Localspeak

Doing More With Less…in the Trenches of Market Research

21 April 2011

“The old refrain of Cheaper/Faster/Better means more now than ever before, and all participants in the MR value chain understand and demand it,” according to Lenny Murphy, Editor-in-Chief of the GreenBook Blog . In an interview with Frankie Johnson of Research Arts on the publication of the Spring 2011 GreenBook Industry Trends Report ( GRIT ), the oldest study in the industry devoted to tracking changing trends in MR, Murphy also said the Market Research industry was “undergoing the greatest realignment in its history”.

While Murphy cited 5 converging stressors: competition, client demand, consumers, technology and economics, in this post I’d like to focus on the economics of cheaper/faster/better from the supplier perspective. Since segueing 5 years ago from the creative side of the localization industry to partner with MR firms, supplying in-language coding and translation services, surprisingly, I’ve run into resistance within the MR industry to adopt the leaner, nimbler, and more culturally authentic coding methods which Localspeak developed in partnership with then OTX , now Ipsos.

A big validation that we must be doing something right on the economics side of things came recently from the client side when I was introduced by a research relationship manager at a software industry leader to one of their market research firms. The manager, who I had worked with in her previous role as a senior manager in Operations at a global MR firm, suggested that Localspeak might be able to help their research supplier save some money by introducing the efficiencies and values of coding international open-end data in-language. It appears that the out-dated, costly, time-intensive and culturally stripped method of first translating open-end verbatims and then coding them in English was their modus operandi.

In an effort to support “faster/cheaper/better” with hard evidence, Localspeak has created comparative cost scenarios across multiple global markets for typical cross-functional brand tracking studies, which are available upon request.

While it may seem arcane to some, a large number of North American market research firms continue to translate open-end global survey data and then code that translation. And yet, the numbers clearly show the sticker shock of this practice.  In-language coding is less time consuming, more cost-effective and culturally weighted. And yet, arguments for and the benefits of in-language coding remain a hard sell. 
 
Presumably, many market research firms still are willing to pay the substantial costs to translate the respondent verbatim and endure protracted timelines.  Ironically, while they place a significant value on the localization of their surveys in global markets, they wrongfully assume they will/are not losing value-added cultural insights or sentiment nuance – both so easily lost in translation. 
 
While many early adopters of such robust language-supported coding tools as Ascribe prove by their market share, the tenacity of these contradictory market research practices remains baffling, especially in an era of witnessing the most dramatic innovation in the industry.