This mix ensures a breadth and depth of experience to draw upon in their deliberations and advice.

The board's task is to focus on topics of importance to the market and social research industry, assess and discuss it in the light of their experience and provide formal action-oriented advice to the joint council.
The first topic they will tackle is ‘growing talent in the industry, on both the supplier and buyer sides'.

‘Talent growth and management is always of critical interest in the market and social research industry and it is exciting that the board has taken on this topic,' says AMSRO executive director Jane Gregory.

‘The new board has started with discussion around what defines ‘talent' in the first instance. In thinking about growing and attracting talent there are clearly opportunities that can arise from a shared industry view of the areas in which we need to develop not just technical ability, but also the less tangible people skills and our business orientation.'
After presenting their recommendations to the joint council, the CAB will share them with the industry at large, at this year's AMSRS National Conference.

John Batistich
Batistich has 17 years' experience in marketing and general management. He has held senior marketing roles at Lion Nathan, Kimberley Clark, Smiths and is former CEO of The Wrigley Company. He is currently general manager of marketing at Westfield, the largest listed retail property company in the world. He was a judge of the Research Effectiveness Awards in 2007 and again in 2008.

What do you hope the CAB will achieve?
We will provide a framework for the new functional skills and behaviours required by researchers to adapt to the changing needs of their customers. These needs are being redefined by rapid technological change. Researchers will need to respond with new thinking, methods and relationships to help lead this transformation.

What is the biggest challenge the research industry needs to tackle when it comes to better understanding the shopper experience?
Technology disruption. The shopper journey is being influenced by more variables, enabled by technology, and the path to purchase is changing towards advocacy and participation. Understanding this behaviour and extracting more value out of the behavioural data to influence purchase decisions will enhance accountability and value.

What is the key message you would like to convey to your current and prospective customers about why they should participate in research?
Observing, tracking and involving your customers in your business has never been more important given the pace of technological change. Organisations will evolve to create closer customers relationships through new social business design. An opportunity exists for research to guide and facilitate this deeper customer connection to fuel strategy and action.

Kathy Hatzis
Hatzis is the head of multi-brand strategy and architecture for The Westpac Group, which now operates five ‘master brands' including Westpac, St. George, BankSA, RAMS and BT. She is the NSW AMI's vice president, was named AANA's Young Marketer of the Year in 2007 and has appeared in Ad News's ‘40 under 40' list of Australian marketers.

What do you hope the CAB will achieve?
I anticipate that the CAB will raise the debate about the current vs required role and style of management of research and customer insight practitioners. We should be protagonists for the creation of new professional development tools across the industry, that will result in more researchers being well-rounded business professionals and presenting themselves in future as contenders for general executive or CEO/board positions.

What is the biggest challenge the research industry needs to tackle when it comes to better understanding the shopper experience?
Ensuring that research methodologies are ahead of curve in the social networking and user interactivity space. What is a constant in human nature is that people don't divulge their underlying motivations, emotions or unconscious thoughts; what also remains true is that a company's competitive advantage will always come from uncovering these current and future needs, as they are being shaped.

What is the key message you would like to convey to your current and prospective customers about why they should participate in research?
Without the ‘voice of the customer' incorporated in the business decision making process, marketers and business practitioners are limiting their success; research should not be viewed as a ‘luxury' of time or cost, it is proof of customer centricity, good governance and is a consistent ingredient of most large-scale business successes. (Note: this isn't to be confused with solely using the customer voice, as some organisations have erroneously done in the recent past).

Mike Daniels
Daniels is managing partner/head of strategy of Singleton Ogilvy & Mather in Sydney. He took up this role after two years as group brand strategy director at Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco where he oversaw global strategy on HP, as well as leading strategy on Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Foster Farms and Emerald Nuts. He has held head of strategy roles at Clemenger BBDO, DDB and McCann Erickson.

What do you hope the CAB will achieve?
I hope it will provide a helpful outsider view to the research industry - it's often hard to self-assess and good feedback and guidance from experienced mentors is as valuable to an industry as it is to an individual.

