Ten years ago, the debate over whether to listen to consumers often created an adversarial stance between client and agency.

Clients usually needed–and still need–to see research as a report card or scorecard that helped them feel more comfortable with the huge outlay of money being spent on their advertising.

On the agency side, "consumer testing" was often seen as an impediment to the creative development process. It was a practice thought to interfere with creativity, especially in the free-spending 1980s. Even in the more sober '90s, a feeling still exists that research can mean putting too much of the decision-making with the consumer.

To many clients, the solution was "copy testing" of commercials that were already concrete ideas. The best way to provide the required reassurance was seen by many clients as elaborately quantitative techniques with banks of normative data, and ideally, proven marketplace predictive validity.

The other side of the argument from agencies has been the "trust me" approach, which means no pretesting with consumers. Many agencies continue to feel this is the only way that truly breakthrough creative can be produced.

In fact, both sides have valid points. Clients need an insurance policy, and agencies want to produce effective breakthrough creative that may defy conventional wisdom and traditional techniques. Consumers are not always the best judges of advertising executions, and should not be expected to be. However, if new ideas don't somehow resonate, there can be a great deal of client and agency discomfort with the huge expenditures of money.

Consumers are the experts in one critical area–on their relationships with a brand, and on how any particular campaign will fit with their system of beliefs about the brand. Only by knowing how consumers feel about a brand at the outset, can advertising and marketing professionals see how new information fits in and, therefore, be able to develop exciting and meaningful creative.

This change of emphasis to gain a better understanding of the consumer's relationship with the brand early on in the development process, and before executions are created, is causing a shift to a different thinking process. As a result, a distinct and often much more fruitful and less adversarial research process is evident in the late '90s.

The account and creative planning functions and planners are becoming greater forces in the development process. Five years ago, the 4As Account Planning Group Annual Conference in the U.S. attracted about 40 people. Almost 800 delegates attended last year's conference in Boston in July.

In the '80s, the emphasis was on the messagessent out to the consumer. Today, we are looking more closely at how these messages are being received.

As a result, the research process is changing. More work is being done up front, which feeds into the positioning-development process. It also provides greater insights into the consumer's "truths" about a brand, and allows for more imaginative approaches to build on these truths and to appeal to the constantly evolving consumer in an ever-changing world. When this type of research is done up front, it means marketers have a more solid foundation on which to build new ideas.

Here are some of the emerging trends in qualitative research we are seeing in this new environment of the client and planner partnership:

• Highly exploratory qualitative questions asked at the very beginning of the positioning-development exercise. For example: What do consumers see as good examples of trust? How do these examples relate to the product category? To the service in the product category? And to the brand? With two brands being advertised together, what is their relationship to each other in the minds of the consumer?
  
  
• Qualitative research to update the brand team on the brand itself and on the brand/consumer relationship. Even though large quantities of research may already exist, there may be new ways to look at the brand relationship–to supplement what is already known–using different projective techniques and stimuli;
  
  
• Several phases of exploratory research–even two or three phases of qualitative research–are used to build and then explore new conceptual directions, long before storyboards are even mentioned;
  
  
• Smaller sessions, such as pairs, trios or minis, are allowing a deeper understanding of each individual's thinking processes, in addition to group interaction;
  
  
• More small sessions are being organized rather than only one or two "traditional" focus groups. (Traditional groups consist of eight to 10 respondents where you may find a similar number of opinions, or only one or two views, depending on the interaction among the respondents, question order and other factors of group dynamics, which even the most highly skilled moderator cannot control.);
  
  
• Work being done with consumers as relationship-development partners, since they are the experts on whether or not they will actually buy the brand, or buy it again.

In general, researchers and their clients and planner partners are beginning to do a few things differently in the late '90s. As noted in my previous article on how we are improving our listening skills ("Learning through listening," Oct. 19, 1998 ), we are also beginning to feel more comfortable listening to the consumer early on in the process. This comes from realizing that it's critical to understand the other side of the brand purchasing partnership before we aim any messages in that direction.

The benefit to this shift in approach is that meaningful breakthrough ideas have a better chance of emerging and evolving into successful programs.

MARION PLUNKETT is president of Plunkett Communications Inc., a full-service Toronto-based marketing research firm. This is the second in a three-part series examining fundamental changes to qualitative research over the past decade.