This is a proposal that will take several days to pull together, with plenty of brain time, and involving half a dozen people in all. Add that up 40 times and you probably have the best part of a year’s work. And all to win a five-figure contract.
This amounts to a gross breach of etiquette, even if it’s all too common in marketing now.
Procurement is an inevitable part of market research’s future, and we’re going to have to get through some teething pain before the process truly starts to work for clients and suppliers. But in order to work it really does have to be a win-win.
Is this procurement officer conditioned by past experience of disappointing and expensive research? Before we judge him or her, it’s worth considering that insight-less research was around long before insight-less procurement.
Should I turn the other cheek and write the proposal, or demand satisfaction with a spreadsheet duel at dawn?
The issue of procurement is regularly discussed within the Independent Consultants Group (www.indepconsultants.co.uk). We all keenly feel the unfairness of the ludicrous practices of government procurement offices and the notorious PQQ but, along with the rest of the world, are powerless to do anything about it other than knuckle down and take your chances.
The Office of Government Commerce (OCG) appears to be committed to compulsory competitive e-tendering, so there is little or no chance of personal contact or experience counting for anything. Bids are now assessed by formulae applied by central procurements departments who haven't a clue about how research works, so even if you are absolutely the obvious man for the job you can be thrown on on a technicality such as not having a staff competency policy or somesuch (not something independents tend to have).
In the current climate where work is scarce, we are all increasingly dependent on government contracts. However I've got to the stage where I believe my time is better spent networking and pursuing other private sector business avenues where, even if I've got about the same chance as getting a public sector job, at least there will have been a cup of coffee or a few lunches in the process.
I do find the market research industry's comments on procurement more relflective of the industry's failure to embrace any number of what are generally recognised as good commercial practices (like transparency in breaking down costs) than anything else.
Of course there are bad procurement practices (I've heard it whispered that there may even be some pretty dodgy market research practices out there too), but procurement will impact market research in just the same way that it has impacted ad production, media planning and buying, and pretty well every other aspect of the marketing services business. Whether the market researchers like it or not.
This impact does not have to be negative; in my experience procurement people can be a real force for good in that they do insist on commercial professionalism, as opposed to a sometimes blind adherence to a sort-of technical myopia above all else.
The market research industry should ask itself why it is so fearful of procurement. Could it be that secretly it rather fears commercial investigation and examination?
JAMES SMYTHE
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 19 Nov 2009
Total Posts: 38
