Transcript of Field Panel 2006

F: I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank and at the same time introduce our panel chair, who is David Dubow from ASE. David began his market research career at Audits and Surveys in New York in 1978 where he served as Director of their national telephone research operation. He then moved to MIL, London, again as a director. Then FDS as managing director and as I say, currently David is at the ASE which he founded in 1992. He’s been a speaker at a number of conferences and seminars around the world, including the American Marketing Association and ESOMAR, the Argentine Marketing Conference, and the American Chamber of Commerce in Manilla. So we’re extremely fortunate to have him tonight as our very own David Dimbleby. Over to you David.

DAVID: Thank you. Well thank you all for being here. I’m going to try to keep my opening remarks and introductions brief so that we can spend most of the evening addressing the issue that we’re here to talk about, and what I’m sure is on all of your minds. The interest in the subject is obviously great. This evening’s seminar was in fact over subscribed, so clearly it’s a subject of great interest to all of you attending and for some of those who were not able to be here. It’s about a year ago that I had the privilege of chairing a not entirely dissimilar gathering. It was the so called Industry Leaders’ Summit at the last of the BMRA conferences. And amongst that group were a number of illustrious industry leaders, one of whom was Tony Cowling, who was then the outgoing chairman of TNS. Tony spoke at some length at that conference about the trends that will impact the market research industry in the near and long term. There were many that he spoke about, most having to do with the integration and globalisation of both client companies and agencies. It’s a very different world than the one that some of us entered. But what he also talked about were the increasing obstacles to access of respondents, the changing face of data collection, impacted both by that and by the advent of technology. Tony saw the role of online data collection growing, and some of the traditional methods, notably telephone interviewing declining. But he saw those things declining but not disappearing. And not disappearing because there are some of the things that we as an industry need to do that requires the interaction, the face to face contact, the discrimination that people can do that technology can’t. However, if we’re going to continue to maintain that as an important part of what the industry does, and clearly an important part of what most of you do, it is essential that we continue to distinguish what we do as being unique and different from what technology does. And to do so effectively what we must do is continue to convince the people who are our clients, our internal clients for those of us who work in service departments in organisations, and our external clients, that what we are doing is something that is reliable, representative, of high integrity and something that is unique. So, I think the main subject today, or the focus of what we’re going to start to talk about at least is those things that perhaps may be impediments to Field carrying on as it is. Either in reality or in the minds of those people who are the clients, the subscribers to Field. There’s going to be a lot of discussion about the things that have been discussed, those things that either are barriers, that is access to respondents, or discredit Field, and I’m sure there’ll be some discussion about what those things are. But really I think that’s the agenda for today and although I have some questions I will put to the panel as we go along, I think primarily what we’re looking to do is to answer the questions that each of you may have and to get the views of our distinguished panel, from various perspectives, about what the current state and future of Field is in relation to qualitative research. So I will briefly introduce the panel to you. And I will do it in alphabetical order if I may. So let me start with Lucy Banister. Lucy began her career in advertising. I’m not sure that I’m going to read out the years that everybody began their careers.

LUCY: Thank you.

DAVID: But Lucy worked for J. Walter Thompson, BBH and the TBWA. She moved into qualitative research in 1995. She is currently a director of Nursery, an organisation that she was responsible for founding. She’s a speaker, tutor, author. Spoken on a number of different platforms and will have some interesting things to say to us today. Debrah Harding. Debrah currently is the Director of Policy and Communication, and Deputy Director General of the MRS. She’s directly responsible for all the professional body activities of the MRS, including Field professional standards, qualifications, process standards and a number of other things, but clearly with a perspective and view on the things that are on the agenda for today. Gareth Roberts has a number of years, I’m not going to say how many years for anybody, of qualitative research experience working for Viewpoint, Sadek Wynberg Millward Brown and is now Managing Director of Safari Research. Gareth says, while keeping an open mind about the benefits and the use of databases and other advances such as online recruitment, he believes that more often than not you’d be hard pushed to beat recruitment conducted by a good, professional, trustworthy recruiter. I think we have an advocate. James Sainsbury. James joined Criteria, I’m not going to give your year either James.

Laughter

DAVID: Although a more recent addition. James is described as Criteria’s authority on the MRS code of conduct and the Data Protection Act. He is an AQR member and has participated in an expert panel for the AQR Field conference in November of last year. Penny. Penny Steele started her market research career some time ago. Started as a graduate trainee with Research and Auditing Services. Moved to DRSM as Research Manager and become a Director with FML when it was launched in 1990. Penny became the MD in 1993. Penny has most recently had the honour of being awarded, how would you describe it? A Fellow of the MRS. Liz Sykes says that she fell in to market research by accident and did that some years ago. Started working as a telephone interviewer and supervisor and then moved into Field and tackled interviewing and recruiting. After graduating Liz went to MAS’s Field office and had some interesting experiences there. She’s been MD of Field Initiatives for ten years and a board Director of RDSI, and is now Treasurer and Honorary Secretary of the AQR, plus Chair of the Viewing Facilities Association and the AQR rep. on the IQCS and MRQSA committees. And finally Sarah Taylor. Sarah is the Field Director in charge of UK, Europe and the US Field for the Added Value Group. Sarah has some years in market research, and says she can’t really imagine doing anything else. Anyway, that is our panel and I think the question that I would like to put to the panel to start is, if indeed there are threats to Field, what are they, how did they come about? And more importantly, if there are threats, clearly there are opportunities, and what is it that we as an industry ought to be doing to address those threats? To continue to maintain the unique position that Field has, in the context of qualitative and more broadly within the context of research and intelligence gathering? So anybody wish to respond first? Gareth?

GARETH: Threats, definitely as far as I’m concerned is the growing prevalence of professional respondents. You’ll be aware that there are several web sites which are available now, which approach people to say, would you like to come along, earn some money, and take part in market research? And it’s very easy for Mr A. N. Other to go from one to the other to the other to the other and register with all of them. And simply make a fat profit. There was a time when there was going to be certain things put forward by AQR, which was going to be a national respondent database. That didn’t work out, for obvious reasons. I wasn’t in favour of it myself. But the way that these web sites, which are now approaching people to come to them directly, some with very explicit adverts going down into as far as for example, do you drink vodka? How often do you drink vodka? We need people who drink vodka at least once a week in clubs, pubs and bars. We need you to be male, 18 to 25. Now you can’t really get around being male, but you can, shade the truth slightly if you want to come and earn some cash. There has been a great deal of steps made within the last ten years to try and crack down on professional repeat respondents. And I do fear that these days, with these sites springing up, unless we take steps now to check them or to try and regulate them, or to come up with some best practice guidelines, that they are going to bring the whole problem of repeat professional respondents back into the fore, again. And it’s going to be a very difficult thing to stop unless we act on it now. Challenges, and things that we could do better, and things which we should be doing, is we should be looking to improve the status of Field within organisations such as these. There doesn’t seem to be a great amount of Field companies, which are putting themselves forward for membership of AQR. In terms of the committee I mean, for standing. I know that Liz is a member. Liz is on the committee and she’s Field and I’m Field, and I think we’re the only two pure Field people. Is that right.

LIZ: Yeah.

GARETH: There should be far more of us, to be honest. There should be no reason at all, why in the next five to ten years that if a chair is elected that it shouldn’t be a Field person. There’s never been one before. And there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be in the future. So there’s the challenges, there’s the threats. Take them as you like, and who’s next?

DAVID: A question for you Gareth, and then we’ll let other people respond to it. This notion of professional respondents, is that a new threat, or is that something that we’ve had to contend with for as long as Field has been around? As long as recruitment has been around?

GARETH: They’re the Daleks essentially. They come back at least once every three years and terrify us enormously. They were dealt with, to an extent by things like IQCS and greater awareness of the problem, but now there are the sites which you can go on and register, they will tell you precisely what they want you to be. And I think that they’re becoming a more prevalent and greater threat than before, because you could essentially just turn up for anything. Because they go into such detail and almost to the extent of telling you where it’s going to be, at what time of an evening. They will say in a studio in W1, but that’s going to be Spectrum, the Research House, or Wyoming. Somebody who is desperate to go along and get the money or to be a con man is just going to phone up those three and say, oh I’m coming along for the vodka groups this evening. Within three phone calls they’ll find out where it’s going to be and they’ll turn up, grab the cash and either take part or leg it. They’ll say well I’m a late notice person.

DAVID: Is the issue that these people do it with regularity or is it that they do it dishonestly?

GARETH: I think there’s a mixture of both. Some just do it with regularity, and they do it dishonestly as well.

PENNY: But isn’t it Field because of the amount of incentives of a lot of people, or companies or recruiters demand, you can’t get the job out if you don’t pay this. There’s more and more money readily available, or demands for. I think that at the moment, everybody quant and qual, the client is so money focussed, can you match this price? And incentives is such a barrier at the moment and they’re being paid too much in my opinion. And a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon. In some cases. When you marry up one like for like sample.

DEBRAH: Do you think the high incentive rate being offered is to do with the speed?

PENNY: It could be the speed, the ease? I’ve having clients querying all the time. As opposed to a year, two years ago going with what we recommend because you’re the professional Field company and you know your business, now they’re actually questioning a lot and also saying, well I can go to company X and do it for less. Be it then, what sort of quality, there’s a different balance there.

GARETH: I must say I did have one recruiter, who was in quite a smallish town. She was the only person there and I said to her the other day, could you get me a couple of groups together, it’s 90 minutes and here is 30 quid. People won’t come out in this town for less than £50, I said, you’re the only recruiter in this bloody town.

Laughter

GARETH: It’s you who’s caused this problem, and she had to accept it. And we got the groups done for 30 quid. And I think there’s a certain amount of, I’m going to get grief from the recruiters, but there is, they do need to apply themselves a bit more to say, listen it’s going to be 30 quid. And if people don’t want to turn up then they don’t. You just have to go and find somebody else. It’s not the first eight people that you come across.

