Who are you and what do you do?
I am Charlie Skinner and I am head of research at Haynes McGregor and my role really is to manage and direct research projects which come in to the company the company specialises in brand management and design and my role is to research to that end.
Return to topWhat is Market Research?
In business if you are producer or manufacturer of goods, you need to know why people are buying your goods and for what reasons and you need to know how you can gain a competitive advantage and you need people who will provide you with intelligence about how the market works in order to gain that competitive advantage.
I think it is a lot more interesting than perhaps it seems from the outside the stereotype abut market research is that it is, the image that comes to mind of market research for people that don't work in it is someone standing with a clipboard in the street trying to hassle you to with a 50 question questionnaire and you don’t really want to answer them. There is so much more to it than that, you can really get involved in brand strategy and brand marketing and really you can get to the hear of innovation and trend setting and cool setting I think the word is. Market research is right in there along with branding and advertising and you can really be a part of that and get a piece of that from market research if that is what you want, so it is probably a lot more vibrant a lot more colourful and a lot more interesting than people would realise looking in from the outside and I am not just saying that because I want to come across as interesting or anything like that but it really is.
Return to topWhat attracted you to this career?
I originally wanted to go into advertising because I thought it was an interesting, I was fascinated by advertising particularly the Guinness adverts, Rutger Hauer going in the belly of the whale, Jonah and all that, I love the symbolism and they were very off the wall those ads but there was something really good about them and people loved them, and there was Louis Armstrong as well with the planets.
I was fascinated, I thought I would like to be a part of that in the end I didn't go for advertising, I wasn't entirely convinced I was extroverted enough to get into it. I wanted to get down into more depth, try and understand what made consumers tick more and that is where market research came into it. My degree I did was psychology and that is really about understanding people and research is also about understanding people as well.
Return to topWhat does your job involve?
What I do is market research which is finding out what the market wants that is the most concise definition about what market research is all about. There are different ways of interrogating the market if you like, there is the basic information about what people buy, how they behave and what they consume. So that would be who buys what, when do they buy it, where do they buy it, what format do they buy it in, those sort of questions are usually covered by a what is known as quantitative research, which is all about figures and numbers and percentages what percentage of people buy beer on a Saturday, how much beer is sold at Christmas, how many different brands of beer does one person buy in a year, that kind of information. The other type of information you get from your market is why do people choose the brand that they do, why do people buy beer, what is it fundamentally about, and that side is known as qualitative research and that is focus groups and that is what we do which is qualitative research.
Return to topWhat's the difference between qualitative and quantitative research?
There are basically two different types of market research you can either work mainly with words or mainly with figures. Mainly with words is known as qualitative and generally that is about evaluating what people think what people feel about brands and products the other type is quantitative and what you are doing there is measuring the responses and you generally have large samples you give out percentages, and figures and statistics about consumptions and about attitudes. The difference between the two is if you have simple questions you can ask them to a lot of people, and you can get back huge amounts of data and you can be very statistical confident about the response to your questions but your questions have to be simple if you have got, a simple question might be how often do you buy beer every week, what brands of beer do you buy, which brands of beer do you never buy, those kinds of fairly simple questions. If you have got more complicated questions like why would you never buy a certain brand of beer, what is it that makes you favour a brand of bear over another, those sorts of questions you have to go into more depth, you can't just farm those questions out to thousands of people you have got to sit down with people either in an interview or focus group and you have got to spend one or two hours going through those questions in depth, that is qualitative research. You enter the world of imagination and subjective experience of let’s say beer, or it could be tissues, or bags or whatever, you get down to the nitty gritty about what something is about and what brands mean to people and you have to take time to do that. So really you are either into words in the evaluative kind of sense or you are into the more descriptive figures type of research and generally people tend to go for one or the other. Not to say you can't do both, there are people who do that, and those people generally end up managing research or they often go to client side. I have talked about the differences between the two different types of research, really what unites research is that it is about evidence about going out finding evidence and drawing conclusions on the basis of what you found. Quantitative is more scientific if you like, it is more about using stats and delivering certainty to your clients, qualitative is the science part, which is going out and gathering your evidence, there is a more arty part, more subjective part which is interpreting what people said and then working out what they really meant. What really unites those two is really about finding evidence from consumers.
Return to topDescribe the process of your work?
