The perils of DIY software

The Grouse and Claret Pub in London’s Belgravia is not a common haunt of In Brief’s editor. Indeed, I probably wouldn’t have set foot in the door if it hadn’t been for a random phone call from Silver Dialogue’s Nicola Stanley, an AQR member.

She alerted me to a debate, part-sponsored by the Association of Survey Companies (ASC) and the Market Research Society (MRS), at the pub one evening in January. The motion up for debate? ‘This house deplores the rise of DIY research software that has the potential to damage the professional market research industry.’

Now, on the face of it, this is a very quant-oriented issue. But as I spoke to Nicola about her proposed speech, the issues around it suddenly seemed to be more wide ranging. Was it just a case of the big software manufacturers — and the big research houses — being worried about cowboy operators, or was there a deeper fear that clients were — like Annie Lennox — increasingly ‘doing it for themselves’?

Setting the scene

So it was that, having got incredibly lost, I arrived at the pub just before the start. The chair, a certain A.J. Johnson, set the scene and encouraged everyone present to text a mobile number he read out, so that at the end they could vote on the motion. “Attempting to vote,” he said, “is in itself a type of research.” So it proved, but more of that later.

Before he introduced Ipsos MORI’s Greg Smith, who proposed the motion, he set the scene, talking about the proliferation of new budget software. He also tweaked the motion slightly: it wasn’t so much the existence of DIY software but the fact that, perish the thought, clients might use it themselves.

But on to Greg, who delivered an entertaining, and what he called ‘burbling’, monologue about the dangers of DIY software, prefacing his comments by saying that they were entirely personal. Never, he said, had there been a time when we had been able to vote — and produce research — in so many different ways, from the red buttons on our TV to texting.This has led to a culture of button pressing and form filling, and might itself have damaged the reputation of the industry.

“As professionals,” he said, “we have a duty to protect our clients, ourselves, but most importantly all the users of research, particularly respondents.” He warned that “the technology and the software that drives the research processes is, in the wrong hands, like putting a loaded gun into the hands of a three- year-old. We fall into a trap if we let this proliferate and go on.”

Potential damage