DAVID: OK, I’d like to come back to the issue of incentives, cos I think that is a contentious issue. And there is an argument that says that we are at least in part, culpable. Because wherever it begins that the agencies that agree to pay incentives at a higher and higher rate, this is an argument that has been made, encourage as I think both of you alluded to, this kind of fraudulent behaviour. Because it’s profitable to purport to be somebody if you do enough of it. But I think one of the things, and I want to bring the rest of the panel in, but just if each of you was to respond, and address this notion of, setting aside the fraud, do we have an issue with people who are respondents on a regular basis? In other words, is that in and of itself an issue? Are we talking simply about the fraud or are we talking about the frequency with which we should allow people to participate in groups? This is a debate that’s been going on.

LIZ: Can I say something about that?

DAVID: Yes, please.

LIZ: This is an old chestnut that has been round a long time and I’m sure people will be talking about it in another 20 or 30 years, hopefully. But the AQR, the MRS and lots of other bodies did a big piece of work, how many years ago was it, Debrah? Quite a few years ago, and we basically looked into this issue of how frequently people were attending and taking part in qualitative research. And we looked for the rules of qualitative research, because everybody thought there’s a rule. Everybody had different rules. But when we actually looked, there isn’t a rule, there’s never been a rule laid down. These rules just exist in peoples’ heads. And we actually tried to put together a set of guidelines, which we did do and they were published, to say to people that it’s really up to you to set your own parameters. So if it’s a really rush project and it’s for a pitch and they just need to talk to some consumers to say that it’s been done by an ad agency or something, then it probably doesn’t matter who turns up so long as they’re people and they can talk. But if it’s a job where you have lots of notice, it’s a really key piece of branding research or strategy or something, then obviously it’s much more important that those people are genuine consumers. And I think we’re never very good at expressing the different sorts of research that we do, and therefore the different sorts of respondents that we need. And obviously repeat attendance is an issue, but in some markets you just can’t get away from it. We do a lot of IT work, and IFA’s and people like that, there’s a finite number of them and they just get reused and reused and reused. And all the companies who commission the research know that it’s the same people and they just accept it. So in a way, if it’s OK in that market, what’s the problem with consumers? As long as they fit the quota, that’s the key in my opinion. Is that people fit, that they’re not lying to go. Which I think is what you were trying to say, wasn’t it Gareth?

GARETH: Yeah, there’s so much information.

DEBRAH: Yeah, I think the other thing though as well, is that you have to look at the rest of the research business, if you think what’s going on with online panels. Online panels, if you’re an online panel and you meet a very broad set of criteria, you actually could be taking part in research every week, earning about £2 a throw or whatever. The question is, it’s possible that the industry is creating panels of professional respondents, cos it’s going in the direction that it’s going in. Because these people, the more frequently they’re asked questions on certain topics, their answers are going to change, because their knowledge is going to increase, because they’ve answered more questions on the topic. So in many ways as well, I do agree with Liz in that it’s not so much about, fraudulent respondents is a separate issue, they are basically breaking the law. They’re taking someone else’s identity or whatever else it might be. So in terms of frequency of respondents, it’s not so much about whether they attend one group every three months, or whether they take part in online research once a week. The issue actually is about whether they’re still genuine respondents. Are you getting genuine views that’s going to be helpful to provide insights to your clients?

PENNY: You get different clients with different opinions. I’ve worked for a client that have been part of an agency. Mostly quite strict or if they’re a novice they’re sticking to the rules. What are the rules? We set ones within our company, and we based it very much along AQR. And then they’ve done thousands of groups and they’ve gone out on their own … It doesn’t matter, a lot of my clients say, I prefer a really, if it’s quite a different issue, a lot of marketing guys behind the screen in studios. I like them warmed up, I don’t want to spend. It’s everybody, because it’s almost like most researchers in this country, each company’s dealing with different rules and regulations and they’re asking group recruiters, you can only do this when you work for company X. You work for Liz, she might be a bit stricter on things. We’re all singing off different song sheets a lot of time.

DAVID: But if what you’re going to do is to simply continue to parade the same people forward, then forgive me, but do we need Field? If what you’re going to do is simply draw from a panel of people who come along to groups, does that not undermine what we say that Field is here to do? Which is to find the right, the most appropriate people to actually to be able to discriminate, to discern in a way, to get the right people for the right groups. Rather than simply churn through the same base of people, who again, setting aside the fraud, but simply the fact that people who do this with regularity, whether they be consumers, whether they be IT professionals, by definition will begin to view the marketplace in a different way, because they are accustomed to sitting around and talking amongst their colleagues or to interviewers, to moderators, about particular subjects that they will pay attention to in a different way. So I guess the question is, and let me draw in the rest of the panel, is it not one of our arguments, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the personal involvement of Field, that says that for at least a large chunk of what we do, we need that kind of discerning, discriminating interviewer or recruiter to actually find the right people. Rather than simply churning through the panel again.

SARAH: For one of our clients we physically have to see people it’s a design company and we need to see what people wear. We need to see their look, we need to see, are they edgy, are they cool, are they street? You can’t do that online. You cannot do that by database. We physically have to go out into Covent Garden, into Brixton. So for me you can’t service everything with a database. I think there’s a role for it. And what I find, especially the last three years, I’ve got recruiters who do that for me, I can use a database for that, I’m using lots of different techniques. My job is completely different. And also because I work globally I work in the States a lot, I work in Europe a lot, so what I think is impacting us is what other markets do. And the UK Field has really changed. And you can’t ignore because the globalisation of brands, the globalisation of Field. And one’s feeding the other.

DAVID: For those of you who work operationally in Field, just a show of hands? How many of you operate databases that you return to with regularity? OK, certainly the minority. Let me ask it differently. How many of you work day to day in Field? OK, so most of you do. And most of you do not operate databases. So it’s all, do your recruiters operate databases, as far as you know?

GARETH: Oh yes.

General agreement, yes

JAMES: What I would say on that, we operate a database ourselves and I’m not sure whether the question was clear, which we return to on a daily basis. But we would return to new respondents and so if someone’s attended something then we flag them as having attended something. We know not to contact them for a period of time. The debate about frequency of attendance is quite interesting from that point of view as well, cos I think it’s really a question of realism and being realistic. If you are looking at something where there’s a very small pool of people to recruit from, then panels of all types become very useful. And obviously frequency of attendance becomes less of a problem. If you’re recruiting a social research project and you’re looking for hard to reach people who are in extreme poverty, you probably don’t want people who’ve been attending groups every other week for 40 quid cos that’s probably going to have carried them out of poverty to a certain extent anyway. So to a certain extent I suppose it’s very much horses for courses. In terms of databases, I would say a well maintained and a well used database is an excellent resource, but not the only resource that a Field agency can use.

DAVID: Most of you say that you don’t operate databases, but that your recruiters do. Do you have company policies, do you have recruiter guidelines in terms of how often they can return to those databases?

PENNY: Yeah.

DAVID: Anybody want to?

PENNY: Yeah, we do, Liz and I used to work together … used to work in the same company. Not within the last six months.

GARETH: No more than three ever.

PENNY: Yeah, the same subject, whatever. And we abide by that one would hope, and that’s what the recruiters do. But we’ve always made it part of the AQR guidelines that the way we’re communicating with the recruiters come back, discuss, if you’re having a problem you can talk to the clients, there’s all those opportunities there. But sometimes, I got completely let down last week where their recruiter had sloppy panel maintenance. There were two respondents, perfectly easy subjects, no rocket science. Very sloppy.

DEBRAH: That’s often the case though, isn’t it? On easy subjects that’s when it tends to go wrong more often. Because people leave it to the last minute, they think it’s easy, and also I think clients expect a higher standard because it is easy and they know there’s lots of people out there.

JAMES: The other thing I would say is obviously you screen, we all screen for past participation and from that point of view, that’s again where it ties back into the fraud debate really. Because someone somewhere along the line is not being truthful. You can’t necessarily differentiate or decide who it is, but someone somewhere is not telling the truth, and then you can argue is the past participation debate any different to any of the other issues to do with fraud? In the sense that the respondents that you get, if they are attending on a very frequent basis and you are imposing a standard restriction, then obviously there’s a case of fraud there straightaway.

DEBRAH: The problem of course is that even though you’ve got the policies where you may not contact people within six months or three months or whatever, there are lots of research companies out there and they could still be doing research every day of the week, if they really wanted to. So even though you can really maintain a great database and you know that you’re not contacting them, you might still have a professional respondent on your hands because they’re on everyone else’s database.

LUCY: Speaking as a moderator, I’ve had situations with clients behind the mirror who’ve recognised respondents.

DEBRAH: Yeah.

LUCY: Because they won’t use the same companies the whole time. They’ll say, I know that person and they might have told the truth to the particular recruiter that we use, but actually been lying about how much total research that they’ve done.

PENNY: Then you get the recruiters that work for company A, B and C.

DAVID: How do we combat that? I know this is not the first time this issue has been raised, but should there be a centralised database? Should there be co-operation across organisations so that you don’t have the issue of, you haven’t recruited this person in the last six months, but six other agencies have? Anybody from the audience?

DAVID: OK. Debrah.

DEBRAH: Yeah, OK. If you’re going to collect lists and have central databases of respondents then basically the respondents must have agreed to it. And they must know exactly how it’s going to be used. And I think it is a pure data protection, and although it’s an EU directive as opposed to a global directive, most countries have something similar except in the States, which is always a bit odd. But most countries have something similar. But I think there’s an additional point here is that, in today’s environment where it is more difficult to get people to take part in research, we all know about response rates and how it’s much more difficult to get people to agree. If you place so much onus on the respondent and they have to give up so much of their information, why should they. Because from their perspective, I don’t want my name on a global list that might be shared with all these companies all round the globe. And in addition to that, with things like identity fraud and ID theft and all the rest of it, how can people be absolutely sure that some online register that is being maintained is truly secure? All you need is one person to access it, take all those names and change your personal details and rip them all off or whatever, and you’ve got a massive PR disaster for market research. With all these ideas there’s a counterbalancing threat in my view.

