After being elected Australian Market and Social Research Society (AMSRS) president at the conference at Luna Park just last month, it would be remiss of me not to firstly thank Greg Wayman, for seven years of leadership as part of the AMSRS National Executive, and also to congratulate Matt Balogh on his election by members to the role of vice president.  Our profession grows mostly due to the dedication of volunteers and both of these people have donated a significant amount of time over the past few years to the benefit of our profession.

It's a wonderful time to be incoming president of AMSRS.  We have just had the election where the role of opinion polls and market research has had a tremendous profile and impact. We have a growing membership base and financially we are strong.

Looking forward, the Society will increasingly focus its attention on the world outside our domestic profession. This includes external stakeholders, the media, the general public and our Asia Pacific neighbours. For this reason, I was pleased when, earlier this month, I was invited by the New Zealand Market Research Society (MRS) Executive to attend its annual conference in Rotorua. The visit was a reciprocal deal with Mark Lloyd attending the AMSRS conference this year.  

The theme of the conference was ?Thinking that moves your mind' and I can assure you that it delivered on this promise, as the papers and presentations were very forward thinking and discussed many of the serious challenges and opportunities facing our profession.  Of particular note were the issues of technology and its impact on what we do, changing consumer decision making processes, the skills required to produce great quality work in 2007 and beyond, and creating and communicating highly impactful work for clients.

There were international speakers from the United Kingdom, North America and Australia - congratulations to Mark McCrindle for a great presentation. My personal highlight was an unbelievably brave and incredibly emotive paper delivered by Kiwi Duncan Stuart of Kudos Organisational Dynamics.  Duncan's paper discussed three challenges facing the market and social research profession to radically shift our focus as we wrestle with societal changes in the 21st century.  Duncan examined the impact of social networks, neuro networks and why surveys and qual don't always connect the dots.  This paper posed a question to all of us within our profession - to truly understand consumer behaviour in the year 2007, what methodologies do we need to discard and which methodologies do we need to consider using more widely?  I hope our profession in Australia can continue this thinking as we launch into 2008.
Apart from providing great thinking to move my mind, this was the first step towards a closer working relationship between AMSRS and MRS NZ.  There are clearly ideas that we can exchange for the mutual benefit of our professions either side of the ditch.

There's a lot to do and we need to maximize the use of our resources. Therefore, the Society's priorities for the next 12 months are to:

• Focus on the needs of our clients
• Attract and retain talent
• Continue to focus on protecting the business of research
  
• Maintain and develop professional standards
• Work with AMSRO to establish a PR process and plan for the profession in Australia
• Build strategic relationships with aligned organisations such as the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI), the Account Planning Group Australia (APG) and ESOMAR.

Print this page



Other Articles in this edition