What is the biggest challenge the research industry needs to tackle when it comes to better understanding the shopper experience?
I think it is about understanding the influence and interaction of unconscious factors on behaviour. A lot of research is based around people's conscious responses - I'd like to see more thought given to how some of Robert Heath's theory of low involvement processing can be operationalised.

What is the key message you would like to convey to your current and prospective customers about why they should participate in research?
Good research can make you smarter.

Gloria Farler
Farler is executive director of market based management at Telstra, where her role is to improve business performance by implementing processes in support of market-based management, including market insights, buyer segmentations, predictive marketing models, marketing training, and market metrics design and reporting.

What do you hope the CAB will achieve?
I believe that our traditional approaches to conducting research projects need to be expanded with a different scope of thinking, and that is what as a group we hope to bring to the professional associations. As the name implies, it is ‘advice' for a very turbulent period - with an uncertain economic climate, increased demands to do more with less resources, the expectation that researchers to be skilled on many fronts in order to influence strategy, what the industry needs is ‘renaissance men/women.' I expect the board will advise the professional associations in methods to distinguish between ‘nice-to-have' and ‘need-to-have' research team assets, and provide members with a concrete profile of the next generation researcher, one who is capable of interpretation at the cross-source, cross-project, cross-findings level.

What is the biggest challenge the research industry needs to tackle when it comes to better understanding the shopper experience?
As in all research, the persistent challenge is to convince decision makers of the importance of research, in this case deeply understanding attitudes and behaviours of shoppers in the particular retail environment. I think that means a movement to more direct observation rather than depending so much on shopper recall after the fact. That approach would also result in insights specifically tailored to the retailer--since not all of us are packaged goods providers where the supermarket is the principal retail channel.

What is the key message you would like to convey to your current and prospective customers about why they should participate in research?
First, we in the enterprise clearly need to make our research topics and questions interesting and engaging to customers. But even more important is to create a sense of mutual purpose and a shared agenda. I don't think the research study is the first place to start thinking about how to get our customer engaged - we need to regularly communicate to customers their importance and their value to us through every interaction. I also think that customers often suspect we really don't act on their input, so we need to make sure that their contribution is heard, by showing them we listened and acted.

Bob Miller
Miller is a marketing specialist with 40 years' experience in large and small ad agencies, client marketing divisions and the media. During his tenure as general manager of marketing at Toyota Australia, the car manufacturer achieved outright market leadership. Most Australians are familiar with Miller's 23-year-running Toyota theme ‘Oh, What a Feeling!' whacky Camry Chicken and other memorably ‘weird' ad campaigns. More recently Miller ran Sydney radio station 2UE for a year and a half. He has been president of the Association of Australian National Advertisers on three separate occasions. He was a judge of the Research Effectiveness Awards in 2007 and again in 2008.

What do you hope the CAB will achieve?
It is my hope that the CAB will encourage senior marketing executives to learn to speak the language of finance departments/CFOs/CEOs and their companies' directors, representing shareholders e.g. ‘discounted future cash flow' and ‘shareholder value analysis'. By discovering through focused research the effect of marketing actions on future cash flows, marketing executives will earn their respected place in the boardrooms as participants rather than occasional guest presenters.

What is the biggest challenge the research industry needs to tackle when it comes to better understanding the shopper experience?
The research industry and its clients will benefit from coming to terms with the fact that shoppers recognise the true commercial value of their information, knowledge and feedback on their experiences. So that a fair price, in one form of currency or another, will need to be paid to shoppers if we are to gain genuine insights that will enable businesses to serve them better. If we fail here, then we will pay in terms of lost margins, discounted pricing, meaningless price lists and reliance on product differentiation that is unlikely to be fulfilled... leading to disappointed customers.

What is the key message you would like to convey to your current and prospective customers about why they should participate in research?
As the president of Harvard University is said to have once responded to a disgruntled student, or perhaps it was an agonised parent, about the cost of getting a first class education: ‘If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.'