Take the example of beer, lets say you are in charge of Fosters and there is a lot of stuff you need to know about your market, a lot of information, which will help you manage your brand and sell more litres, or thousands of litres of your beer. So there are a lot of different types of questions you might have, so you might want to know what is the right kind of advert for Fosters, for my brand, how do I choose the right kind of advert and where am I going to invest my money, with which advertising agency and specifically which type of advert. So what is going to be a good advert for my brand? That is quite a hard question to answer so what you would do is come to a company like us and you would do qualitative research so that is in depth research you have got, you don't talk to many people, it is a relatively small sample of people, a focus group is six or eight people and you might do four groups of Fosters consumers and people who consume other types of beer. You would take the time to go into depth about what is beer all about, what specifically is Fosters about as a brand, how do people relate to that brand, what is it’s personality, what does it stand for in people’s minds and therefore what direction does it need to move in to attract more consumers. Lets say so you would establish those and then you might test three or four different advertising ideas in depth with people during the course of your group, so whilst having done that we would come back to you after having made a recommendation as to which ad route is going to be best for your brand. As the brand manager, you would go away and go to your advertising agency and say we want to go this route and we want to use this type of advert because we think this is going to work best for our brand.
Return to topDo you moderate your own groups?
Generally yes, I will do groups in the UK certainly myself, I have done groups in Spain, because I speak Spanish, groups in Australia and Mexico as well, but generally when you go abroad because the groups are in a foreign language you would get a local moderator to do that and you would be behind the mirror, behind the one way mirror in the viewing facility as it is known, you would be watching them moderate in the local language and you would have someone translating simultaneously next to you.
Return to topWhat type of things do you research?
You can research anything and everything, ads are just an example you can go from the highly glamorous things such as pearls to the highly unglamorous such as loo paper or engine oil or anything so any product that people sell, sooner or later, somebody is going to need market research to find out who is buying what when and why so it can be pretty much anything.
Interviewer: Do you ever research the products yourselves or are you just in the brand part of it?
A lot of work is done on brands as well, some of it is done on new product development, coming back to beer again, I have done research on new types of beer, beer with tequila in it, beer with Earl Grey tea in it, diet beer, all sorts of stuff. So you can do brand stuff, you can do advertising stuff and there is a lot of product stuff as well and that could be anything from innovation, ie new product ideas to just understanding a category and how consumers organise it in their minds, it might be a new category that a business is moving into, lets say a company has suddenly acquired a business that is all to do with selling tea and they nothing about tea, you might do a large exploratory research into the tea market in one country or several countries, what brands do they currently have and where are the opportunities for their existing brands and where might they introduce new brands.
Return to topIs it difficult to remain impartial?
There are politics you have to be aware of in any client company, let us say that you will have certain people who favour certain types of ideas and believe that certain types should work or will work, and when those ideas are put into research obviously they have an answer they want. However if you only give them the answer they want then you are wasting their money because the is no point really doing your research so what you have to do is manage their expectations, you have to prepare them for the fact that and you have to emphasise with them that the consumer is always right and you have to convince them that you will give their advertising or product, their idea, a fair testing and come back with a fair reflection of what the market wants and that is always what market research is about and yes you do get those pressures but it is never completely like that. You may have one or two people within the company who support a particular idea and believe that that idea will work and then when you test it against the consumer, you do encounter resistance and they will question you and disagree with you they will try and try to make sure that your response is a valid one and what you say to them is indeed valid. That can become difficult but what you have to do as a researcher is make sure you have a water tight argument and that what you have found out, you have explored every possible avenue and given them as complete and fair an answer as possible and that it is a completely accurate or as accurate a reflection you can make of the market. That is the long answer, but it is difficult it does happen that way and you just have to give people a fair a response as you can.
Return to topWhat are the best bits about your job?