ELAINE FRANBCIS: Elaine Francis, Criteria. I was just interested really what the panel thought on how you would keep track of the respondent who’s constantly changing their identity, changing their name, their phone number, their address, on a central database. Especially I think in America and in Italy now they have real problems with identity fraud. I do … interested in terms of keeping a centralised database. But I know they’ll probably run out of names eventually, and addresses and phone numbers eventually. But in the meantime, how to track somebody who’s forever changing.

SARAH: I recruited somebody that worked in a previous life in a studio, and that was terrifying. Because he had just seen everything. Doctors are particularly bad, cos they get paid a lot. They can’t lie as easily. But it was terrifying listening to him and what he had he’d seen. Sarah turned up one day, she was married, the next day she wasn’t, the next day she had three children. And he saw them coming in, week in and week out. I think, I’m a bit like Penny, and I always say to my recruiters, my door is completely open. Some of our clients actively want people who’ve been to groups before, so how can phone up Linda one day and say I want you to have virgin respondents in this group and then could you magically create people who’ve been to groups before. She’s obviously got a list. And I think what we have to do is say there is always going to be a percentage of people who, it’s human nature, people are always going to get away with stuff if they can. And I just think I’ve not solved it, I think that’s the answer. It’ll be interesting if I haven’t solved it after X number of years. Because you’ve got this data protection issue, we did try it, the AQR … it would be fantastic but everyone’s got to be in

DEBRAH: And people will sign into it.

SARAH: Yeah.

DAVID: Is this not what we should be counting on recruiters for though? If we go back to what I said at the outset, one of the things that is going to continue to distinguish and protect Field from the online panels, the databases that people draw from, is the ability of Field departments, but recruiters specifically to be able to assess the legitimacy of what people are saying. To recruit the right people under the right circumstances. Is that not what the recruiter should be doing?

LYNNE CHAPMAN: I must confess, I am that recruiter. My name’s Lynne Chapman, I live in Nottingham some of you have sat in my living room. I just want to go back a stage, you said, how can we address this? I’ve been asking, certainly the MRS for many years and now AQR, if there could be some global advertising campaign to people to say, this is qualitative research, you may be approached by somebody who says, can you come to my house and talk about what do you do etc. It’s not a con, it’s not a time share, it’s not white slavery, she’s not after your money. Can we not somehow advertise the fact that we do this, and it’s totally kosher and that in fact most people enjoy it once they’ve been. How many times have you heard people going out of somebody’s living room saying, oh that was wonderful, when can I do it again? But I don’t know, is that something we can do?

DEBRAH: That is the problem though. We are victims of our own success I think. Because people do actually quite like going to groups. If it’s an interesting subject or if they get lots of money.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: I have to say to them, this is interesting and fun. Otherwise they ain’t coming. And if they don’t come, you are going to be down on me like a tonne of bricks.

DAVID: And you think that your job would be substantially easier if you didn’t have to begin by making the case. That is, if the communication was out there, so that people already began by thinking, oh I’ve heard about that.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: Yes, if there’s been some publicity about it. I think you’ve still got to sell it and you’ve still got to make sure they’re the right people. And I will confess, I do have a database, but I only use that database to see if I’ve got anybody the right age, before I go on to see if they fit that quota. You’re paying me to get the people … who do what you want and who are the right people. And I’d like to ask Gareth how many groups he’s actually recruited?

GARETH: I remember going out once onto Windsor High Street with a clipboard many years ago, far longer than any of us care to remember. I have only recruited possibly two groups on the street and I have done telephone. I usually try and get some telephone work in at least once a year. And it’s difficult. I hate it, I loathe it entirely and I’m so pleased there are people like you who are out there that mean I don’t have to do it.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: But you were slagging off those of us who do groups.

GARETH: No, I most certainly wasn’t. No, Lynne.

Panel talk at once

DAVID: Is it your suggestion that maybe there isn’t an appreciation from those people who need to fill the room, with the work that the good recruiters have to do.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: A lack of appreciation on both sides.

GARETH: I value recruiters more than anything. I do. I do think there is a certain amount of cases when the incentive levels are getting out of hand, and they do get out of hand. I spoke to somebody only recently, I said, listen I need to have some people coming along to do two groups on magazine readership, it’s going to be a couple of hours in town, up here just locally, could you get them together for us, it’s going to be 45 quid. They won’t come out for less than 60 and a taxi. That’s nonsense.

LIZ: I wouldn’t pay that.

GARETH: Absolutely. I said, well I’m sorry love but on this occasion I’m going to have to go somewhere else.

DAVID: I would just like to set aside, cos I’d like to spend some time on that. Cos recruitment obviously is, that is the cost of recruitment or the incentive issue is a sensitive issue and I would like to spend some time on that. But setting aside what incentives ought to be, how incentive levels ought to be set, is there a feeling amongst those of you who are involved in recruitment that you are under appreciated by those people who simply set the standard, or the requirement, without appreciating what’s involved in getting the recruitment done? Who else is involved on a day to day basis in recruitment? Anybody else, show of hands? Yeah?

HELEN WANFORD: I wonder if I could just raise a couple of points actually, I’m from Westcombe Business Research and we’re primarily engaged in business to business research. Now we actually do all of our recruitment, well virtually all of it, on the telephone, drawing a fresh sample every time, obviously there are some areas of telecoms and IT where there’s only so many IT directors and companies of this size with this sort of hardware etc, where inevitably you’ve got a small and finite number, and those people are sought after by everyone. Then comes the problem of, what do you do as incentives? So we are looking very carefully to fresh sample every time, when it comes to incentives, we have to pay them quite highly because other things can crop up at the last minute, you have to trade off whether you’re going to recruit 12 respondents to achieve 8 and pay them £150 or whatever it be? Or whether you’re going to recruit 16 and offer them 80 quid. All those things come into the equation and we have found, from a lot experience, that we’re better off actually offering a higher incentive on the business front. I’m not really commenting on the consumer front.

DAVID: Do you honestly believe that you get a better respondent with a higher incentive? Or do you get a greedier respondent with a higher incentive?

HELEN WANFORD: I think people often treat it more seriously, and I actually did a research project myself some years ago where some people were paid and some people weren’t. We found that when you went into the office and you were paying this substantial amount, come in my dear, oh yes well I haven’t got that information but I’ll just get my secretary, she’ll go and do it, and at the end, please don’t hesitate to call me if there's anything else, they treated it more seriously. The medical profession actually have been very greedy and set a standard and actually the IT people have realised and cottoned on that they’re pretty well sought after and I think they too are demanding amounts, but they won’t come out for less.

DAVID: Just a quick show of hands, how many people think that the incentives we pay, on average are too high?

Inaudible

JAMES: It’s a difficult question to ask when ... work in field.

DAVID: Who thinks they’re too low? Do I take it that everybody thinks that on average they’re about right?

LYNNE CHAPMAN: I’ve noticed there’s a tendency to try and lower them lately and I’m talking 30, we were going up to 30 for an average 1.5 hour group it’s £35, all of a sudden now it’s 30.

GARETH: Times are hard.

Laughter

LYNNE CHAPMAN: … for you.

DAVID: But the reason I ask that is if unless people want to reconsider that, I had a very small number of hands who thought they were too high, nobody said they were too low. I would take away from that that they were about right. If they are about right then, I’m not sure what the issue is?

JAMES: I would say that it varies. As we’ve moved on to talking about incentives, we do quite a lot of telephone recruitment in house for qualitative research and we’ve actually started to cost our telephone recruitment effectively on the basis of an hourly rate, we’ll give an estimate but we won’t say this is how much it’s going to cost you because we don’t know the quality of the sample. What we find with that, is that if we offer a higher incentive, it gets recruited that much quicker, therefore the client’s net saving is actually higher for paying a higher incentive. With telephone recruitment and recruiting from client sample, you’re unlikely to be dealing with a large quantity of regular attendees, you’re simply dealing with human nature, and people think it’s more worthwhile to attend for 50 quid rather than 30 quid, and may well take that more seriously and actually turn up as well as agree to attend. So you end up with a much lower drop out rate.

DAVID: How do we address the dilemma, on the one hand, if we pay people too much you increase the risk of people pretending to be something other than they are, because it’s attractive to do so. Or at least modifying who they are sufficiently, to qualify. If we pay them too little, people don’t take it seriously or are unwilling to come. How does one go about establishing what is right? Getting the balance right so that people are paid appropriately but not excessively?

ANNA NOONAN: Anna from Harris Interactive. I would say that we have to go by experience of our recruiters, most of whom have been in the industry for many, many years and have worked for several companies. They’ll tell us if we’re paying too low an incentive or too high. It’s an industry standard, for consumer groups anyway. We’ll pay a certain amount for an 1.5 hours or 2 hours etc, but if we’re not offering enough the recruiters will certainly tell us. We can say to them, oh sorry it’s the client putting a cap on it at this, but it comes through the recruiters a lot because they work for several companies.

DAVID: But are they as likely to tell you if you’re offering too much? I’m sure some will but the reason I’m asking that question is, if you’re out there recruiting, if you’re offering £30, £40 or £50, the more you offer the easier your job is going to be. So are recruiters likely to come back to you and say, lets not offer 50 I think 25 is more than ample, how likely is that to happen? If recruiters set the standard because it may make some of their lives easier, and therefore recruitment costs, incentives continue to rise, don’t we face two problems, one is pricing ourselves out of the market, because then the differential between personal recruitment and database, or panel recruitment becomes greater. Two, aren’t we contributing or creating an incentive for fraud because we’re making it too attractive to turn down?

