Old MR, New MR, Borrowed MR, Blue MR
On Twitter this week Sean Copeland asked for 140-character definitions of “New MR” (here’s his write-up of the answers). Ray Poynter replied with a definition talking about epistemology and paradigms and he invented the idea so he should know. I jokily said something about how it’s all the stuff people initially think can’t possibly work, but now I’ve considered it a bit more I have a slightly more considered definition.
New MR, it seems to me, is our response to the industrialisation of information. You might go further and say “to the industrialisation of consumer data”, throw the behavioural stuff in there too.
Old market research was a solution to a lack of information. New MR is a solution to a glut of it. The things we built in Old MR - surveys, groups - were designed to extract information from people who wouldn’t otherwise have had an opportunity to give it. The things we build in New MR are designed to filter information, or derive it from enormous unstructured datasets, or focus it.
What mattered in Old MR was the data. A survey is a mold for a dataset, it has no function beyond that. You would imagine the dataset you needed to get the information you required and build something that would produce it. The best surveys would be well-designed for this - even beautiful, in their way. A great survey was a wonderful piece of craftsmanship - a small number of well-chosen questions meshing together like a Swiss watch to produce the maximum amount of information. Most, of course, were less Swiss watch and more Swiss army knife - festooned with questions somebody in the design process thought might be useful to someone sometime.
What matters in New MR is the environment the data is created in and the analytics applied to it. Creating the data is less important - there’s an awful lot of it about, more all the time. Harvesting it is relatively simple too. Filtering, weighing, understanding it - there’s the difficulty. So the effort goes into creating analytical systems which allow data to be useful, whether automated (“listening”, monitoring) or more peer-to-peer.
(This idea also explains why MROCs often feel kind of disapppointing to me - they ought to be NewMR, but actually they’re often fairly regimented affairs, with little real autonomy for participants faced with an ever-scrolling list of tasks.)
So the challenges facing researchers vis-a-vis participants are very different, too. With Old MR, you were trying to get people to do stuff they wouldn’t usually do, so you used a combination of incentives, hand-holding, inhumanly clear copy, and hopefully made the whole process smooth and quick. In NewMR, you’re either trying to make sense of what they have done, or - with communities - trying to get them to do the same sort of thing they usually do (talk to people online, share stuff) but in an environment you’ve built.
