It’s been a while since my last post, there’s nothing like an integration during a recession to remind one about change, and the true and very real challenges of business. It was an article about this very integration that prompted this post, an article that I myself could have written ten years ago when I worked in a boutique agency. There is a strong positive mythology around small in the qualitative arena, and the opposite for big. As someone who loved working in a boutique, I did not expect to spend so long in (an increasingly) big organization.
Hypothetically the market research ecosystem needs a mix of successful large and small players. It’s increasingly clear to me that the environment qualitative researchers operate in is changing, and new skills and new assumptions will be needed. For example, I was struck by the assumption that increased size leads to templatisation; yet currently large client organisations are moving to a consolidated list of suppliers. Fact based interpretative skills will be part of the new repertoire, along with utilizing new sources of online information.
Books like The Granularity of Growth: How to Identify the Sources of Growth and Drive Enduring Company Performance by Patrick Viguerie, Sven Smith, Mehrdad Baghai showcase the compelling reasons for growth. The Economist featured an August edition with Big is Back. “Today the balance of advantage may be shifting again. To a degree, the financial crisis is responsible. It has devastated the venture-capital market, the lifeblood of many young firms. Governments have been rescuing companies they consider too big to fail, such as Citigroup and General Motors. Recession is squeezing out smaller and less well-connected firms…Two further developments are shifting the balance of advantage in favour of size. One is a heightened awareness of the risks of subcontracting…A second is the emergence of companies that have discovered how to be entrepreneurial as well as big…”
It’s also interesting when Fiona Czerniawska noted four trends in management consulting in her Friday morning keynote speech at Congress 2009; four trends, exacerbated by recession, that were changing the world of consulting. The first was a need among clients for expert or specialist advice, the rise of centralised procurement and preferred supplier lists, meant that securing new business and justifying its value was becoming harder, a “flight to brand” - a tendency to rely on the big, blue chip names - and finally, a downward pressure on prices and margins, as clients demand more for less. (see http://www.warc.com/ConferenceBlogs/ESOMAR-092009.asp).
Finally crowds are big, and I do enjoy being part of a large crowd. The informal learning opportunities – people, clients, countries – are myriad. The best of this year has been working with new colleagues, and that includes new quant colleagues, the latter enabling me to asks lots of questions about what happens when you have tens of thousands of data points… but that’s another post.