DEBRAH: I think the issue about incentives and the greedy respondent shouldn’t be viewed in isolation. We get the respondents that we deserve and those respondents reflect society and this is just about changing society, we’re much more consumerist, kids have a greater idea about marketing, advertising, market research, the value of their opinions and it’s a snow ball really. Society’s not going to change to the values of the ‘70’s or the 80’s, thank God. But the Noughties is a society where money and consumerism is the driving force and in many ways research has to reflect that otherwise you’ll never get anyone to agree to participate. I can never see it going back.

LIZ: Also people are cash rich and time poor. They’ve got a lot better things to do than come and sit in somebody’s living room for 1.5 hours, they can go to the gym, watch TV, 250 channels, there's just so many other things that people do nowadays.

Some agreement, yes

DAVID: Doesn’t this go back to the point that you were making earlier about making the experience more fun. Getting people to believe, not just that they’ll be compensated for their time but that it will be a pleasurable experience. Rather than paying more for pain, to try to convince people that it isn’t painful it’s pleasurable.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: And important. Often afterwards you’ll get stopped on the street, I came to that group and that thing that we looked at is on the supermarket shelves and I changed that packaging, and they feel involved with the brand or the product. That’s important too, the whole experience.

LUCY: Speaking as a moderator and somebody who then consumes the end product, I always find that I take great pains to thank people for their time, say thank you for your time, I know you’ve given up time to come this evening, and try very hard to make it enjoyable and relaxed. Partly for my benefit because it’s more fun for me and there's a more relaxed respondent, therefore a better response. Also I think it’s very important they go away having enjoyed the experience, I think that’s probably the most important thing to get them involved and interested in the process and spread the word. From my point of view I want to see lots of people out there interested in coming along to research, not to get £50 but to have an enjoyable experience and to proselytise and spread the word. I was speaking to a friend of mine who works in a completely different sphere about my job and she just happened to mention that someone in her office had been to a group and she thought it sounded quite fun, then this person was told that she had to pretend that she was pregnant and I just thought, how sad that somebody who knew nothing about research was hearing about it as an experience where you had to pretend to be something you weren’t. Instead of a legitimate fun side of developing brands and developing products.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: And taking people seriously, I had one in tears, I said what’s the matter, she said, they listened to me, they respected my opinion, my husband doesn’t do that. I didn’t know what to say to her, she said, nobody ever listens to what I have to say, and they did.

DAVID: Some people who haven’t spoken? Yes?

GILL SWAN: Gill, Henley Centre HeadlightVision. I completely agree with what you said about making it fun, but I also agree that I don’t think lowering the incentives is a way of discouraging professional respondents because it’ll also discourage real respondents. Clients are willing to pay a huge amount of money for us to analyse what these people think and consumers are really vital to us, I’m a researcher and a moderator and a lot of what we do is really reliant on consumers. So I think if we lower it generally then we risk discouraging real respondents as well.

LUCY: We’re confusing two issues as well, the issue of how we sort out who is honest and who is dishonest and then the issue of how much we pay people, and how much we pay people is a market mechanism. We have to get these people by a certain time and if a certain amount of money won’t do it then we have to pay more. But I think the issue of fraud is something that’s separate and we shouldn’t be looking at incentives and seeing that as a control mechanism for discouraging fraud.

DAVID: I’m not suggesting that we should lower our incentives and I don’t think the panel is suggesting they should be. But I think that one of the questions is, whether the market mechanism is actually not something that we are feeding, in other words, by trying to up each other by offering 5 or £10 more, whether we don’t create this incentive inflation that needs to be brought under control. Not about bringing it back but about controlling the pace at which incentives get higher and higher. Would you agree?

GILL SWAN: I would imagine that is true but part of the reason I came here today was because I met a person socially and without him knowing what I did told me that he supplemented his income by attending a focus group every week. And how he regularly met people after groups to discuss who, for example, were smokers in the group, that completely horrified me as a moderator and also being closely involved in clients and their strategy and what they do and how they perceive focus groups … to actually be speaking to someone who felt he knew everything about marketing from his attendance at groups and completely prepared to this on such a regular basis. I think it’s something we need to address, I know that higher incentives aren’t the answer, I’m not sure that if we stop incentives from going up that’s going to have a massive effect either, and I just think it’s something that does really need to be addressed and I don’t really have any answers so I was curious to see what other suggestions people have.

DAVID: We’re going to try to put together some answers.

SARAH: We’ve just had a big tax audit by the Inland Revenue at work, and I think it’s going to get … down from there and we’re now thinking about paying vouchers. I’m going to have to phone a few recruiters to see the impact but I think I’m going to lose some recruiters, but I’m being forced to do it by the company that owns my company. And in my office in Italy they only pay vouchers, they pay petrol vouchers they don’t pay cash at all. So I’m being told by my global office, why can’t you do that in the UK, cos my incentive bill is huge? I can see it happening next year. Also the Inland Revenue they turned a blind eye, there's always a gentleman’s agreement with the industry. I just think that it can’t last forever.

LIZ: They’re too much now aren’t they?

SARAH: I’m going to do a bit of market research amongst my recruiters to see how people feel but I’d be interested in Lynne’s opinion on that as a recruiter in the street.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: I have to say the only company I’ve heard do that that we work for is Next, they also insist on paying vouchers, but Next have a high profile and people are policed.

SARAH: Say it’s a Marks and Spencers voucher, I’d be really interested in what you say cos I think it might start impacting on us.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: Someone said recently the economy’s bad, and one of the reasons people come to groups is because they actually need the cash?

DEBRAH: If I can just put a slight ethical point on it. I’m MRS after all …

GARETH: What do they know about ethics?

Laughter

DEBRAH: The other issue is as well, is that in terms of the way the code is written, if you’re working for a client you can’t give that client’s vouchers as incentives because it’s an indirect form of Sugging. Because you’re increasing sales. So I would just flag at this point that, if you do use vouchers for companies who you’re doing research for then you shouldn’t because it’s an indirect form of subbing.

LUCY: Can I just say as a moderator that I feel uncomfortable because we would have to tell people up front about the vouchers and about the incentives. I would feel uncomfortable with people being paid by the organisation, because I think that would influence them, probably unconsciously rather than consciously. People tend to be quite open, if they don’t something they’ll tell you. But I think unconsciously they would be biased in favour of the organisation.

DEBRAH: And that’s a very good reason not to do it also.

DAVID: But I would imagine you could include the client’s voucher if there were a range of vouchers that were being offered, and you’re treating it as a pay transaction with the client. In other words, if you were buying Next and Marks and Spencer and Boots vouchers, the fact that one of those people was your client wouldn’t be an impediment as long as they were being positioned equally.

DEBRAH: So you’re saying the respondents make a choice?

DAVID: That’s right.

DEBRAH: There’s less of an issue with that. Give me five minutes and I could probably come up with one.

Laughter

ANNE WARD: Anne Ward Thinks Research. I’m just doing a project where we’re paying by vouchers and my experience is that it’s even more inflationary because you’re having to offer more in vouchers.

DEBRAH: Because people don’t want the vouchers, they want cash, exactly.

JAMES: I was just going to say, from anecdotal experience, we’ve done quite a lot of work using High Street vouchers and the response rate and turn out rate is very variable depending on precisely the type of people you’re dealing with. High Street vouchers probably skew towards a certain demographic because of the particular stores that you can use High Street vouchers in. I don’t want to comment on any particular store, but if it’s somewhere like …… then you’re inevitably skewing yourself away from having ABs.

GARETH: Maybe you should go and find all the people who have got conned by Farepak and give them lots of vouchers for coming along.

LUCY: Can I just add one little anecdote cos it’s very funny. We did a project for one of the petrol companies, and we used a research company in Italy and they were using petrol vouchers but they used the competitor’s vouchers.

Laughter

LYNNE CHAPMAN: Recruiters see it as a con though because the cost to the organisation is not the cost of the money, cos if that £15 Next voucher goes back to Next it hasn’t cost them that much.

DAVID: I think we should move on from this, but I think you’ve raised an important point here. Whether it be vouchers or some form other than cash we may have an issue that the industry’s is going to have to address in some fashion.

ROSEMARY COWAN: I’m Rosemary Cowan from Rosemary Cowan Research. I do work for HMRC, we pay incentives on behalf of HMRC, so they’re going to have to sort it out.

DEBRAH: It was just that they really got tough on us.

DAVID: But I think that is something we may need to address. I think I’d like to move on from that and take a question from the back.

SAM MURRAY-PETERSEN: Sam from Rite Angle. Just one thing about incentives, we used to fill out a form every year, I don’t know if anyone else remembers doing it in field? But you gave an average of incentives, how much you paid and I always found it a really good reference, so I knew what other companies were doing. But we stopped doing it about eight years ago.

LIZ: Basically people wouldn’t fill it in. It dwindled and dwindled so it was valueless, the last time we did it five companies completed it, so there's no point. I probably know more people than that.

GARETH: We do have … play our cards very close to our chest though …

DEBRAH: But we are in business.

GARETH: We’re in business and a competitive business. But a lot of these people who say, oh I’m not going to do that because of our recruiting list, they’re just our recruiters. It’s just nonsense.

PENNY: Over the last few years I think … lot … a reasonable amount of committees and I do believe both in qual and quant, the operational side of this business has become much more sharing and discussing, I pick the phone up and talk to Carol George at TN, what do you think about this? And it’s much more over the last numbers of years, not so much, this is my little island and I don’t talk about that. There’s much more discussion with my peers and my colleagues, what’s your opinion? And sharing for cutting out bad practices or making best practices and I do think it’s much, much better, that organisations and field and researchers and everybody are working together much more for the common good in quality across qual and quant.

