We live in a New Dark Age.
I speak of Procurement and Rosters.
I've been prompted to write this piece today by something in the IJMR recently.
Before you start checking the acidity of the grapes on my desk, I should say that I have been on rosters aplenty, over the years. As I have always co-run small companies, this has been Quite A Hard Thing to achieve, but we did it. And worked with some big, bruiser brands in the UK and Europe.
And perhaps what I'm about to say has been said before. In which case I make no apologies for saying it again.
There are the apologists for the way things are. Procurement departments have been a fact of life in many other corporate functions for years. Get over yourself. Prove you're better. Then you'll be fine, they say. Meanwhile, the cost-of-everything-value-of-nothing mentality creeps forward, powered by The Recession - its Henry V Moment - and the manner in which research is bought in the UK goes into deeper lock down each month...
But even the most superficial of examinations of this approach leaves it in shreds. It has been killing something vital. And it's getting worse and worse.
Research - of whatever kind - is about people.
Infinitely complicated, infinitely extraordinary people.
People who conduct it, and people who take part in it. Everything that happens in research - everything - is about the quality of those people.
Imagine you were hiring someone to work for you, in your department. You know what the job is, you know the kind of person you want, and you want the best you can find. You write the recruitment brief.
Then someone from Procurement emails you to say that you can only hire this person from the three companies from which the last three successful applicants came.
Of course, such a thing would never happen. But just imagine it did. What might be the motivation behind such an edict? At its heart would be fear, and conservatism. And lack of trust - in you, the manager, hiring. Implicit would be the belief that you would quite likely mess things up if you went off piste. Hire a crazy person perhaps. Offer them a salary of £2 million and as many bananas as they can eat? The last three companies produced perfectly fine candidates thank you, the logic might go. All of them brought with them the technical or craft skills you needed before. None of them wanted a stupid salary. You'll be fine. Just buy a new employee from them, like a box of copier paper.
Insane?
This is exactly what the closed shop of rosters does. And the thinking is essentially the same. At its heart is the belief that what happened in the past will always be good enough for what will happen in the future. At its heart is the obsession with not dropping the ball, and much less interest in taking that ball and scoring with it.
Now there are some good agencies on rosters. No question of that.
But I'd submit that if they were that good, you'd be hiring them anyway - without the need for a roster. They'd prove their worth every time.
And of course, there are some 'not so good' agencies on rosters. I used to work in the world of advertising, as a Planner. Even then, the roster culture was taking hold, especially amongst the big corporates. I can remember many ocassions when my heart - sometimes even my client's heart - would sink because someone somewhere within the company had dictated that a certain project should be handled by a certain research company.
And the project would duly take place, and the results would duly be mundane, or tired, or superficial, or in some other way disappointing. Any chance of fertile, breakthrough thinking had somewhere had a pillow pressed firmly over its face.
The winner? You tell me. Not the client, not the business, not the customer.
And then there's the response 'Yes, but if you were good enough/doing something different enough, you could make a case to be on the roster'.
They always say that don't they? Something 'different'.
This one needs demolishing with both barrels.
Apart from the whole Equity-card style paradox of never getting a chance to prove that you have something to offer until someone actually hires you, there is a basic misunderstanding of the nature of qualitative research here.
Qualitative research can, and often does, make a clear, measurable difference to a client's business. Insight, connections, truths discovered in it unlock problems, open up opportunities, change the landscape, every day of the week.
But the manner and mechanism by which good researchers do this has usually got much less to do with shiny, eye catching new techniques or 'products', which can be branded, publicised, and shown to a Procurement Dept ("Look we definitely haven't got any agency that makes people not brush their teeth for a year and then make a movie about it or interviews people under water wearing aqualungs" etc...) than with the quality of the grey matter inside the researcher's head.
We're talking about the researcher's ability to THINK. Clearly, imaginatively, openly. We're talking about their vision, imagination, and instincts. We're talking about their experience - and by that I do not mean simply years accumulated, but breadth, of markets, brands, life. The 25 year old who has spent a year digging wells in Africa alongside her two years learning the ropes of 'research' has learned something worth hearing about. The 55 year old who has come into research after three other successful careers in catering, publishing and market gardening has too.
Can you write this stuff down on a form?
"We'd like to use these people because they just seem to really get what we're about as a business, because we have chemistry with them, because they seem to exhibit real flair and imagination and we're confident they'll do a great job".
See what happens.
More often that not, such an appeal to a Procurement department won't even get to first base. Where's the shiny new toy? Who's to say that the people already on the roster can do all this just as well...
And that, actually, gets to the nub of it. Who's to say? Well you, actually.
You, the Research Buyer.
You the person actually hired to think about this stuff, to have a view, to make the best decisions.
You the person whose career is going to languish if all the research you commission is kind of, well, er, just ok.
You whose company is going to hit the skids because the competitor down the road is thinking these things through in an open minded, unconstrained way, and has the scope to get the best people in each time...
That's right - your opinion isn't good enough though. They. Don't. Trust. You.
And as for where I'm sitting...well here's another home truth about all this. And it's something that researchers are terrified of saying. Terrified.
We don't really have any shiny new things to show you.
Read that right? We don't. Sure, we have approaches, techniques, all that. But then so have all our competitors. Glittery ones, in some cases.
The real news is about what we have lodged firmly between our ears.The stuff that we bring into play to decide which approaches to use, and having used them, how you can use what they revealed.
I haven't found a way of writing it down on a form yet. Or taking it to a Procurement manager and saying "There! Look! That's the thing!"
But then, I'm not sure than any of the great researchers from whom I learned my trade, learned about what was really important in this business (people like Chrissie Burns, Roddy Glen, the late Prosper Riley-Smith) could do it either.
And nor, I suspect, would they try.
