Ethics Shmethics! As long as you get the next job.
A moral dilemma.
Peter Lovett, Chief Executive, Consumer Profile Ltd.
“We live in a world where the culture of dishonesty is pervasive and condoned”
Senior Researcher - MMRS
“Most market researchers try to be ethical, but they often fail, either because of client pressures or, when things go wrong, just out of self preservation.”
Research Buyer - MMRS
Introduction
This paper is a personal view of the extent to which the market research industry conducts its business in a coherently ethical manner. It is not an attack on market research or, indeed, on market researchers. Overall I believe the industry and the people within it to be rather ethical (that is they try their best to do the right thing); however, I also believe that in some areas we act inconsistently and erratically – particularly in relation to issues of data protection and in general ethical business decision making. Such behaviour is based on omission (ignorance) and commission (taking the easier option). I perceive it to be widespread within the industry. This view is drawn from personal observation over the past few years and from original research, which is reported on within this paper.
Background
Recently, over a social game of snooker with a middle aged GP friend of mine, I asked him how he knew that he acted ethically in relation to his patients and his colleagues. He answered:
‘I just do’
‘Was it part of your professional exams?’
‘Only two to three questions’
‘Do you get the magazine?’
‘Well there’s the journal of medical ethics, but I don’t subscribe to it’
‘So how do you know what the current view is?’
‘They report dilemmas in the GP’s trade mag, but I don’t read that bit’
So how do you know what the current view is?’
‘You get edicts from on high – and they go straight in the bin’
‘So how do you know what is right?’
‘I talk to my colleagues – if there is a dilemma we share it – and of course in my business we have more dilemmas than most – so it is just a process of osmosis’
I don’t think things are much different in the business of Market Research.
I began working in market research in 1978, and in 1982 I stood before a panel of three of my peers, one of whom, I seem to remember, I knew rather well. Having answered two to three questions on market research and the code of conduct of its day, I was declared a full member of the Market Research Society. The admission process to full membership of the society has, of course, become rather stiffer since then, but at the time it was not much more complex than the first five questions on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. True we weren’t guaranteed a £1000 for getting them right, but membership did confer my right to hang out my sign as an MRS Member, to obtain a full page for my company in the MRS handbook and, later on, to add a few more letters after my name. As I recall it, at the time when the society was making the membership criteria more onerous, any associate member with sufficient years of membership could apply for and be awarded full membership, merely for the cost of a stamp.
Small wonder then that I and a number of my colleagues continue to be confused by the professional codes that govern us? For many of us, as for my medical friend, they have been learnt through osmosis rather than through active study.
A recent book on business ethics (Wyburd, 1998) makes the point that:
“In recent years, the professional associations have moved rapidly towards becoming self regulators; the main object of which is to ensure high standards of ethical behaviour in dealing with clients while at the same time trying to protect their members from over prescriptive government regulation.”
This is as true of market research as of other professions. But until I sat down to write this paper, I had not read the new Code of Conduct. The leaflet had been sitting on my desk for several months, if not years. And I doubt that I am alone in this. On reading, the 1998 revision is an excellent, clear and relevant document that covers in detail the ways in which we should act in the community. We also have excellent guidelines covering specialist areas such as qualitative research and mystery shopping and how to do research among children – all of which have their own particular issues. We are, moreover, fortunate to have many interested and devoted people who have given up much of their time and energy to developing, revising and providing guidance on the operation of the rules that govern us. The problem is that many of us never look at them and we assume we know them because of some experience with them in the dim and distant past.
Of course, I am aware that the admirable Codeline service run by the MRS, offers clear advice on what is and what is not permissible to those of us who think to call on their services – and I have done so several times. But I am also aware of numerous circumstances, in my own and other companies, where members of the MRS would be prepared to contravene the code, not out of malice, but simply out of ignorance and a desire to please the client, if they were not pulled up by a colleague with a greater awareness of the rules.