What I really love is the application of new ideas. It’s because marketing is constantly evolving, it is not really a science or anything, so it is full of ideas, but constantly evolving but you can build new ways of looking at marketing, new ways of understanding the consumer. You can borrow ideas from things like psychology, neuroscience, anthropology and you basically steal ideas from anywhere to get closer to a better understanding of consumers, which will put you ahead with you clients and make you look better and be very interesting as well. Marketing as a social phenomenon is an extremely interesting and dynamic area of modern life and you can make a small contribution to that by understanding how consumers relate to brands. The most satisfying part is when you have let’s say a client who is confused about the market and the kind or research I do is all about going into depth with consumers and trying to work out what makes them tick in any particular market. Because you go into depth with people you drill down below the rational literal layers of people’s consciousness and you can drill down and understand what are the underlying motivations within a particular category. So you get to the bottom of the market and you come out with an insight which really frames the whole market and helps the client understand it and you come back up and communicate back to them in a clear and concise way and that will help them understand that market and organise their own strategy going forward and that is very, very satisfying when that happens. It doesn’t always happen because you don’t often get that kind of brief, but you have to wait for a brief to come along and if you aren’t going to do that you have to convince a client to go ahead and do that kind of research so that is extremely satisfying because they will always value that and the more fundamental your insight and the clearer it is the stronger relationship you can build with that client and they will never forget you for it.
Return to topWhat are the worst bits about your job?
The downside is probably doing groups in the evening that is tricky, doing qualitative research you have to occasionally give up evenings to do your groups because that is when people are generally free you can do them in the day time if you are researching housewives, so you can avoid it sometimes, but sometimes it is unavoidable and sometimes you find yourself going out to Birmingham on a rainy Wednesday to go and talk to people in the evening and that is a night or two away from home that is one of the downsides, you also occasionally get very dull jobs that maybe you have no interest in but you have just got to do it anyway; I suppose that is the case with any job. Clients can be difficult as well, marketing can be very stressful and pressured there is a lot to understand and a lot of things are unclear and at times have to help people make a decision with not enough information to decided on and they can be very stressful for them and you have to sooth that stress and be very patient with them so that is a skill you have to learn. You invest a lot of yourself into your research. Because I do in depth stuff a lot of it quite subjective and you have convince your clients that you have to the validity of what at the end of the day is really your opinion of what people really mean, and why they are really buying into a brand or not buying a brand and so on. So because it is about understanding consumers’ intuitive and subjective understanding you put a lot of yourself into it. Yes it is dissatisfying when you see clients disagreeing with what you are saying or they can just shelve what they say or ignore what they say, but you have to try and convince them and if you can’t convince them that is down to you. Sometimes it just gets shelved for political reasons and you just have to get on with it. It doesn’t often happen like that and the better relationship you build with your client, the less likely that is to happen. So they will start to develop a personal relation with you and how you see things and you start to fit that with their organisation and the way they work, the better effect you have the better business you do together.
Return to topWhat has been your greatest achievement?
A lot of work with Coca Cola to do with their strategy and portfolio management and by that I mean you have got lots of different brands, you have got Fanta, Sprite, Coca Cola and water brands and part of marketing is about managing those brands around the world globally so what we did was give them insight into what their brands mean, fundamentally what are their brands about and what do they mean in different counties, we help them plan out their portfolio and strategy globally on the basis of research and we also wrote a chapter of their new marketing model, one of twenty I believe.
Return to topAny regrets?
Career wise I started off in London and moved to Spain after about three and a half years in London, I spent seven years in Spain before coming back to the UK and I have been back in the UK for a year and a half. I would have spent less time in Spain definitely. London is probably one of the best places, if not the best place in the world to do market research it is just so dynamic and vibrant and energetic and fantastic, Spain is not like that really at all and I would have spent less time there I think.
Return to topWhat is the pay like and are there any perks?
Well I don’t know what a standard is but I will tell you about what you do get. When I started out you got to go business class everywhere, which is great at the age of 24/25 and the perks are really excellent. That was in the mid 90s since then things have slimmed down and I think that has happened in all industries, to the point where you will only go business class if your flight is more than five hours. So the perks have got less in general I would think, what you get now, what is standard in market research is a pension, a bonus, and a reasonably good salary, it is not spectacular, it is pretty good and depending on what type of research you do, what type of market research you go into, it can be pretty good. If you are looking at the top end of market research you need to be establishing relationships with clients so that you can say to a new company, I can bring a new supplier with me I bring X amount of revenue per year into your company and once you get to that stage you can really start to demand salaries relative to all industries, I suppose.
Return to topHow long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?
