Over the last two or three years I’ve started working with more full-service market research agencies. I work for them when they are over-stretched, very often during holiday periods. When I first started doing this I had no idea how much I’d enjoy it or how much I learn.
Of course I love the variety of projects I do for these agencies – this year alone I’ve worked on research for banks and utility companies, fashion retailers and fast food restaurants, brewers and multinational charities.
What I wasn’t prepared for was quite how much I would learn. I’m working on some massive projects, projects that (as a one woman freelancer) I would never take on and I’m being taught new techniques and, crucially, new ways of showing data.
In August I helped with the pen-portrait charting for two segmentations and they were fab. The first one felt fresh and unique in that it was grounded not on splitting the types of people in a market but the reason they’re engaging with a brand. That was new to me and interesting and I am sure it will be hugely useful to the client who can market to an occasion rather than a type of person.
I absolutely loved the second segmentation where the agency had not commissioned a whole lot of new fieldwork but instead had used research that their client already had in the form of a brand tracker. Researchers, in our rush to answer the question of the moment, commission new research but really, before we do that we should look at what research has already been done and whether or not that can answer the questions our clients have. In this case it certainly did and I feel proud to have made a relatively small contribution to what was one of the sharpest client segmentations I’ve ever seen.
