Viewpoint: My day rate is none of your business!

Timing is everything: Why an old idea might finally have found its moment 

By Phyllis MacFarlane 

Every so often, the market research industry rediscovers a truth that can be found, re-iterating endlessly, in its own archive for decades: that if we want to be taken seriously, we must stop pricing ourselves like a data‑collection service and start behaving like a decision-making consultancy.  Paul Griffith’s excellent paper at the ASC May Conference – Competing on Decision Confidence – argued for precisely this. And although the idea is not new, perhaps its time has come -because the world has changed enough to make it unavoidable. And Paul has given the research industry a language to tackle it.

The AMSR archive shows that the industry has been edging towards consultancy since at least 1980. Diana Mills’ Industrial Decisions paper makes the point with admirable bluntness: industrial clients want research that helps them choose between “alternative courses of action.” They want guidance, not tabulations. They want judgement, not just measurement. By 1989, Marilyn Baxter and Michael Warren’s paper: Motes and Beams sharpened the critique, noting that agencies were still selling “projects” and “methodologies” rather than solutions to business problems, and still pricing themselves according to the cost of fieldwork – a model inherited from the era when data collection was expensive, slow and logistically heroic. 

And within these papers lies an even deeper insight: that client organisations are not tidy pyramids but sprawling, multi‑headed creatures in which decisions emerge from negotiation, politics and distributed intelligence. We did not yet have Paul’s Octopus metaphor (I don’t think we even knew in the 1980s that octopuses had 9 brains!) but the papers in the Archive describe the anatomy perfectly. Researchers were already being told that to influence decisions, they needed to understand how organisations actually work – across functions, hierarchies and competing incentives. In other words, the industry has been moving towards decision consultancy for forty plus years, but slowly, unevenly, and often only when pushed. 

Which brings us to what is genuinely new. Paul Griffiths’ argument about Decision Confidence gives the industry a language it has never quite had. Insight is everywhere; data is everywhere; AI makes both effectively infinite. What Paul points out is that what organisations lack is the trust, clarity and reassurance to act when “good enough” really is good enough. The Archive papers talk about judgement; Paul reframes judgement as the product. He names the thing clients have always wanted, but the industry has never quite known how to describe. 

He also captures something the archive could not foresee in the 1980s : the sheer speed and exposure of modern decision-making. Digital-native expectations of iteration, democratised access to data, shorter tenures, higher personal risk – the octopus now moves faster, is more transparent, and is under far greater pressure. The old descriptive model is not just inadequate; it is impossible. 

And then there is AI. The archive predicted that data would get cheaper; we are now living in the moment when it has become almost free. When machines can generate surveys, process data and produce first‑draft insights in seconds, the old cost‑plus model becomes not just outdated but absurd. AI is the structural pressure the industry has lacked for decades – the force that may finally push us to adopt the value‑based, decision‑centred model it has been circling since 1980 (and probably before, if I looked hard enough!). 

Which brings us back to my title: My day rate is none of your business! That’s what really stuck in my head after the presentation – so shocking a statement it is… Because the shift we have resisted for decades is not methodological but philosophical. Consultants charge for outcomes, not inputs. They charge for expertise, not hours. They charge for the decision, not the data. And they do so unapologetically. 

Perhaps the moment has finally arrived for market research to embrace the dual genius of the Ancient Romans – the ability to be deeply innovative and deeply traditional at the same time. To keep the rigour, the curiosity, the empirical discipline that have always defined the field, while finally adopting the decision‑centred, confidence‑building role it has been approaching, slowly but steadily, for more than forty years. 

If so, then the idea’s time has come – not because it is new, but because the world has changed enough to make it unavoidable. And Paul has given us a language to tackle it.

Phyllis Macfarlane – Chair of Contents, AMSR

Phyllis is a winner of the ESOMAR Excellence Award, the MRS Gold and Silver medals, and a Fellow of the MRS. In the early part of her career she was much involved with the development of analysis systems, including Quantum and Merlin.

At AMSR – the Archive of Market and Social research – her focus is on building content and promoting the Archive for use by A-Level Students and Academics.