didn’t care if you graduated 3 years before. I snuck through the qualification process and stuck around.
D: When did you first realize you had a passion for research?
T: I may yet realize it! I’ve met enough people who are passionate about research to realize I’m not one of them. Research has been good to me though and I hope I’ve done fairly by it.
D: If you can recall a defining moment where you felt that the research industry was calling you, when was it?
T: I was in the running for two jobs – one was the civil service, one was Research International. The civil service was asking me about reforming the House of Lords, RI were asking me about pants. There was no contest.
D: Can you explain to me what a ‘digital culture officer’ does on a day to day basis?
T: I can offer an exceptionally minor scoop in that I might be changing my job title though I can’t say what to! Most jobs I’ve had have involved some combination of copywriting, Internet expertise, and sort-of planning-style big thinking, and this one is no exception: the job title mainly leant on the Internet part.
But what I actually do – and this is a huge joy for me – is read things and write things. I write our conference papers, a lot of our press articles, help with marketing materials, collate and curate behavioural science studies, write memos and point-of-view pieces on this and that, blog as BrianJuicer and as myself, run the Twitter stream, pitch in on proposals and pitches, support the rest of the BrainJuicer Labs team – and I read about online culture, psychology, new research techniques, and go to conferences. The “Culture Officer” bit was nicked from Grant McCracken’s idea of someone who is a lens for the wider world into the business, and I’ve tried to do that.
D: What sort of impact do you think the work you do as a ‘digital culture officer’ has on the industry itself?
T: I have no idea! I think individually not much, but the BrainJuicer team has more impact on the industry than any of its individual staff. With something like the Twitter feed, though, I’ve tried to widen its focus away from us and to celebrate some of the work other behavioural researchers and practitioners are doing, and just highlight interesting things.
D: Do you think the market research industry is changing? Evolving/devolving?
T: The change is both rapid and gradual. In that, on a day to day basis, I am doing the same things, but suddenly when I look at the industry now compared to five years ago, it seems quite different. There’s always new ideas coming in and there’s always consolidation happening too. Social media research, for instance, used to be a frontier and is now established. Research rooted in behavioural science will go the same way.
D: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the market research industry right now?
T: We’re at a period of incredible opportunity at the moment thanks to technology making it easier than ever to capture passive data and behavioural data. The response of the research industry to this has been to rally round a very sensible party line, which is “Ah, but big data won’t deliver real meaning” – you need researchers to work out what’s really important.
It’s a beautiful argument and unfortunately it reminds me of my second life as a music critic. Critics occupied a similar gatekeeper role in the music biz – directing people towards what mattered, to draw a very broad analogy – and they’ve faced something of a crisis as more and more tools have surfaced to let people do that themselves.
So I think “providing meaning” isn’t quite the deal-clincher researchers would hope for. I suspect automated meaning and DIY meaning are hard to do but far from impossible.
D: Do you have any suggestions on how to oppose this challenge?
T: From a BrainJuicer perspective the key is getting people to look at the psychological basis for the assumptions they’re making about branding and marketing and research, and ask “Is this right?” Data is ultimately a fossil record of decisions. So how people make decisions is at the absolute centre of research and marketing. But we’ve long relied on what we know in aggregate – sales figures – and on what we get people to tell us about why they do things.
And now we have a golden moment when we can find out what people do at a very granular level, and run a lot more experiments.
So the big challenge is to use this golden moment to examine people’s actual behaviour and hypothesize about how people really make decisions and then test ways to change it. The point isn’t exactly finding the meaning in the data, it’s going a step beyond that and proactively hypothesizing and testing solutions you think will have an impact on that data.
D: Can you describe BrainJuicer in three words?
T: “System 1 rules!”
D: Do you think that our industry will see a rise in companies like BrainJuicer, or that major research firms will remain the key players in market research?
T: Small and medium size research companies are already more prominent. Not so much in terms of macro financial trends – which show top-level consolidation as the big story – but in terms of setting an agenda and surviving and prospering, the best smaller firms seem to be doing very well. When I look at a conference agenda, or at people I personally admire in research, they’re generally at the smaller firms.
D: Working at Research Through Gaming, I know there are many challenges/opportunities with smaller research companies. Are there any differences you have noticed between working for an encompassing research company, and now a smaller yet still globally recognized company? (not clichés) What are the top three differences between larger firms and smaller companies?
