It is a privilege to be asked to write an article for
InterVIEW giving my view on the changes in the industry in the last decade. As it happens, this is almost exactly the length of time that I have been working for Kantar, firstly as Managing Director of TNS New Zealand and then as CEO of Kantar New Zealand. Over this time, I believe the three trends that have had the biggest impact on our industry are technological development, the rise of the millennial workforce and the need to be able to respond to clients in a more agile manner. Technology means that organisations have almost unlimited access to data, whereas maybe a decade ago they would have had to come to agencies like ours to get it. We never have clients say to us, “We don’t have enough data”, but the challenge is always how to draw meaningful insight from it. This technological development means the range of tools and techniques we have at our disposal to draw meaning and insight from the data has also proliferated. We are a people business and increasingly our people are millennials, who quite rightly have different expectations of what they want from their employer and their career, compared to previous generations. Our challenge is to ensure we recruit and retain the best, and as a result this means we are continuing to evolve the way we work and the career opportunities we provide to our people to meet these expectations. Our clients also expect, quite rightly in my opinion, that we can respond faster and provide them more timely insight. This is driven in part by the fact that technology makes this easier to do, but also by their need to respond faster in the markets in which they operate.
The days of setting up a tracker, providing quarterly reporting and revisiting the design every three years are long gone. It is the intersection of these trends that makes me bullish about the future of the industry. There is, in my opinion, too much focus by the industry on its growth rate being at best stagnant. That might be true of the growth in demand for market research, but the market for insight continues to grow year on year, as witnessed by the entrance of new types of competitors into this market, and it is the people who work in our industry who are best placed to capitalise on this growth in demand. And it is not just me that is bullish about the industry’s future. Our parent company WPP is in the process of selling 60% of Kantar globally to Bain Capital, a private equity firm. Bain Capital were the successful bidder out of 16 private equity firms and have paid a price that reflects the strong growth potential they see. The big data that technology now provides us is excellent at answering the “what” and the “who” questions, for example, what did the consumer do and who was the consumer? What it doesn’t answer well is the “why” question – why did the consumer do what they did? To answer that “why” question, the role of primary research and the skills of insights professionals are critical. Insights professionals have a deep understanding of why people behave in the way they do. When you combine that human understanding with technology, you can deliver true insight in a timeframe that allows it to be acted upon to make a difference. As someone who works in the insights industry, I think that is a pretty exciting place to be.
< contents 15