Roles Marketing Research Market Research Careers Marketing Research Career Paths
Market research offers many career paths in various functions, either on the agency or client side. The one quality that is probably necessary for all contemplating careers as market research professionals is a highly developed curiosity, ideally focused on human behavior. From the people who interview others in the streets to the analysts who mine into the data files, to executives who report and interpret, it's all about finding answers to questions about what (and why, and how, and when) people actually do, think and feel.
Market research is one of the vast sub-disciplines within even larger marketing and advertising area. It has emerged from - and it is still very much connected to - related areas of opinion polling and sociological research. It draws on theories and methods used in psychology, sociology, anthropology, ergonomics and many others. It uses sophisticated data analysis techniques developed by statisticians and mathematicians, and it relies on skills and abilities of a veritable army of interviewers and moderators who conduct the actual fieldwork.
The most appealing aspect of the whole industry is that, although there exist undergraduate and post-graduate qualifications, the inherently interdisciplinary character of market research means that people working in the industry come from a variety of backgrounds: those with market research qualifications are joined (and possibly even outnumbered) by the marketing men, psychologists, social scientists and statisticians, but also by people with general business qualifications, graphic designers, linguists, writers, economists, IT professionals and more.
Another aspect of market research which permeates the whole industry and needs to be seriously considered is the time pressures. Market research is project-based, and the projects are often complex and rely on many parts coming together and many (sometime hundreds) of people doing their part - correctly and on time. This leads - almost invariably - to bottlenecks, delays and need for putting in emergency hours. If you value fixed timetables, and would be unhappy having to work weekends or nights on a short notice, then market research (apart perhaps from field interviewing) is definitely not for you.
FIELD INTERVIEWER
Fieldwork is the actual interviewing: talking to people in the street and on the phone; conducting depth interviews and moderating focus groups. There is no particular qualifications required to become an interviewer (in the UK, normally only a GCSE is needed), although a short training to industry standards is normally provided for first timers. What you need is most of all an ability to connect with people, confidence to approach them and persuade to talk to you (without bullying), thick skin and sense of humour and proportion for dealing with refusals and difficult people, and ability to control and guide the structured social interaction that the interview is.
Career paths in fieldwork consist mostly of moving from actual interviewing to managing the interviewers, be it in the field or in the head office, training, and quality control. Fieldwork managers working directly in the agency provide a crucial input into the design of research projects: they say what is and what isn't actually practically possible, how long it would take and how much people need to be paid!
Those who conduct in -depth interviews and focus groups are usually expected to write up the findings and often report on them to the client, and are nearer to the role of research executive than an interviewer.
RESEARCH EXECUTIVE
The role usually named "research executive" is a core function within the industry. The actual title might vary from agency to agency and from country to country (other options include project manager, researcher, research specialist and more) but the job is roughly the same: a research executive is the person who plans, designs, analyses, reports and presents the research as well as being responsible for all or at least part of the client contact.
This role requires a combination of many skills and qualities that don't always necessarily go together. The curiosity and interest in human behavior mentioned earlier are crucially important, but the client contact side of things requires ability to confidently relate to people at all levels of client organizations: normally marketing and advertising executives, but important projects involve marketing managers, product development people, client's advertising agency and occasionally even the CEOs themselves.
In most cases (unless you deal exclusively with qualitative projects or very routine ones) you really do need to be pretty numerate and have a working knowledge or at least good understanding of statistics. In some smaller agencies the "execs" also do some of the more complex number crunching, in others that is left to the data analysts, but even if you don't do the analysis or sampling yourself, you will need to order it from analysts and you will get better and faster results if you can talk to them in their own language.
Being numerate can be learned and is not the end in itself. What is even more important is to be able to see meaning in numbers and to translate them into what your clients will be able to understand, relate to and - crucially - use. Market research information is gathered to help decisions, and research executives need to interpret the data in a way that will, ultimately, help to make those decisions.
It's a varied, stimulating and challenging role, great combination of intellectual effort and people skills. If you are to survive - and more importantly - enjoy being a market research exec, you need an ability to work under time (and other kinds of) pressure, cope with the control issues that stem from the fact that you doing your job relies on many others doing theirs, skin thick enough to take the responsibility for the whole project (and the resulting flak from clients and your superiors). Slight geekiness helps to deal with mind-numbing triviality of some projects.
DATA ANALYST/STATISTICIAN
This is one of the more "geeky" or back office roles in market research: it very rarely if at all involves any client contact as all your clients will be internal. Love for numbers and ability to see patterns and meanings, combined with high proficiency in statistical methods of data analysis and principles of research methodology are crucial for this role.
It's also important to know ins and outs of the software packages you are using: knowing how to practically do something (including how to gather the information and then process the raw data to get it into manageable format) is often as important as theoretical knowledge of statistics.
A good data analyst in a market research company is also able to communicate with the research executives: in project that involve more complex or sophisticated your input into the design of the study and the questionnaires (or other tools) will be absolutely crucial.
OTHER ROLES
As any other area, market research employs many people in back-office functions, from HR to IT to sales and marketing. IT in particular offers a lot of opportunities as modern market research relies more and more on technology solutions: from the obvious maintenance of office networks to specialized systems like CAPI (Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing, which involve interviewers in the field being equipped with their own notebook or tablet computers), CATI Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing) and the ever growing area of Internet surveys.