GARETH: … opportunities a few moments ago, you may want a show of hands about who’d be prepared to fill in that form again?

DAVID: That’s exactly what I was going to ask. If we accept that not all of you are necessarily the decision makers in your organisations, but assume for the moment that you are, how many of you would be prepared to fill out such a form? OK, so this is perhaps an opportunity both for those of you who aren’t the decision makers to encourage and find out whether people would, and for those of us involved in the industry to actually try.

PENNY: … rates of pay, was that with the BMRA Deborah? Have the MRS taken over it now?

DEBRAH: They have, yes.

PENNY: And that was telephone, even asking how much we pay our staff operational side, telephone, supervisors.

DEBRAH: Yeah, we’ve taken over all the statistics that were formally done by the BMRA.

PENNY: And that was very, very useful.

DAVID: But we don’t do incentives and I also think, to be fair that the list, for a whole range of reasons, some of them legal reasons, the number of companies that participate in that survey has been shrinking over the years.

DEBRAH: Well, we’ve only done one round of stats at the moment.

DAVID: But I’ve gone back to the BMRA days, it’s been a shrinking group.

DEBRAH: Yeah, we do quarterly trends analysis. That’s the first stats that the MRS has gathered and actually we increased participation by 25%, I think the thing as well about statistics, going back to the point regarding dwindling numbers, the other way to do it of course, is to restrict access to the final aggregated statistics to those that participate.

DAVID: Which is what the BMRA used to do.

DEBRAH: Yeah. Which could be a way to do it so that in effect, if you participate you get the access but if you don’t, you don’t get access to it. And that way it’s a case of, if it’s really important to you you’ll do it, if it’s not, you won’t because you don’t care about … data.

PENNY: It was a very useful tool. Cos we used to sort of, well what’s your mileage rate?

General agreement, yes

PENNY: … we’re all competitively priced, but it’s not so much of a hidden agenda any longer and are we putting the rates up because we’re paying our interviewers more and we want to make sure we’re using a reasonably similar pool of people, that one’s not upping it.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: Debrah, do you have statistics on recruiters rates of pay then?

DEBRAH: We inherited the statistics gathering from the BMRA, when the BMRA integrated their services into MRS earlier this year. So literally we’ve inherited all their stats and projects which they did, some of which have actually been dormant like the salary surveys, for a number of years. So we’re starting from zero with it, so at the moment we’ll just be going with the stats that were collected by BMRA. As to how it develops, it’s in our interest to expand it if it become successful, but I have to be honest we have literally done one set of quarterly stats, so we’re really at the beginning.

DAVID: But Debrah I think that what the BMRA recorded in terms of that information was hourly rates of pay for interviewers not distinguishing qual from quant. And I think in terms of what we’re talking about here, if there was interest, to actually find out they ways in which people compensate recruiters and come up with some sort of uniform standard. But I think as important, or more important perhaps is incentives, because if we go back to this issue that we spent a lot of time talking about today, that rather than each recruiter or each respondent, particularly respondents who are in professions, doctors or IT directors etc who argue what the rate of pay should be, that if there were some industry stats which told us what the rate of pay currently is, then we can make our own judgements about what it should be. But to have some factual information on which to base what people are really being paid by other organisations.

ANNE HASTINGS: Anne Hastings from ASE, and … on the AQR committee. Just one point about incentives, recently I was working in a project and we were trying to recruit very senior scientists and it was reported back to us by a recruiter that this person wanted to know why they weren’t being paid for their time, and to me that was really just, sorry. If the industry goes there we have to pay doctors, accountants what they consider to be appropriate their time we’ve got a problem. And that started me thinking, should recruiters be trained to be like sales people? Surely the job of recruitment is a skilled job, I don’t think I could do it, I don’t think a lot of people could, it’s about persuasion and how do you train people? Is that part of training, that you actually tell people its not just about throwing cash about, it’s being inventive, it’s persuading people. … training and the context, the way the industry is now that not everybody’s in house, so how do you deal with that?

DAVID: I assume you’re talking about appropriate persuasion?

ANNE HASTINGS: Obviously. How do you train people so that they can actually have those skills? Do you treat them like sales people, do they view their job in that way?

DAVID: How we train recruiters?

ANNE HASTINGS: Recruiters, yeah.

JAMES: I think it’s important to differentiate between sales people first of all obviously, effectively they’re not selling a product or service.

ANNE HASTINGS: They’re selling an idea, they’re selling themselves.

JAMES: Yes. I think that there are several things that you need to try to train and instil in people, and often you need to start with a very good raw material, it’s very difficult to train someone to be outgoing if they’re simply not. And part of that outgoingness is what then feeds into being able to encourage people to attend and participate. I do think it is remarkable that recruiters are able to do that and it’s something that you have to start with a level of skill before you even begin to train. But then it is about encouraging confidence in the process and the experience because the major barrier that we have is that people are very suspicious, that people are naturally suspicious of someone coming up to them in the street and offering them, come to my house for 1.5 hours and I’ll give you £40. I understand that, that’s a hard sell really. But in order to be able to encourage that, then you do need to be able to differentiate from sales because if you have a recruiter who comes on like an estate agent then they’re probably not going to be very successful.

ANNE HASTINGS: Is that more to do with our view of sales? So as an industry we don’t like selling, than what good salesmanship actually is?

LIZ: Can I just say a couple of things about that? I think in a way we do treat recruiters like sales people because, a quantitative interviewer, if we ask them to go and recruit in a store, we say, you have to be in this store for six hours. And if they stand in that store and nobody comes along they still get paid, a recruiter wouldn’t get paid because she hadn’t recruited anybody, so in effect we are paying them on their performance, which is the same as a sales person. Also I think the pool of recruiters, people don’t really acknowledge that it is a very specialist job and an awful lot of people are trained as recruiters and they just can’t hack it, they can’t do it. And it is just because they don’t have the right personality, because it’s all about being self motivated, not letting a challenge get you down, keeping going, managing your time very well, lots of things that you can’t really teach people. And it’s the same with a sales person, you can’t teach somebody to be a good sales person. They always say that salesmen are born and not made and I would argue that it’s the same with recruiters.

Some agreement, yes

GARETH: Hear hear.

DAVID: Those of you who do primarily B to B recruiting and do it by telephone, do you pay recruiters per successful recruit or do you pay them hourly rate like a telephone interviewer?

HELEN WARNFORD: We pay them per recruit but we have figure in mind of how long we expect that recruit to take, if it turns out it’s much more difficult and we’ve got experienced recruiters on it, then we look at whether we should be paying them an hourly rate.

DAVID: So it is the same principle then, the point that we were making about treating like they are sale people?

HELEN WARNFORD: Yeah.

JAMES: For telephone recruitment we pay an hourly rate cos it’s internal, it’s measurable, it’s moniterable and therefore you can monitor how people are working, rather like any other person on the staff. If they’re not actually putting the work in then you simply don’t give them the job, you don’t employ them. So we do operate an hourly rate for our telephone staff, for external field recruiters, it’s that much harder to do because they fit the work in around other aspects of their lives, it’s very difficult to apply an hourly rate to external field recruitment in the same way that you can to telephone. That’s a very interesting question because also the onus is then on us to ensure that our telephone interviewers, recruiters which is what they are, are skilled and able to complete the recruitment as quickly as possible, and therefore do have that outgoing, gregarious nature we’re encouraging, do have an element of sales although, again it has to be tempered because often you’ll get the phone put down straight away if they’ve got a sales call on their hands.

DAVID: If people who are recruiting and being paid per successful recruit are effectively self policing, cos they’re going to come back and tell you that the job is harder than you thought it was and that they need to be compensated more. Whilst somebody who’s been paid an hourly rate may or may not do so.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: Can I just say, it’s not per recruit, if you offer me a group, you’d say it’s 160 plus … and OK you might want 8 or 10 people depending, you’d negotiate, it’s not per recruit per say, it’s per group.

DAVID: But it’s not time based it’s success based.

DEBRAH: But it’s a unit, you're being paid per unit.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: Per unit yes. I get paid on results.

PENNY: One of the things that we were talking about, training, knowledge or whatever, I totally agree with Liz that a good recruiter is so valuable, they do a fantastic job, making sure the recruiters are fully aware of where they are in the whole research process, and how their job, I’ve always worked with a company where Field has been up there and not down there, and so it was such an important role, where we fit in in the process, where recruiting is such a crucial stage. So taking pride in your work as well and understanding, oh well if they don’t turn up then I haven’t really screwed up that advertising campaign or the amount of money that’s riding on it. Just understand that getting those eight people, bums on seats, the whole process of why we ask for quotas and why we’re asking for this, it’s just making them really sign up and share the responsibility of the whole recruitment and research process. I think that is very crucial cos that makes so much difference, as apposed to, well I churn out ten groups a week and it’s just the money.

DAVID: Are we perhaps not as good as we ought to be in communicating what the objectives are from the project director to the operation to the recruiter, so that everybody feels that they are part of the same team in terms of getting done what needs to be done. Rather than it being a task, it’s being an integral part, people are more likely to take ownership if they’re part of the process. Or do we do that well, is that not the issue?

DEBRAH: I think it’s partly the issue but going back to a comment earlier about valuing recruiters or valuing field as a whole segment, it’s not only about communicating information but it’s also about investing in those people. I think one of the things that tends to be quite low on priorities is investing in training in field interviewers or recruiters, or telephone interviewers etc. It’s quite interesting, MRS developed some material for the training of interviewers both telephone and face to face, and Penny’s smiling wryly at the end cos she was involved with it, and it’s been an uphill struggle to get companies to even be interested in this as a concept. The scheme’s been developed for about 4 years and I’ve got 14 companies that are prepared to sign up to this kind of training. For me that is an indication of how much store is given by a lot of companies at this end, it’s the end of the food chain.