But we, as members, are all subject to the following rule of the Code of Conduct:
A23 Membership may be withdrawn or other disciplinary action taken if, on investigation of a complaint it is found that … any part of the member’s research work or behaviour breaches this Code of Conduct
I am afraid the code is broken rather more often than we care to admit – perhaps not in ways that are damaging to the outcome of the research, but certainly in ways that run counter to the long term well being of the market research community (at least as long as it purports to follow the set of rules encapsulated in the Code of Conduct). Having made this statement, I am not sure, from a philosophical point of view, if this is important at all – As GJ Warnock (1976) states in his comprehensive review of moral philosophy: –
“It seems clear that really demonstrative reasoning in morals is certain to be in fact exceedingly rare…while the (necessarily relevant) notion of ‘the welfare’ of human beings surely has…. a perfectly clear determinate core or centre, no one would wish to deny that it has also an extensive penumbral fringe of vagueness and indeterminacy.”
It was this vagueness or indeterminacy in relation to how we make the decisions that drive the moral and ethical conduct of our business that I wished to explore in greater detail
Objectives
The aim therefore for this paper was to explore three questions about our behaviour and attitudes as suppliers of market research.
1Do we understand the rules that govern us professionally?
2Do we invariably follow those rules?
3If we don’t, is this
- through ignorance of the rules?
- because it is easier or more pragmatic or better for business to flaunt them occasionally?
Rather than relying purely on my intuition and personal experiences, I decided to take the approach of presenting a series of dilemmas to practitioners of market research and see how they felt they would react to them in reality.
The hypothesis that guided me was the cynical thought that for many suppliers opportunism might rule the day. That is that we as an industry are masters of situational ethics – the view that suggests that no conduct is of itself good or bad, rather that conduct must be determined as right or wrong in each situation as it arises. Perhaps that shouldn’t be a concern. As one well known researcher and MMRS remarked to me:
“We see dishonesty wherever we look. It is pervasive – we disparage it but have come to expect it from politicians and businessmen. Many market researchers just put a spin on their observations – especially if it supports their favourite clients.”
And, of course, we know that the public does not trust market research. In a recent survey reported in Research Magazine (December 2000) “58% (of respondents) felt that MR interviewers were trying to sell them something and 63% felt that their personal details would be used to sell them something in the future”
So it is important that we get this right – not because of taking some moral high ground, but because it is good for business – and ultimately because it will keep out the regulators.
I decided to construct a questionnaire that would pose a number of ethical dilemmas drawn from my experience as a researcher and company owner. Originally the intention was to devise a broad based questionnaire that could be mailed to a sub sample of members of the MRS and would therefore provide information on the different ethical standards of people at different levels of the industry and with a range of jobs within the industry. Unfortunately I hadn’t taken account of the Data Protection Act. A matter of omission rather than commission on my part. To comply with the Act the MRS has a strict ruling that information on members may only be used for the purpose for which it was obtained and may not be handed to third parties – except, presumably, in pursuit of surveys conducted on behalf of the society.
Suitably chastened by my lack of understanding of the rules, I went about amending the approach. We have a database in my office that we have collected for the marketing of our viewing facility. The database consists largely of senior qualitative researchers and, to save time and effort, this was what we used as the sampling frame for the survey. The questionnaire was also reshaped to focus on the specific concerns of people involved in qualitative research.
430 questionnaires were mailed out to the sample and at the time of writing this document, 133 (31%) have been returned. (Smaller bases will be noted in many of the tables that follow because non-responses have been excluded). Respondents were assured of complete anonymity and because of this, no procedure was put in place to be able to check in returns or to make reminders. A copy of the questionnaire and covering letter is appended.
Table 1 shows the sample composition. And illustrates the bias to those who had worked longer in the industry.
Table 1
Just over 95% of the respondents were members of the Market Research Society, with just over three quarters being Full Members. The affiliations of respondents are shown in table 2
Table 2
Key findings from the survey
The questionnaire was divided into 4 parts covering the following areas
- Pitching for new work
- Fieldwork
- Debriefing and reporting
- Money matters
In each part a number of scenarios were presented that offered dilemmas – many of which are covered by the code of conduct. I have selected the results from some of these for illustrative purposes.
Pitching for New Work
Proposing to excess
First a scenario that explores how we receive work from some clients.
The code expressly forbids people commissioning research from requesting proposals from more than four agencies unless they disclose how many invitations to tender they are seeking. Well it appears that this is something that many of us have faced.
Given the following scenario:
A client approaches you to pitch for a relatively large project. She lets it slip (after you have been to a meeting and spent some time on preparation of the proposal) that there are 22 other agencies being invited to pitch for the project. What do you do?