Good question, that depends on you really and the type of research you choose if you choose quantitative style of research which is questionnaires, surveys, working with figures really, you don’t have to do focus groups you don’t have to do evenings, and your job can be pretty much 9 to 6.30, pretty average predictable working day. If you choose qualitative research which is slightly more in depth, you do focus groups you can be working typically evenings until 10pm but you can compensate for that by getting in later in the mornings so that is something you have to do if you do qualitative research an average of no more than two evenings a week, every week in a very heavy period of work, you might be doing three evenings a week sometimes three but that would be fairly exceptional but you might do a couple of weeks a month where you might have two evenings. As to whether you have to work weekends, that is up to you, some people do but you don’t have to work weekends you can do it so you don’t have to work weekends, or very occasionally work weekends. With market research you don’t have to be on call for your clients over the weekends, your clients don’t own you in that respect the same way as they can in other industries.
Return to topIs there much in the way of travel?
Certainly there is a lot of travel within the UK generally you will need to talk to people in the south and in the north if you are going to get a representative sample because there are slight differences between the north and the south maybe you will go to Scotland, Wales, Ireland as well and a lot of research like a lot of marketing these days is global and international. So if you are into that kind of thing and you want to do that kind of research potentially there is a lot of travel to other countries to supervise research, supervise focus groups and supervise moderation in other countries. UK is a hub for coordinating international projects and a lot of global companies have their HQ in the UK therefore a lot of research projects are run out of the UK and these are coordinated by UK agencies. So London is a great place if you want to do international research you can be travelling to a different country every month if you want to. In the last year I have been to Taiwan, Japan, Korea Kuwait, Italy, Greece, all over the place and stacking up the air miles. And you can do that if you want to personally I really enjoy exploring different cultures, understanding how the culture affects the behaviour and consumption and how people behave to products, brands and marketing in different countries, it is fascinating but that is another element to marketing you can explore through research.
Return to topDo you have to be based anywhere in particular?
There are agencies based outside of London that I know of but most of the major ones are based in London. It is as well to be close to your clients, not all clients are based in London of course, but it is a good place to be around particularly if you are doing international stuff and flying around. That is not to say that only good agencies are based in London, not at all, but it is as well to be based in London I think.
Return to topWhat is the working environment like?
I would say it is informal definitely smart casual or even scruffy casual around the office, often meeting clients you have to match them and match their dress codes so if you are going to see finance people in the city you match them you wear a jacket and tie, if you were going to see an advertising agency you would probably be informal, it depends. When you go and see clients you match them but every day it is very informal.
A mix of people a reasonably goods mix of male and female. It tends to be younger I would think generally I think as people get older in market research they tend to join smaller agencies, a lot of older people become freelance and work on their own and they build up their own relationships with their clients. I think it is a fairly young profile.
Return to topHow did you get into your job?
I think there are no particular entry requirements except I suppose the main thing would be curiosity about people and if you have got that and you are genuinely interested in what makes people tick, how brands work, how marketing works, how consumption works those kinds of questions. If you are genuinely interested in that and that is what floats your boat, then you can get a job in marketing, so you don’t need any specific qualifications. To give you an idea people might have a degree in psychology, anthropology, arts, classics, English, perhaps in mathematics something like that, because there is a very statistical side to marketing as well but no hard and fast rules as to what degree you should have or what class of degree you should have.
Return to topDo you need a degree?
I think most people have a degree who get into market research. There are different roles within market research, there are the more client facing roles, which is what I do, where you do your focus groups, you do your surveys and your presenting to clients there is that side of market research. There is another side which is recruitment and these are the people who are responsible for organising focus groups and finding people to turn up, that is known as recruitment. Also there are the legions of people who go out every day and they conduct questionnaires either in person on the street or over the phone or they set up the online surveys so there is that more practical side of interviewing people as well.
Return to topWhat's the application process like?
Well it depends on the company really the smaller the company the more informal the process, small companies would generally use people they know in networking or they use recruitment consultants. Larger companies will be a bit more formal they will use sometimes networking, a lot of recruitment consultants they also have graduate training schemes which are quite difficult and I think the selection process is quite rigorous and they get a lot of applicants. They can choose you and then they have quite a structured training programme and once you are accepted to the graduate training scheme you get to try the six or seven different departments say a couple of months in each and after that you choose the one which you like best. When I first joined it was very informal, I joined a small company having worked for a large company I now see that it is quite structured.
Return to topAre there other routes into the industry?
Again it would depend on the size of agency you are looking, the larger the agency the more formal and the less likely you are to find a back route in. I am sure there is always a back route in, if you know someone it is always worth finding out from them and getting an internship or a bit of work experience, I am sure you can find a back route in. With the medium and small agencies I would suggest contact them directly or find a recruitment consultant and get in that way.