DAVID: There’s been in a number of different regards, discussion about investment, and it’s investment in training, when I say investment I mean not only time but the cost associated with that time. It’s investment in advertising, or communication, and I guess the question to the panel and the audience is, assuming that those are amongst the issues that need to be addressed, are we as an industry prepared to make that investment? The evidence seems to be at least based upon your experience Debrah, as not willing to step up and make that investment at least not under those circumstances, and is that the impediment? Aren’t we, in many respects talking about details? But there is a more fundamental issue about communicating to the public about what it is we do, creating the motivation, but also communicating through training and career development, to the people who are responsible for recruitment in the field?

PENNY: Can I also just add in there, going back to, I am a full member, I’m a fellow actually. I can be held accountable for my actions and interviewers will talk about this, talking about another ten years, if all the interviewers and recruiters were members of the Market Research Society, and people do cut corners, we do have cheating interviewers and they could held accountable. Cos I’ve found interviewers and recruiters who go, blow you, I’ll go and work for company X then, we can’t have that black list. And this has come up over the years and it goes back to the investment and that bottom line, or are recruiters and interviewers going to take that on themselves? If you’ve only got half a dozen members and not everybody then it’s never going to be a body that can police, I’m policed, my company is policed, if we break the code of conduct it’s dealt with. I think that’s the only true way, not stop respondents and members of the public fraudulently doing something on their own behalf but with the recruiters or interviewers in cahoots with them, that’s the only things, having policing by a professional body which one body is the Market Research Society.

DEBRAH: Penny’s completely right, we’ve had debates on this issue and it’s absolutely right, we talked about black lists of respondents but there shouldn’t be a black list of interviewers and recruiters that have breached the rules, because in effect it’s illegal to say something about somebody that hasn’t been proven, whereas as a professional body, if a member breaches the code we investigate it properly and follow the right procedures, Human Rights Act etc, we can then publish a statement that says, X made up results, he’s been expelled from the society, because we’ve gone through due process. But we can only do that with members because the sanctions that are available to us relate to membership. At the moment we’ve got 800 field members, now most conservative estimates are, there’re 25,000 people out there doing field interviewing, in terms of recruiters I could probably count them on 2 hands, we’ve got so few recruiter members.

GARETH: Could I ask, how many recruiter identity cards are sent out? And why isn’t there are central that they just get one? I know it’s an old chestnut.

Groans

PENNY: We haven’t heard that one for a while.

GARETH: But it’s a useful one, as you just said, they go from company to company to company and say, blow you I’m not going to work for you, I’m going to work for them I’m going to get a different card, why not just have a central recruiter card and that’s it?

JAMES: That ties in with the whole membership …

DEBRAH: Can I answer that, I’ll try and give a short answer?

DAVID: Yeah, please.

DEBRAH: We issue 90,000 IID cards a year, so taking the fact there’s probably about 25,000 people out there doing some kind of interviewing, doing the maths you’ve got three point whatever per person. We’ve tried lots of times and every time we’ve suggested ideas about central databases we’ve been told two words usually, the second one being off.

Laughter

DEBRAH: Because there are quite rightly concerns about whether the MRS could service it properly, because if you think about it, people are recruiting interviewers on a daily basis, the churn is so high, 50% churn for most organisations, that there are concerns about whether MRS could properly administer and issue cards at such a rapid rate. That’s one thing. But the other thing as well is concerns about people getting hold of their lists, the concern about the unionisation of interviewers and recruiters. There are still lots of concerns like that and so whenever we go out to the industry and ask them the answer is we can see the benefits but, and it always comes back to but no.

DAVID: But the other issues and I think we shouldn’t spend too much time on this, but it would seem to me that some of obstacles to it being administered by the MRS or any other third party that were clearly present 20 years ago and to some degree present ten years ago, that the state of technology today would make that a fairly simple thing.

DEBRAH: Oh yeah, you can do it online, that is the way that we would do it.

DAVID: Yeah, to operate a database, forgetting now about the legal and competitive issues that people may have, but the actual administration of it, which would have been a nightmare 20 years ago I think need not be now.

DEBRAH: I agree, yeah.

DAVID: So if there were a movement within the industry to do it I think it could be done.

DEBRAH: Yeah, I think it physically can be done. But I think that economically and emotionally for some organisations that they would not want to sign up to it.

DAVID: Is there any, yes in the back?

LUKE TIPTON: Just been talking about investment and training for recruiters.

DAVID: Name and company please?

LUKE TIPTON: Luke from Propeller Field, just been talking about investment in training for recruiters in the industry, does the panel think we’re doing enough as an industry to encourage new people to start recruiting and then train and …

DAVID: Bringing new people into the business?

JAMES: It’s quite an interesting one because we do actually bring face to face interviewers in through our telephone interviewers and we then train them up to conduct face to face recruitment but they continue to work from our office and they continue to work on a very different basis in a way to our external field recruiters, they’re after work 9 to 5 or 2 to 9, whatever it is, depending on what we’re trying to get them to do and they’re treated very differently. So I guess that also raises the question of whether field as we know it is perhaps in a process of change and whether at some stage in the future we will have reached a point where we are paying all of our interviewers by the hour and that they are very much based at a central location, it would be very difficult to operate your entire UK field base out of London but whether you can then base out of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, wherever it is. But I suppose that’s certainly one avenue to pursue is then to change the status and the way that we look at recruiting.

DAVID: Does that not undermine the local knowledge that’s so important to recruiting certain kinds of people? That people are actually recruiting in communities that they live?

JAMES: I think it can and I think that depends again on what you’re looking to recruit. Obviously that’s why we operate several different layers of types of recruitment because they can suit us very well, if we’re looking for leading edge or very fashionable twenty somethings in London then obviously we have a resource of people who are aware of exactly what all of that will mean and the right sort of places to go, they’ll often be instructed the right sort of places to go. Similarly if you were looking for something which involves finding people who are in social housing or something like that, then again you can do that very easily with an internal resource that you send out. But certainly there are aspects that you would have to then apply a level of more local knowledge to, a free found interviewer and that’s where obviously you can still then return to free found interviewers to do that.

DAVID: To the rest of the panel to address the question that was raised about are we investing enough once again and actually bringing new people in. But also, to follow on from James’s point, is there actually a change in place of the recruitment side of our business? Is field beginning to look different and will it continue to look different in the years to come? Anybody who wants to tackle either or both of those questions? In your organisations.

SARAH: I think for me and when the digital recorders came down on the table I was smiling inwardly because I think that the whole technology explosion has really changed the way I’m conducting fieldwork and that applies to recruitment and also to another issue, which isn’t answering what you just said but we’ve this year started to do digital recording because our clients want to have the voice data from their groups and then you’re into a whole data protection issue. They’re demanding a huge amount from respondents themselves, so whether they’re there fraudulently or not I actually think for me a big issue is pretask, they want diaries, the rise of ethnography. I think that we’re really immersing ourselves in peoples’ lives. I’ve done work this year where I’ve spent six hours with a respondent, well you’re best friends by the time you leave. I think for me that’s changing and we were asked to cost something for a scrap blog so they actually want respondents to go on a blog, so for me that technology side, that explosion of fastness and what we’re asking them to deliver and how techno we want our respondents to be. OK, that’s client driven obviously but I think that sort of thing is impacting on me much more than a lot of the other stuff, which has been around for years and years and will always be around. So I think that’s my challenges and I don’t know, it’ll just be interesting to see.

LIZ: I think it’s a really positive thing, that online exists and that there are different opportunities, different ways to recruit people because all recruitment is, and people get so hung up on their recruitment screeners and version ten and all this palaver, the clients changed the grammar again.

Laughter, inaudible

LIZ: Recruitment is just a tool, that’s all it is and far as I’m concerned I think it doesn’t really matter how the people are recruited, how they get where they’re supposed to be at the right time and on quota. But as long as they’re genuine I think it’s irrelevant really how they get there.

DAVID: But if we say that, and I don’t know whether everybody would agree with that statement but if we say that are we then not evermore dependent upon the knowledge and integrity of field because what you’re saying is, I don’t care how you do it, get me the right people.

LIZ: No.

DAVID: No, but get the right people, not fill the room but get me the right people. To whomever you’re directing that within an organisation, in other words if what we’re saying is if the client is saying and if the internal client is saying, it doesn’t really matter which way we go about it, what matters is that we meet our objective reliably and correctly, if that is the case then if we’re not going to be very prescribed in the way that we direct field then we have to do that because it would seem to me that we have the kind of faith in the knowledge, integrity, training, background of the people who are actually doing our recruiting so that we can give them the task rather than prescribe the means of arriving at that task.

LIZ: I think maybe I didn’t express myself very well. What I mean is that whether it’s a recruiter recruiting using her database, whether it’s somebody in a telephone unit recruiting people from a client supplied list, you’re looking for something so miniscule that you’re using a massive online database. What I’m saying is as long as it happens correctly and everybody knows the way that it’s being recruited so people are open and transparent about it and they know what rules they’re working to then it actually doesn’t matter.

DAVID: But how precise and how rigid must the rules be for a given task I guess is really my question. In other words, if recruitment is being done face to face in the field is it a question of version ten where the client has moved a comma from one place to another and it’s a precise implementation of a document or is it more about saying to recruiters, here’s what we want to accomplish, here’s what we want you to do, not just fill the room but it’s the right sorts of people and how do we decide what the rules are in a given case?