It was somewhat disheartening to learn that this or something similar has happened to about 40% of us and this includes people who have only recently started in Market Research (i.e. within the past 10 years). Interestingly it was less likely to have happened to freelancers and sadly it was more likely to have happened to Esomar members (nearly three quarters of Esomar members in this sample) who presumably are more often involved in international projects.
There is some concern that this is an increasing phenomenon because, as one respondent put it, “requests are sent out by email, sometimes to as many as 50 agencies”. A response to this behaviour as described by several respondents was to refuse any email approach from unknown sources.
So what do we do in these circumstances? It was apparent that nobody was prepared to make a complaint to the MRS or Esomar about this behaviour but equally heartening to note that most would be unwilling to write a full proposal under these conditions.
Table 3
Precoded responses are given in table 3 and from these it would seem that nearly half of us would rather have a go – if only in a half hearted manner. This is, it seems to me the worst of all worlds. The client loses respect and quality of thought, while the researcher is left in the uncomfortable position of not having done justice to the proposal.
Personally, before anyone wastes my time with the same problem again, I am with the whistle blowers on this one.
Research for PR
But what about the situation where the research is being commissioned for PR purposes only, as in the following scenario that was put to respondents:
You have received a request to conduct a very small project in which the employees of a company will be interviewed about some forthcoming changes that are in the pipeline. During the briefing, the client tells you that this research is purely a PR exercise. There is no need to report on the findings. Any decisions that need to be made have already been made. What do you do?
Here we do meet a real division of attitude. Approximately half, after some battle, would, I believe correctly, if not profitably, refuse to work on the project.
Approximately half of the researchers we spoke to were prepared to conduct the research – perhaps with a modicum of resistance. This is justified on the basis that – it’s not our problem, how the data is used. As one respondent put it:
“I’d conduct the project and present the report, if they choose to ignore it that’s their problem.”
Or even more worryingly:
“it would be patronising to persuade the client about the value of research. This happens all the time.”
Or the commercially savvy response:
“if it was a new client with few further prospects, I would probably turn the project down.”
I would suggest that these responses are based on an incomplete recognition of the risks of conducting the project. Market Research may offer the democratisation of information, to be used as clients wish, but I would suggest that conducting the project would run counter to Principle B5 of the MRS Qualitative Research Guidelines, which as we all know states that:
“The researcher must take all reasonable precautions to ensure that respondents are in no way directly harmed or adversely affected as a result of their participation in a marketing research study.”
I think it would be hard to argue that respondents in this project were not potentially going to be adversely affected by the study, but I, like many of my colleagues would probably get on with working on the project – after all I have my bills to pay. Whether it does us any good in our search for professional respect is another matter.
Some additional points on costing approaches and pitfalls
A third area that I have been aware of since beginning in the business has been the practise of smaller advertising agencies and marketing consultants to request research agency proposals to include their handling fee in the proposed costs as though they were part of the overall research expenditure. This is clearly a result of the poor relations that such people may have with their own clients, but we are asked to comply with these wishes nonetheless, the inference being that if we do not, we will not be given the chance to work on the project – on the other hand, if we do comply, we will look expensive in relation to other quotes the end clients may receive.
As a counter to this, we act for some clients who have employed staff whose sole role it is to buy at the best possible price. Knowing that every time we do business with these clients we will need to reduce costs (if only to justify the jobs of these staff members) there is a great temptation to increase the initial quote that we put out.
In themselves, neither of these positions may be strictly unethical, but what do they say about us as professionals?
Conducting the fieldwork
Observers
The issue of observers at fieldwork has been a hot topic for many years. The effect of observers on groups was the subject of an excellent paper in the 1980’s (Robson and Wardle. 1998) and in her follow up paper about the need to reform our introduction of observers to respondents, Sue Robson (1990) reminded us all that there is “a danger of regarding respondents as some sort of alien being. If we fall into this trap then we lose our respect for them, regard them as a cheap form of entertainment or as a cheap form of ideas to stimulate our jaded marketing or advertising palates.” Since then, we have made enormous strides as an industry. Relatively few researchers would even consider being dishonest with respondents. They will explain who is observing from the other side of the mirror or in the room, and as far as I am able to judge, it is rare for researchers to use the half truths of being ‘observed by colleagues’ that used to be current in the industry and that made me and many of my peers very uncomfortable.