The Post Researcher Era

Confusion about competence is the new normal. Marketing Researchers, welcome to the Post Researcher Era! It’s just not a matter of technology helping us to do things better, faster and cheaper, or do things we could never do before. Technology will also do our thinking for us.

At least, at the extreme, these are the sort of claims I sometimes hear. In How To Lie With Numbers and Disrupting B.S., I suggest some antidotes to the sales pitches that confuse science with science fiction. To be fair, technology has done an enormous amount to improve our lives. All things considered, I would not like to live like Henry VIII. A century ago, I probably would have died before age 5. A decade ago I was not able to perform many of the analytics listed here. Ten years ago, even fast computers were just too slow, and software for many statistical procedures and machine learning techniques did not exist.

That said, I increasingly wonder what the word research is doing in “marketing research.” At the rate we’re going where we seem to be headed, before long marketing research will be predominantly tech sales. But, maybe not. Let’s step back for a moment. The brains of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) are computer programs. Humans program computers to do specific things and these programs may be imbedded in, or linked to, other computers or physical machines, some of which we call robots.

These AIs are idiot savants in the sense of being geniuses by human standards at a few things, but Artificial General Intelligence remains an aspiration. Even the most advanced AI has about as many neural connections as an insect and all lack the gut instincts, though currently unfashionable, that have helped humans survive for millennia.

Despite the hype, recommender systems, targeted ads, chatbots and even spell checkers just aren’t there yet. They waste a lot of our time…and worsen our browsing experience. AI cannot do my job, as I explain in Automating My Job. I sometimes wonder if there are too many venture capital dollars chasing too few sound investment opportunities, and that this imbalance has led to a hyperinflation in B.S.

But the perception is the reality, and the capabilities of machines are often overrated, even by those who should know better. We may be thinking too much about technology and not enough about the skills marketing researchers must have to do more than sell. Many MR veterans I know feel marketing research skills are in decline, even though most of us don’t want to see this elephant in our room. By and large, I agree with them.

Some of these skills are methodological, such as research design, sampling, questionnaire design and inferential statistics. Others pertain to marketing and business in general. There are also reporting and presentation skills. Then there is the most important of them all, critical thinking. Not all are deteriorating – presentation and public speaking skills, on the whole, are much better than when I began my career. There is software, in addition, that didn’t even exist a decade or so ago.

People in most occupations today have more to learn in the same space of time than earlier generations had to for their jobs. Many of the statistical and machine learning tools I use every day, for instance, did not exist or were on the drawing board when I was in college. Fortunately, I had the academic grounding necessary to make sense of textbooks, journal articles and software documentation to learn through self-study. I’m fortunate to have many academic contacts as well, and I’ve learned a great deal from them. Had I not invested the time (and money) to learn about these recent developments, most likely I would not have survived as a marketing scientist.

That’s scary, but I don’t feel I’m exaggerating. We do need to learn more to do our jobs than earlier generations of marketing researchers. Some of the new tech comes in very handy, but learning how to use it takes time. Then there is all the spam we must wade through to find what we really need and what works as advertised. Getting squeezed are many of the fundamental skills, some of which I mentioned earlier, that technology will not be able to replace in the foreseeable future

We are also losing what I call research thinking. In my experience, it is this mindset which mostly separates an average marketing researcher from a good one, not technical knowledge. It also helps us understand new technologies, such as recent developments in neuroscience, and apply them more effectively.

If we lose these foundational thinking and research skills, we will indeed enter a Post Researcher Era. Let’s try to keep that from happening.

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