LIZ: Well to be honest I think that a lot of researchers are very nervous about having those conversations with their clients and they don’t do it. And I think a lot of that causes problems so there’s five days to recruit a group and they let their client think that somebody’s going to go and stand out on a street corner with a clipboard and somehow recruit 20 people that fit a penetration that it’s probably only 5% of the population, and that’s nationally, they’re only looking in a small area, it could be even smaller. It’s that kind of thing, it’s rubbish, we all know it doesn’t happen, that’s not what’s happening because that’s not a practical way to do something. It’s different if you want somebody to recruit in a store so that they’ve looked at a specific display or something like that, then obviously that is really important that people are recruited there in that store. But I do think that there needs to be a bit more, because as well a lot of clients now aren’t very experienced, they don’t necessarily know very much about market research, they don’t necessarily spend that much time in the market research departments where years ago people would get into the market research department and they would work there for 30 years and they knew everything about research and it’s not like that, people move around a lot more within company and they work in lots of different roles. We’ve got lots of clients that don’t know anything really about research, they’ve just ended up in their job and it’s really for us to advise them and be honest with them.

DAVID: For those of you again, I know there’s a show of hands or comments but for those of you who have day to day contact with the end client, how much do clients care about the means of recruitment? Is that an issue that comes up a lot, not very often or do they simply want to get the job done but get it done correctly, in other words, is it faith in you or your organisation to do it right or do clients care about the particulars of the means of recruitment? And anybody who has day to day contact with end clients.

SAM MURRAY-PETERSEN: I think it varies. We have some clients who are really keen on having virgin respondents who have never been to a group before, then we have other clients who desperately want people who have been to a group. So there’s no consistency and you’re basically trying to please everyone who has a different end task.

DAVID: But how interested are they in the process, whether the interviewer was standing on a street corner or picking up the phone?

SAM MURRAY-PETERSEN: Some do still think the recruiters stand on a street corner and others are a lot more realistic about it, we do always say that we offer any method of recruitment to recruit, they can phone up, they can stand on a street corner.

DAVID: Yes?

LUKE TIPTON: I was going to say you get asked did they do it properly? You’re like, what do you mean? Well were they in the road, when did you last see somebody in the road?

Laughter, inaudible

DEBRAH: I think the interesting, from the MRS perspective in terms of my standards hat on, clients usually become interested in the process when something’s gone wrong.

General agreement

LIZ: Absolutely.

DEBRAH: And they’ve got poor research and they want to know why and then they become very, very interested in the recruitment process. But if they’ve got good research that meets their objectives, that’s given them a springboard into some insight for some work they want to do they don’t really care. And it’s the same for all of us really, it’s a bit like you don’t care about how your bank serves you until they suddenly take £10,000 out of your account that you don’t have. It’s like all things, as soon as something goes wrong you want to know why it’s gone wrong but if nothing’s going wrong then why use the little time they’ve got trying to find out the intricacies of something which they outsourced and the reason why they outsourced it is because they don’t want it to do it themselves.

GARETH: Also the whole question about questionnaires themselves, most of us are field people here and we’ve all been asked can you get me a group together, I need it tomorrow evening, we don’t have time to write a questionnaire, no problem with that. But then when there’s a bit more time they suddenly want to have the questionnaire and I think there is a debate about whether a questionnaire is needed at all times. For God’s sake I’ve known questionnaires where it’s question four, are you male or female and sometimes it’s so ludicrous what we are asked to do just so a client can have a tick the box saying yes, the end client, not the research, saying yes, I’ve seen the questionnaire and yes, I have approved it. I wouldn’t mind at some stage to see whether there was room to, for basic jobs just to say, listen, we’re going to do a field spec, we’re not going to have this eight page questionnaire, we’re all being encouraged to save the planet anyway and just have a point, point, point, point, point basis, spec, single sheet, single easy to understand. And if it’s a single easy to understand thing less mistakes made on recruitment because it would just be a very simple easy to understand rather than, which of any of the following have you read in the last three weeks, and which have you read in the last week and which have you read to date. It’s just nonsense so possibly that’s something that we should also be looking at.

DAVID: We’re starting to get close to end time and I am going to want to ask the panel to talk about solutions because we’ve talked about issues and I think we’ve touched on some solutions but to answer the question about is field dead or dying or is it simply going through a metamorphosis to paraphrase what the title for this discussion initially was. But just before we get onto that, are there, from those of you who have listened to what each of the members of the panel had to say and listened to each other over the course of the last hour and a half or so. Have you heard any answers, are we moving any further along in the discussion, has it been in any way illuminating, are there things that people are going to go away with feeling that they understand better as a result of having been here today or are there fundamental issues that we haven’t addressed? And anybody really.

ANNE WARD: As a moderator rather than a field person I’m disappointed that we’ve kept shying away from the real thing that clients care about and that is the quality of the respondents. Sometimes whether they’re repeat or not, some people don’t mind, some like people who are warmed up or whatever but basically they want the right kind of people and it seems to me that we haven’t really addressed that. One of the ways in which you can improve the quality of the people who turn up, because when you’ve done the group reprisals are pretty well immaterial, you put in crap you get out crap and that is what the real problem is. But if you add an extra layer of checking before the group I have found that that can significantly reduce any question, you can spot a professional, you can spot somebody who isn’t right. If you don’t do it by ticking the boxes but you do it by talking to people, in effect you do a qualitative check on them before you get them in and that in practical terms has reduced the number of duds that you’ve got, or the number of dodgy people. But it’s an extra layer of time, it’s an extra layer of expense.

DAVID: Who does that? Sorry, who should be doing that? Whose job is that?

ANNE WARD: It varies. In America something like that is quite commonplace at a lot of the studios because they recruit from database but then they have a kind of talent show before the group and you can say, I’ll have that one, that one and that one and get rid one of the weak. So it depends how it’s being done. Before freelancing I was 12 years heading up the qualitative department at Ipsos and we had moved to prechecking for practically all our groups before I left. So again, it may be that your fieldwork companies would feel that this is something that you could offer or should be doing. We were doing it as clients when we were recruiting directly.

DAVID: But how did Ipsos do that, face to face, over the telephone, what was the process?

ANNE WARD: Telephone mostly.

JAMES: But again, that’s something we’re able to do through our telephone centre is to prevalidate, again it does tie into the lead time issue that I think Gareth touched on really and if you have a very short lead time to then impose on your recruiters a further two days into their lead time to say, I’m going to validate those groups beforehand as well can actually undermine quality. That said, where you have the lead time then I think a prevalidation, a precheck is fantastically useful and I think the new ISO standard for next year actually states it as standard.

LIZ: It does, yes.

JAMES: And the other thing that they also cover I think is either prevalidation or validation at the venue alongside.

LIZ: It does, yes.

DEBRAH: We do it.

ANNE WARD: But a lot of the prevalidation is fairly basic, it’s taking you through …

DEBRAH: Well no, the ISO actually does, it just says you have to do it, it doesn’t say how you to do it and so therefore it rests with how important quality is to those that are doing the recruitment. And at the end of the day it comes down to resources, how much they’re being paid and all the rest of it. But no, the ISO is very broad on this and that was the reason why we kept it broad, was actually so that we didn’t almost make it too basic so that actually we’re interested in companies doing more than the standard.

DAVID: But do you think it should be done before the venue because obviously once they’re there

ANNE WARD: Yes well it depends how much you have in regard and what the resources are and there’s also the embarrassment of dealing with people who you want to reject. It’s all very businesslike in the states, they’re told to expect this but we’re gentler people over here.

JAMES: You also have a sizeable over recruit in the States as well where often they recruit 12 or 14 for 8 or something, which also carries a cost.

DEBRAH: Yeah, it’s massively more expensive.

ANNE WARD: As a moderator I’d like to say that it’s better to have a group where the numbers are down but everybody’s right than get the bums on the seats and some of them are duds.

DEBRAH: Totally.

PENNY: But is that still a form of prechecking, checking to see that you are the 27 year old male that buys

JAMES: …………….., yeah.

PENNY: Whatever, as opposed to, now if that respondent had been in cahoots with Recruiter X or just got onto my panel because you still can lie to the prechecker over the phone, but really I’ve found from researchers coming back to me that they spotted them when they’re in the group and they can tell as opposed to me ringing up.

JAMES: Well that’s the final stage isn’t it really?

PENNY: Well unfortunately so but it was maybe just checking if there’s anything out of quota cos we can all make mistakes.

ANNE WARD: It’s not so much about quotas, it’s about their understanding of being of the market in which they are supposed to be participating. We could well get a 28 year old or a 30 year old who’s lied about their age but that’s seldom the most important thing in a recruited group.

PENNY: No …

GARETH: There’s a job I’m working on with a client at the moment but it’s a series of jobs and they’re asking you to, not tell them which group is which, they’re not going to go into too much brand specifics but they don’t care, say it’s for Heinz soups, as long as the people understand all about soups, which who doesn’t? But they want to get people who are just going to be within the age group, bright, chatty, alert, charming, lovely, they really don’t care what their brand usage is and they’re asking me to get some groups which are on quota for brand usage and some groups which are just going to be good, chatty, brand aware, media savvy, chatty types and maybe that’s the thing which we should also be looking at, is how important these days is brand usage.

ANNE WARD: It depends on the project doesn’t it?

GARETH: Everybody’s so fickle and charming. I suppose if it’s about a group of people who are driving Land Rovers you can’t really talk if you don’t have the experience but if it’s just a general advertising chatty, lovely group then is that that important. And that’s what we’re working on at the moment, is to try and do some blind groups which I’ll just throw one in every now and again and if they spot it.

DAVID: I’m conscious of time. The point is adherence to quality and actually setting procedures in place that ensure that the people, you can’t guarantee that they’re going to be talkative, that they’re going to be good respondents but you can guarantee that they are the right sort of respondents to be there, is that?

ANNE WARD: Well I think there we’re into another matter which is the theatre of qualitative research, which is reducing standards in various ways. Now I’m talking more about whether they are what they claim to be and that they know enough about the market, what do you feel about new things that you see, what are other people doing, how do you feel about that. You can soon tell the people who know very little about it and aren’t what they say they are.

