A - What I like about the job is that I am allowed to think. You are being paid to use your brain rather than just sit there doing some sort of project by rote. Some projects are very similar, but most of them have their own little quirks, and you have to be agile enough of mind to see which areas need to be probed and which do not.
I love my job. There's always something new coming up. It is not a routine type of job. There is never a dull moment. It may be something that you do, or it may be something that the competition does, but there is always new information coming in. Processing information and letting it perk a little bit in your head and then coming up with hypotheses about how that is going to affect things as we know them right now is very challenging. You are part confessor, part clairvoyant. You wear a lot of hats, and there is no boredom.
Well, I have had occasions where a salesperson has walked back in and said, "It helped. Thank you. We got the business because of this." That makes it all worthwhile. A lot of the projects are boring, mundane, and you pull your hair out, but by the time it is all completed, you got their business. It's there in the magazine, and you know you helped to get it there. That makes it. Those are personal gratifications for me. It is important that I have a sense of completion. I have been in school all my life where you pass a test, you study, and you pass another test. There is nothing there to hold in your hand. This time you've got something in your hand, and if it's turned to a promotional piece and one of the "big guns" out there who spends millions of dollars in media has my study and likes it, well... it's great! They have even written me thank-you letters. They are making decisions based on what I do. That is gratifying. It comes from all angles-the advertiser, the publisher, the sales staff, whoever. Again, for me it is a reconfirmation in my own mind.
Q - What do you dislike about marketing research?
A - One thing that I sometimes find frustrating is a function of the job. The research department is a staff function, so we are in the position to make recommendations but are not part of the marketing decisions. I would say that is one of the major drawbacks and the most frustrating aspect of the job.
It's very, very difficult to control all the activities that are needed in doing a research project. In most cases you are waiting for the respondent. Sometimes we don't complete enough questionnaires. It's a problem if the activities are not performed within certain times, since I have already made a commitment to my marketing group that they will have this report at a certain date. If things get screwed up along the way, then I have to scramble. There are a lot of activities outside my direct control. No matter what I can do to move things along, typically there is something that goes crazy. It can be a rain storm in Des Moines, or it can be a post office strike. There are a lot of extraneous variables that come into play in a research project.
Well, some of it is repetitive. The repetitiveness of it sometimes gets a little bit heavy. You are not too anxious to tackle a project you have done twenty times before, I guess, even though it is in a slightly different format and will yield different results. I would rather be devising new techniques, but the opportunities are not that great because if something works, it's done over again. Still, I have devised some new techniques for this organization, and they have worked pretty well.
I guess the one thing that I find most frustrating of all the market research problems is that I think a market researcher who has been with a company for a number of years see things through the continuum and through the research. There are things that I know should be done at the company and seem so clear to me, but aren't done for a number of reasons: politics in the marketing department, lack of continuity among marketing M.B.A.'s, who want to be with the company and want to be constantly promoted. If they are constantly promoted, then that means they are constantly on different brands, have different jobs, and have limited knowledge. If they are not constantly promoted, they leave in a short period of time and go to some other package goods company. So, one of my frustrations seems to be that there doesn't seem to be as much continuity as I would like in a marketing department. Therefore, some of the results of the research fall by the wayside because there is nobody there with the necessary depth of experience to be able to follow through on the recommendations for the medium and longer term.
I almost wish that a market research person who has been with the company for a while could be a kind of director over the marketing department and get away with it politically, someone who would become an integral part of the marketing group. This person could sit in on some of their discussions and say, "Remember when we did this piece of research? It showed such and such meaning. Of the three alternatives you are discussing, we ought to eliminate alternative B, because that doesn't go along with the research that we did in the past." Sometimes that works now.
There is never enough money and never enough time. When you stop and think of the type of things that could be done with unlimited time and money....
Q - How much stress is involved in your work?
A - There is a lot of stress, but I think different people handle stress differently. On the supplier side, there was always a heck of a lot of stress, but it was primarily deadlines-making sure that everything got out on time. On this side it is not only deadlines but the political aspects of the job. You can have two people in the room both telling you they want the same research but both of them having different objectives. You want to make everybody happy, but at the same time you want the company to succeed. If you are not as objective as you possibly can be, it will hurt the company in the long run and yourself as well.
