What is Your Market Research Identity?

Is it time to slaughter your sacred research cows?

The relative interest in the recent post about the census surprised me a little. Not that I didn’t expect there to be traffic, after all census is something that affects everyone, and race is always a hot button topic. What surprised me was what a sacred cow the census is to some market researchers.

From MR perspective census data certainly is helpful in allowing us to sample and project survey results. There is money to be made thanks to the census and many MR firms have products that either directly or indirectly are tied to census data. However, if the Census were gone tomorrow that wouldn’t mean that the MR industry would somehow be set back would it? It is just as likely that the lack of census data would give rise to many new products to fill any information void.

The whole debate made me wonder how many of us market researchers link our professional identity to just one specific area of research such as survey data?

Today even linking your identity completely to either quantitative or qualitative may be a mistake. You should probably at least start to learn about hybrid quaili-quant methods …

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