Compared to the UK, or even London alone, the Scandinavian market research arena is ridiculously small. You would have to work hard to find 4000 persons working full-time professionally with market research in any way (not counting interviewers, but secretaries, assistants etc). Still, we are masters in the art of setting up numerous organisations, dividing and weakening the industry, instead of speaking with the one strong voice we are all in such dire need of. And most surprising of all – no one knows why we behave like this!
One reason is obviously the different countries and different languages. Not a good reason, but at least an explanation. It takes thirty minutes to travel from Copenhagen, Denmark to Malmö, Sweden with train and Danish is less different from Swedish than the Malmö dialect is from the the incomprehensible gibberish spoken in the north of Sweden. Nevertheless, Danes stick to themselves and Swedes stay in Sweden. At meetings with the Swedish MRS in Stockholm, I often meet people who have travelled 500 km or more to get there, from Malmö, Gothenburg or Härnösand, but I never saw a Dane or Norweigan at a Swedish meeting before I started to invite my personal friends. The number of swedes I have met in Norway and Denmark could be counted by the fingers on one hand.
If you accept the rather sad fact that Scandinavia is several weak countries and not one strong region, things get a bit more logical, at least to start with. Take Denmark for example. Danes are a relaxed bunch, working when work is required, enjoying themselves when they can. They have one organisation for the 14 largest companies, FMD, which used to be a member of EFAMRO, but now works on its own. It is a serious organisation, but I get the impression they don't do more than they have to. If you want more action, check out Analyseforum, a very active, but also highly informal gathering of senior researchers. Without membership fee, official roster, formal board, web site, regulation (charter?) - to be honest: they lack everything but ambitions – they manage to arrange four interesting seminars yearly with some 30 people attending each time. Other than that there is nothing MR-wise happening in Denmark. There are rumours that a few of the biggest clients meet informally now and then, but they also attend the Analyseforum meetings, so I am not sure their group is that active.
Norway is the role model when it comes to organising market research, not just for Scandinavia but for most countries in the world. They have one association, NMF, unifying providers and clients as well as big and small companies. NMF has an impressive total of more than 1200 individual members – most of them living and working in the half-million-town of Oslo (the four big research companies, controlling at least 70% of the market, are all within crawling distance in the city centre). Everyone who is anyone is a member of NMF, any controversity is resolved within the association (except for when ESOMAR appointed the "wrong" national representative), all public MR meetings and seminars in the country are arranged within the realms of the association and they even publish a quarterly magazine (unheard of in Sweden and Denmark).
Sweden is a farce in comparison. We do not only have one organisation for the clients, SMUF, one organisation for general market researchers, SÖK, one association for statisticians, Statistikersamfundet and a very active ESOMAR representative. We have two organisations for companies: FSM (for the mid-sized) and SMIF (member of EFAMRO – for the larger companies). As a representative of SMRN (Scandinavian Market Research News – an almost non-profit online community and news service) I have interviewed the chairmen of almost all these organisations, as well as the CEO:s of all larger companies and I have asked them all why we have this situation in Sweden. No one has a clue – "That happened before I got into the industry". Do you think anyone wants to do something about the disintegration? Of course not – why awaken the sleeping bear?
A gleam of hope came this spring when SMIF (the big-company association in Sweden) changed their rules drastically, allowing both field-n-tab companies as well as mid-sized agencies as members. The FSM chairman immediately abdicated and joined SMIF with his fieldwork company, the largest in Sweden (which is a branch of Norways largest fieldwork agency). Along with them came a couple of other field-n-tabbers, previously not members anywhere but in SÖK, but the rest of FSM has not yet followed suit. The new SMIF membership rules have only been in existence for a month so there is still time, but I have my doubts. There is no animosity as powerful as the one without a reason. Arguing for two new sections in SMIF, one for clients and one for individual providers, like I do, is a true Don Quijote assignment!
Meanwhile, the large companies grow larger and more international than ever. Knowledge, experience, influences and solutions flow freely at an ever-increasing speed within the global business groups. The loosers are the small angencies and independants, the ones who think the world is the same now as ten years ago and that Stockholm (or Oslo, or Copenhagen) is the world. And the bizarre little thought that the market research world could sometimes stand for a little bit more noble than fierce rivalry and tough commercial competition.
Henrik Hall
SMRN.org
NB! The article was written for and published in UK based Business Intelligence Groups newsletter BIG Times in 2006. Some things have changed since then, particularly in Denmark, but most of what I wrote about sadly remains the same.