Heather White
White is News Limited's Director, News Intelligence Group which involves her in research conducted across the 140 plus newspapers, over 30 magazines and digital brands which make up the portfolio of one of Australia's largest media companies. Research conducted includes brand and advertising tracking, product development, consumer and advertiser experiences, market and consumer segmentation. She is a committee member of the NSW CNG.

What do you hope the CAB will achieve?
Like all clients, I am under increasing pressure to prove to my stakeholders the value of research to our business. As an industry we need to continually evolve and show how that value is provided and I see the CAB as providing an opportunity to be part of that process from the client perspective.

What is the biggest challenge the research industry needs to tackle when it comes to better understanding the shopper experience?
As a media organisation, the role of the media in the shopper experience is often overlooked and understated. If the industry can tackle the issues around understanding what drives purchasing decisions prior to getting to store that would deliver greater insight to retailers and advertisers that go beyond the shopper experience in store alone.

What is the key message you would like to convey to your current and prospective customers about why they should participate in research?
We conduct research to understand and better meet the needs of our audiences. Their participation in research is crucial to our development of products and services that we hope enrich their lives, whether that be news or entertainment. Our business is one of telling stories and without their help we cannot tell them the stories that matter the most.

Tiina Raikko
After 20 years in blue chip organisations on both sides of research, most recently as director of consumer insight and marketing operations at Unilever, Raikko has recently launched her own consultancy, Fuel. In this new role, she will be working with research agencies to help meet client needs. She is a member of the NSW CNG.

What do you hope the CAB will achieve?
On the client side we have plenty to say about the industry and how research should and could work better so this provides a terrific opportunity to harness that and actively contribute to the development of our industry. It's about harnessing the skills, experience and perspective of the largely silent other half of the industry. We aren't generally quiet but when it comes to involvement in AMSRS and AMSRO we tend not to get very involved as a group/as a voice within the industry. There are client networking groups but they are largely about us, not about giving back to the industry and contributing to its development.

What is the biggest challenge the research industry needs to tackle when it comes to better understanding the shopper experience?
I think the challenge is not so much in understanding the shopper experience as in knowing how to apply what they learn. Researchers are good at understanding consumers and getting to the nitty gritty of how they are feeling and behaving. The challenge in the shopper space is translating that into meaningful, actionable recommendations because that requires a good understanding of category management and the trade, something we aren't, as an industry, strong in. The end user clients in this case are less likely to be marketers and more likely to be trade marketing/ sales people with different needs and levels of experience with research.

What is the key message you would like to convey to your current and prospective customers about why they should participate in research?
Taking part in research is a very real way of contributing to the development of the products and services you are offered. If you don't take the opportunity to comment when it's offered then you don't have much right to complain about what you get later. Marketers aren't mind readers, when they ask you for your feedback they want it and are paying a lot of money to get it. Apart from that, the more people they have to ask to get their quota the more it costs and that always comes back in the cost of the products, one way or the other.

Stephen Paton
Paton is chair of the Victorian Clients' Networking Group (CNG) and insights manager at AGL, Australia largest integrated renewable energy company. His research life began almost 20 years ago when he joined Telcats, one of Australia's largest customer satisfaction programs at Telecom (now Telstra). He went on to lead the integration of technology into Telstra's research program including building Telstra's sampling, analysis and report distribution systems. After managing Telstra's segmentation research he went on to consult on research, e-marketing and segmentation before joining AGL in 2006.

What do you hope the CAB will achieve?
I think it is about momentum. I know that through meeting other buyers at the CNG there is a desire for change and for us to become more visible and influential in the industry. I feel that through the CAB the industry is sharing its desire to embrace this and I am excited about what we might achieve. Like all of us, I feel the pressure of day to day tasks and competing goals, and this can restrict the ability to get involved. However I feel the quality of the people involved and our ambitious aims for the CAB makes it the vehicle that will help deliver findings and recommendations that will benefit us all.

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