T: The bigger firms have some advantages. They are mostly speaking to more powerful people and working on larger-scale campaigns. A lot of that is industrialized research – tracking and so on – but some of it is really high-level strategic stuff which must be extremely satisfying and exciting to work on. But for most people at a big firm, they won’t see much of that, which is one reason the churn is so big.
There’s also a trade-off between experimentation and resources. BrainJuicer is unusual, as I understand it, in the proportion of money it puts into innovation and experimentation. But simple scale means the big firms usually have more resources to innovate. The question is, do they? The difference isn’t really in willingness to experiment, it’s in the ability to deploy the results of those experiments meaningfully and the organisational structure of big firms – in my experience – means innovation withers or is even actively stamped on in the name of consistency.
And from a personal perspective, the biggest problem at the big firms is getting stuff done at an organisational level. You can do excellent client-facing work but in terms of helping shape the intellectual direction of a company, or doing work that impacts a whole organisation, it’s far harder to make your voice heard. Now, this is partly a personal failing – at the big firms I’ve worked for there are people who were brilliant at creating and leveraging influence within a big organisation and they had skills I simply didn’t. But it’s true that the smaller a firm gets, the easier it is to make an impact at it.
D: Do you consider yourself a ‘hero of market research’? If yes or no, why?
T: No, though it’s very flattering to be given the opportunity to ramble on like this! Research is always a team effort, so I think hero implies being a good role model or mentor, or making particular advances in the industry, and I don’t think I have really done those things. I have avoided being a villain of market research, so far at least.
D: Why do you think we have chosen you to be a hero of market research?
T: My guess is it’s to do with my Twitter presence and conference presence, both of which are down to me being lucky enough to have employers who encouraged them – for very different reasons.
D: I know you are very busy and have a variety of blogs. Specifically, those which cover music. I was wondering how your interests in non-research related fields can be seen as influences throughout your work?
T: I have a fatal weakness for puns in headlines inherited from the early 90s NME.
There are quite a few studies which say that teams produce more innovation, and that diverse knowledge sets and backgrounds produce better innovation. One of the things I’ve always liked about research is that it’s a mongrel business – it’s full of people who did just drift into it and have what politicians call a “hinterland”, a set of interests and a full life outside research. So even if my music journalism career has nothing directly to do with research it’s helpful in terms of widening the set of perspectives we can draw from – same goes for anyone with secondary interests.
D: You won best paper at both the ESOMAR 2013 and ESOMAR 2012 Congress. Could you tell me a little about those papers?
T: They were for the same paper. The second one was a “best of the best” award for all the winning papers across ESOMAR events. It was especially lovely as it involved no extra work!
The paper is “Research In A World Without Questions”, about doing research without asking direct questions – so it covers observational research, ethnography, behavioural experiments, social media, and a bunch of other things, as well as talking about why moving away from direct questions are important. Somewhere in its enormous crowd scenes gamification gets a look-in too. I approached “World Without Questions” like a mixtape, me as the DJ weaving together a dozen or so experiments and case studies from BrainJuicer and our co-writers Allstate Insurance and trying to get them to make coherent sense.
D: How did you celebrate those wins?
T: I was blogging both events and had deadlines to hit, so after the big dinner and awards ceremony I went back to my hotel to finish off blog pieces. Rock and roll!
D: It’s been a year since you won best paper, do you see any major or minor changes happening within the industry that relate to the ideas oh which you wrote about?
T: Pretty much everything we talked about in the paper has moved on – I gave big data a measly paragraph and that has come to dominate the research conversation. Social media research has got better – it still feels essentially descriptive rather than insightful in many cases but people know more every year about how to do it well. The scope of what you can do with mobile is expanding all the time, and so on. From our perspective the behavioural experiments we wrote up – making pack research more “system 1”, running field experiments in-store – have paid off and now behavioural work underpins a lot of our research.
It’s also the case that questions aren’t going anywhere – not that I claimed they would. A lot of DIY or very cheap research is oriented around questions. And MROCs, which are wonderful tools, have grown a lot and are oriented around questions and set tasks. The model of the survey and the respondent is sunk very deep into our industry, so a lot of the paper was asking “How can we do that right?”.
D: What type of implications do you think these changes mean for the future of the industry?
T: I still think that the proportion of useful information that comes from direct questions will keep on shrinking. I would hope that the people coming into research these days aren’t as wedded to the idea that the best way to find something out is to ask people. I am sure they aren’t, in fact! “The industry” as we know it may well end up as a sprinkle of croutons, bobbing forlornly in a soup of data analysis, business intelligence and behavioural understanding.
