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2010 is deemed as a year of recovery from setbacks faced in the last two years. There is a lot of discussion about the MR industry being required to prove the ROI of their contracts. And while we read about various challenges for researchers in 2010, a few developments look more apparent than others-increasing demand from clients for consulting and "value-add" and synthesizing of holistic data from across multiple sources. Some of these trends have had a direct impact on market research outsourcing over past couple of quarters and will hopefully continue to define outsourcing relationships in coming months.
While top MR companies have driven MR outsourcing until recently, there is an increasing trend that even small and medium-sized MR companies are looking toward the outsourced model. With many small companies coming into play, the models of outsourcing engagement are changing. Typically, smaller companies look for bundled services as opposed to larger companies whose focus is more on cost reductions through labor cost arbitrage and productivity gains for individual processes. Bundled services can range from multi-skilled FTEs, where the same resource could manage multiple tasks, to end-to-end operations management from scripting to reporting. Here the ability of the engagement to take costs (fixed) out of the system and deploy scarce resources in critical (client-facing) areas seems to be driving decisions in favor of outsourcing.
The other important trend we have seen is clients seeking increasing support analyzing content from online communities and blogs. This has lead to growth of new areas in MR outsourcing such as social media monitoring and maintenance, where teams working from outsource locations track discussion boards, forums, tweets, and blogs to derive insights into consumer sentiments or post updates on company online blogs and forums. Words like buzz-tracking, market research online communities (MROC), crowd-sourcing, etc. are likely to define the new methodologies entering the market research outsourcing industry in 2010. |