GARETH: The way to get chatty people though as I’ve always said, is to go through a recruiter and they’ll get them all and sort them out. They’ll get people who can chat but databasers won’t work to get that.

DAVID: Anything else? Any other quick questions or points from the audience just before we wrap this up? I’m going to ask any and all of the members of the panel to summarise from their perspective but it seems to me that most of what we’ve talked about in terms of being the critical issues, as we’ve already said, all have to do with investment. It has to do with paying the right level of incentive and that sometimes costs more money, it’s about the investment in training for recruiters and for organisations that are involved in recruitment to make sure that we get that right. It’s investment in communications, public relations, advertising and it’s investment in the kind of quality procedures that are a step beyond perhaps what some people are doing now, to ensure that we’re getting the right people. And all of that requires devoted resource and spending money. So I know that we’ve already touched on that but if I can ask each of the panel, maybe we can just go down the table in brief summation, to talk about whether these are all things that as an industry we ought to be doing and it is individual practitioners within the industry, whether these are investments that their organisations are prepared to make. So why don’t we start down at this end.

PENNY: On the investment in training of the recruiters, now getting brand new blood into the industry, we’re always trying to get I think a good quantitative base to get to approaching people, techniques, social grading, we’re always trying to invest and get quantitative interviewers in on that. We really say our added value is the way that we are communicating with our recruiters and the open door policy so that’s what we actively, cos I’m not trying to say we’ve got different recruiters or the best in the world but it’s how we work with them and communicate. So we spend a lot of time with that and talking and nurturing recruiters and … really value. Incentives and that monetary thing I haven’t got an answer, I just feel that that is an issue I feel it’s running away out of my control in a very cost competitive market at the moment and I’m damned if I’m going to lose all the jobs because of the incentives. But I think it has to be fair cos people are giving up their time as well as, it should not just be paid to do that, it should be for the right reasons, but not everybody, I probably wouldn’t if I wasn’t in this business, go to a group. On the other issues of, what other issues were there?

LIZ: Quality.

PENNY: The quality, I sat on the ISO, the MRQSA Committee, I’m Chairman of the IQCS and now the ISO will be taking over completely within the next year, 18 months.

DEBRAH: May 2008.

PENNY: Yeah, but obviously I’m very much pro IQCS and currently the MRQSA standards were completely the IQCS, we held a meeting of MRQSA and IQCS members last Tuesday when we had the best ever show, to look at the standards that are currently IQCS and to see if we are up to date with technology, it’s a long time since we’ve looked at qualitative, mystery shopping, the whole kit and caboodle because now we are not tied, there’s still 30/40 that are accredited IQCS and we will be doing working parties at looking at the relevance, particularly there’s an awful lot of online but looking at the qualitative standards that are currently in IQCS, the relevance, it’s a long time, Liz, you and I probably sat on that about ten years ago feeding in to IQCS standards.

LIZ: It was longer than that.

PENNY: But looking at that from a standard, we are looking at that and setting up working parties on that, to take that forward to see if we’re missing a trick in today’s environment the way we as practitioners and our clients … not lessening, it’s all about increasing quality. So that’s how we can say from the IQCS side of things. But within, there was 40 companies represented, there were ISO, MRQSA and IQCS accredited, all there because of standards, very much in a very cost conscious market and the chequebook coming down the ways is really telling field directors of the most highest quality that they have cut costs, cut costs, cut costs. So it’s a big issue at the moment.

DAVID: So the answer is there is a reluctance to make the investment.

PENNY: It always has been my opinion with that hat or not on.

DAVID: Anything else quickly from each of us? Go ahead.

LUCY: As a researcher and as a user of field I guess I’m slightly detached but I’d like to make two observations based on my own experience. It feels to me as if the kind of jobs that I’m being briefed with by clients are actually polarising into the very quick turnaround, just get me people where actually there is very little concern on quality, it’s more about speed, let me get the people quickly. And the kind of jobs that are much longer drawn out, it was interesting to hear you talk about pretasks and the curse of the pretasks.

LIZ: Challenge.

LUCY: There is the challenge.

Laughter

LUCY: There is an awful lot of pressure on us from clients at the other end of the spectrum to go for the big involved, let’s have the blogs, the scrapbooks, whatever and I think they’re twin challenges but they exist at opposite ends of the spectrum and require quite different skills and I see the marketplace polarising more in that direction.

DAVID: Would your company be prepared to invest if there was a cost associated with any of these initiatives that we’re talking about?

DEBRAH: I think it’s very important, yeah.

DAVID: OK, James?

JAMES: Well in terms of investment and in terms of cost I would say, yes to an extent there is a level at which, and I know speaking for our company, we’re not as cheap as some other companies but that’s because there’s a level of cost that comes with that level of investment and those processes. Moving away from the cost related issue I would say that I certainly don’t think we’re looking at the death of field, I’m not entirely sure that we’re looking at a sea change either but it’s more to my mind anyway, about really evolution of field and that isn’t something that should be happening now or this year or today but some of it really should be going on all the time. And as agencies or people involved in field in whatever capacity we are and I think we all have a role to play in the responsibilities of that really to prevent the death of field by continuing to evolve I guess.

DAVID: Gareth, five years from now, are we having the same discussion or have things moved on? Are we looking at a different industry in terms of the role field plays?

GARETH: I think five years from now no because there’s still enough of a pool of recruiters that we can draw on. Ten years, who knows? There’s been some, it’s a horrible thing to dwell on but there has been recently a very high profile death of one recruiter Pat Shorrock in Leeds who has been around doing recruitment for I’m sure as long as any of us care to remember and there will be retirements, there will be people who as quotas continue to get harder and as things, if pay rates don’t increase they’ll just say, well I don’t want to do this anymore. On the plus side there are some excellent new recruiters coming along, there’s a recruiter in Strawberry Hill, Angela Maxon, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her? She’s only recently started, she started with a small database and she is excellent, she doesn’t come with any of the old baggage that some recruiters have about, oh I don’t like to help her out, I don’t like to help her out. It’s this sort of new, inclusive approach which is rather exciting. And the other thing which is rather exciting is how many people have turned out here this evening. I helped organise this and I’m sure that Elaine and Anne will tell you that I was going, you won’t get people to come along on an evening to talk about … and we had a capacity crowd and we’ve been having to turn people away.

DEBRAH: You didn’t get enough M&S vouchers.

Laughter

GARETH: Well that’s cos I put them all in my back pocket and went shopping. If we can keep this momentum up and if we can keep this, I think that this sort of thing should be happening at least annually that we can come along and chat. We need to get more recruiters involved in AQR to come along and become members. There’s Lynne over there and I’m sorry, are you a recruiter or do you work within

F: Me?

GARETH: Yes.

F: I’m a Research Director.

GARETH: So only one recruiter here this evening, which is a shame. Next year I’d like to see ten because unless we get the recruiters involved at this stage then we’ll face criticisms that we’re being exclusive towards them and they have a wealth of experience that they could bring along and say, this is how we should be going forward, this is how we get more people in. So that’s me done.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: I have a database of recruiters and I’m happy to help you encourage them.

GARETH: Lovely, thanks.

LYNNE CHAPMAN: And they should come free …

JAMES: They’ll certainly need to book early I think to ensure they can get a ticket.

GARETH: There is an argument about saying that they should come free and I do appreciate it. I also appreciate that on the one hand, and I’ve been doing this for 15 years and I always get the same argument from recruiters, it’s a valid one. We’re professionals, we should be treated as such, now there are freelance researchers who are professionals and join AQR and pay their full fees and they don’t

LYNNE CHAPMAN: Only for the evening.

GARETH: Only for the evening, yeah absolutely but I think that recruiters, it’s only £100, it’s less than they get paid for a group.

DAVID: I’m going to wrap this up in just a couple of minutes and a lot of us can stand around, continue to chat afterwards. But to this side of the table, just that last question quickly. Five years from now, are we talking about the same issues in the same way and how is the industry going to be different?

SARAH: I’m sure we’ll have some of the same issues because they’re the same issues I’ve been talking about 15 years as well. But I think what I’ve done this year and it might be relevant, it might not be but I’ve started a program with my internal team because I spent a lot of time talking to recruiters, I worry a lot about respondents and I think that what I’ve tried to do with my team is invest in them and get my team internally really engaged to do the same because I think there’s a whole kind of, the field execs side and I’ve been in it a long time and there’s people coming into the industry from that end that also need to know all about these issues and need to realise it’s a profession, you can have a great career, all of this is really relevant but we also need people in field offices who are bothered and care and want it to become their career. So I’ve had an investment program running with them, which isn’t recruiters and it isn’t respondents but I think it’s relevant and think of it as a career, I’ve done it.

DAVID: Debrah?

DEBRAH: Same problems, different characteristics I would suggest. I think all that technology does is it provides a stopgap to certain things but then the same problems arise because of fatigue or whatever else it might be. MRS’s job is as a professional body and also The Business Association is to provide frameworks to address issues like training, like providing statistics, all those sorts of issues we talked about today. That’s what we invest in, that’s what we spend members’ money on. At the end of the day we’ve got 8,000 members and they paid £104 each so we’ve got a rate of trying to invest in more and more things but having the same level of members that we’ve had for the last ten years. So the issue I think is that we’re going to have to also be able to try and punch above the weight that we already do but equally that we need members to and people in the industry to want to be become members.

DAVID: Liz, last word.

LIZ: I think of three things really. I think as long as we provide a good service to our clients I think we’ll still be important. I think that more people need to be involved and put their point across and I think we also need to be thinking about what we need to be doing tomorrow rather than what we were doing yesterday.

DAVID: And with that I’d like to wrap up. I would like to thank the panel for their time and their contribution and also to thank all of those who attended for joining us this evening.

Applause

END OF DISCUSSION

This discussion was transcribed by paul.s@thetranscriptionagency.com (Telephone 01303 230038)