Return to topWhat's your top tip for breaking into your industry?
What people want is passion for insights, the word passion is probably way overused but if you can show genuine curiosity and interest in marketing and understanding people and consumers and you can convince people of that or can get that across to them you have got a great chance. So it has to come from you, if you do have that curiosity about people and about marketing and you just need to make that shine though.
Return to topWhat are the key skills required for your job?
You have got to be a good listener and good at reading people, and understanding what people are thinking and listening to them, listen to what they are saying and try and work out what they mean. You have to be patient you have to enjoy analysis and be quite nosy as well.
Return to topWhat's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?
It is certainly meritocratic way of working in that you can spend, at each level from when you start out as the most junior possible to the most senior possible, there are various stages within that. How long you spend on each stage depends on how quickly you master it how quickly you take to it, and how ready you feel to move on the next stage. So the better you are and the more aptitude you show it the quicker you will move through. Generally you will start as a junior research executive, as soon as you can show you can handle a job near enough on your own you will become a senior research executive, you then move to research manager, then to associate director and full director, ie someone who is responsible for bringing clients in, that whole process can take five or six years at the quickest, to 10-12 years for the slower amongst us and I include myself in that.
Return to topWhere do you see the industry going?
New media is the hot topic at the moment I am sure you know over the past few years there has been a huge fragmentation in media. The old certainties where you could guarantee an audience of 15m say for a TV advert now the biggest you get for TV advert is much lower than that because of the fragmentation. The number of TV channels has multiplied, you have also got the internet, You Tube and so on and so forth. So there are many more ways that people can interact with brands. Having done a project of that recently, what is seems to me is that marketers don’t yet quite understand how to manage this new media environment and how to deal with this fragmentation. I think this will be a very interesting area to focus on if you were going into marketing or brand consultancy or market research because there is a huge amount of opportunity there and a lot of information that people don’t have which they need. So that could be something special I think. Also I think psychological research, needs based research is becoming increasingly interesting. People making choices about brands on the basis of a notion rather that reason and really delving into the depths of peoples individual psyche to find out why people choose Fosters over Carling. That is very interesting as well I think.
You can’t choose rationally, to choose using only reasoning between Fosters, Heineken, Carling and Stella you couldn’t do it there is not a choice you can make, they are all about the same price, in a blind taste test they all taste basically the same. So if everything is level what you end up doing as a consumer is you choose on the basis of brand imagery and so what you are doing you are buying into a brand myth so with Fosters for example I would say that is the myth of Australian masculinity, with Heineken probably the clever guy, with Stella it is probably the Joe average perhaps, Carling is the regular guy, perhaps something like that. So what you are buying into is intangible, it is essentially emotional about choice and that for me is the interesting thing about marketing is understanding why people making these choices, how can they choose between these things, some of them they can explain to you literally and some of it you can’t and you have to work out the stuff they can’t explain and then explore that stuff in the realm of their imaginations and there are various techniques that you use to do that and that is where it really starts to get interesting.
Return to topWhat are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?
There is Research Magazine, which is all about the industry it is quite industry focuses so if you wanted to bone up on the industry itself you should take a look at that, there is also Brand Republic which is a general marketing media advertising website, and just generally stuff on marketing, particularly books on marketing, there are a lot of goods books on marketing and branding and the future of marketing around at the moment, and it is worth taking a look at.
Return to topIs there scope for movement during or after this career?
You learn a lot about marketing and you learn a certain amount about the industry from the perspective and point of view of market research. So you develop the skills that you can transfer, you can go client side and you can manage research, that is a fairly easy step to take and a lot of people do that and then you can go from client side back to agency side at a much higher level, people do that as well. You can go client side into marketing as opposed to just managing market research so you can get to brand management and eventually become marketing director. So you can use market research as a platform I suppose it most easily translates into marketing, thinking about client side, on the agency side the closest industries to it would be brand consultancy, brand innovation, perhaps design and advertising and those are all quite close to market research and you can really jump into those if that is what you wanted to do.
Return to topIf you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?
Probably something like journalism, writing, a lot of what we do is getting words right, taking information and sorting the wheat from the chaff and sorting out to producing something that is clear and concise and picks up the key important them, journalism or writing or something like that.
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