D: It’s apparent that with your blogs, columns, work, awards, papers, presentations and family life that you are very busy. Could you provide a rough ‘day in the life’ for me? What does a typical day for you look like?
T: I am one of those awful modern digital workers who is never entirely away from work and never entirely at work either. My working hours diffuse across the day and beyond, though since my kids started school I try and keep weekends sacred at least. On the other hand, I feel no shame about reading music blogs or catching up on comics news when I fancy it. If the job gets done well and on time, the hours kept matter less. So a typical day is a mix of deadlines to hit, snatches of leisure and idea trails followed on a whim. I try and build in an hour for reading and researching new things, too.
D: What advice would you give readers as to how to juggle their time?
Don’t be like me! I need their advice, frankly. My time management is abominable.
D: It’s been said that you’re a very ‘frank’ speaker. Has this honesty ever gotten you into any ‘hot-water’ within the industry? When would you suggest is a good time to start being so honest as a speaker/writer? Is there a certain age or level of experience?
T: This is the first I’ve heard of it! Of course, you only know what you know. If there are opportunities which I’ve missed because of being a dick on Twitter, and there may well be, I’ve never heard about them in the first place. I try and be honest about myself and my limitations if I’m being critical of other work, and I try not to make criticism personal. And I try – though probably fail – to praise as much as I blame. I think as long as you’re self-aware about what you do or don’t know yourself, frankness should always be an option. You need to own up when you get things wrong, too.
D: You’ve attended many a conference, what are some of the things that put you to sleep during these talks, if anything? Alternatively, can you provide any examples of what excites you at these conferences.
D: I’ve seen lots of bad research presentations and lots of good ones but actually very few boring ones. A boring presentation would be one that doesn’t elicit any reaction – you know from slide one where it’s going, and it goes there, and you basically agree with it, because who couldn’t? This is a worse problem in marketing than in research, because in research at least you usually have fresh data, and I can almost always find SOMETHING to enjoy in a chart, even if it’s just spitting blood over how it doesn’t prove what the presenter is saying. Marketing guru types and motivational speakers are much worse, however slick they are.
Exciting things are anything that makes me go “Damn, I wish we’d done that” or “I wish we could do that” – it happens a few times a conference, and it’s the best feeling, if you leave aside the gnawing sense of envy. And I also love some presentations at a craft level – at ESOMAR there was one on second-screening, for instance, which is the most overhyped subject and which I was dreading. It was excellent – really solid, mixed-mode, beautifully presented and robust results – superb craftsmanship.
D: Being that I am a student, and also an intern, are there any words of wisdom that you would give to those just starting out in MR?
T: I think things are quite different now because the whole job market is more precarious on the one hand, but there’s also a higher level of professionalism coming in, with courses specifically aimed at researchers. I had the opportunity to present to a class of research students in Spain last year and they asked better and tougher questions than anything I got at a conference. Older researchers – at least the good ones – like questions and appreciate challenges, so don’t ever be afraid to ask them. Other advice? Keep an eye on the hot areas outside research and own what you know about.
D: Personally, even though I’ve taken a program specifically geared towards market research, I still don’t know all of the main players in the industry. With conferences, linked in profiles, more conferences, papers, webinars, talks, presentations, blogs, green books, vines and hashtags I find that there is a lot to take in. In fact, I still feel as if I’m playing catch-up. What sort of advice can you offer as to how to make sense of it all for someone who is new to the industry? Being that I’m still a novice, how important is it for me to keep tabs on the innovations being made in MR?
T: I don’t pay structured attention to most of it – if I did I would have no time to find out about the world beyond research. You have to find the modes you’re comfortable in – I happen to like Twitter and I end up going to conferences, but other people find more value in LinkedIn, which I can’t stand! There are a lot of monthly drinks for designers, psychologists, behavioural economists, etc. around the world, which often attract younger people with fewer commitments.
For a newcomer – find people in your “generation” who are doing interesting work. Check out Jeff Henning’s Top 10 post on Greenbook for a sense of what’s getting the Twitter crowd interested. Investigate award winners and read their case studies. But honestly what you bring to the industry from outside is more important than the things you pick up inside – you’ll have plenty of time to absorb the biases and structural errors we no longer notice.
D: Thank you Tom for your time!
Tomorrow we’ll be posting the 2nd interview from our next #MRXHero.