Views from the Hills by R. E. Stevens, GENESIS II (The Second Beginning) E-Mail views@aol.com

CHANGE -- Death and Change the Only Two things You Know Are Going to Take Place

In response to my Views "We don't get any respect," a longtime friend called to say the reaction in his company to the idea of a need for change expressed in the Views was "This is the way we have always done this testing and it has served us well."  The state of their business does not reflect their level of confidence.  My reaction was, "Are they #1 in their product categories?  Has their business grown faster than competition's?  Is their management satisfied with their performance?"  The answer to all three is a resounding "No!"

I guess it is all a matter of your objectives and goals.  I do know that stimulating change is a difficult task.  As one of my friends would say, "The only person who likes change is a wet baby."  That may be, but like it or not, change is inevitable.  If you don't initiate change, somebody will do it for you.  Change can be your enemy or your ally, it is your choice but regardless it will happen.

Change is all around us.  In my talk on "Keeping the pipeline full," I reflect on the changes in products in my market research time.  For example:

My first computer purchased by Procter & Gamble was a Pickett slide rule (1952).  A couple years later they bought me a Monroe Matic Calculator (a gear driven desk calculator).  This was followed by a hand held calculator in the early 1960s (HP15).  A year later I got an HP45 which I have today and still use to calculate the independence of proportions.  The effective life of computer technology is 18 months.
Not only do products change but methods also change.

My introduction to computers was with a hard wired IBM604 (about 1955).  A total of 16 command steps was not really practical.  In 1957 I learned to write machine language for an IBM 705.  It was not practical for survey work either.  Over the years I tried compiler programming such as Fortran, Salt, Simplex, etc.  None were practical for my survey work.  It took entirely too long to write and test a program.  It wasn't until the mid 1980s that computers and software really arrived in market research.

When I started in consumer research (1952) the state of the art was door-to-door interviewing.  It did not take long before Central Location came on the scene.  This was about the same time Telephone interviewing became the dominant system.  This quickly led to Mail Panels for almost all types of testing.  Then as lifestyles changed, we created enclosed malls which led to the growth of Mall Research.  i should add that quietly in some companies, In-Store Research was growing and the companies were keeping this method to themselves.  They considered it a proprietary position for consumer research, why tell your competition?  Now we are looking at internet research.  Again a lot of changes over the years.

All the above is to set the stage for one idea and that is when i started in consumer research, there was basically one and only one method of research and that was a "Paired Comparison Blind Test."  Everything else has changed but still there are companies where their "state of the art research" is only the paired comparison blind test.  Haven't they seen the advantages of other research methods and the disadvantages of the paired comparison?  There is still a place for the paired comparison protocol but it is limited to a specific problem (see my Views, "Paired vs. Single Product Testing" September 3, 1994).  It is not an all purpose method that some companies evidently think it is.


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