Diverse & Inclusive Leaders Podcast #98 - Shane Farrell, CEO Europe at Ipsos

Starting with your first question with regards to the current circumstance. So we're obviously going through a very once-in-a-generation period, as they call it. We're going through this pandemic which is affecting everybody, all different businesses, all different industries. The business that we are in, the market research industry, it's having a big impact on our business as well. First and foremost, because not all of our clients are business as usual, so that is slowing down how they are executing their business, maybe not conducting as many research programs as before. And then on the other side, how we actually execute our research. The most obvious forms that would be affected would be what we call face-to-face interviewing, so people that would be doing interviews in malls or door-to-door. Obviously that has all stopped with all of the lockdowns, all of the isolation. But it's also a period where we're going through a lot of change. It's very interesting sometimes when you have change forced upon you that you have to move very, very quickly. So in some parts of the world where we would normally do a lot of face-to-face interviewing, maybe more where we'd be working for governmental research or we would be doing work in developing markets, we've put a big effort into moving a lot of that to online research. Interestingly, we have some feedback that our participation rates, response rates from people that we're interviewing are up. Because why? Because people are at home, they have a little bit more time. We're actually able to interview some professionals that would be more difficult to reach. So it might even sound surprising, but in the healthcare industry, obviously the healthcare industry, all of the doctors are very busy, but there are some specialists where particular procedures are put on hold and some of these people are available to help us with trying to give information back to our clients. But yeah, it's a huge period of turmoil. We believe as one of the biggest market research companies, if you just look at the news every day, what's coming out is all about data. It's all about, you know, everybody's looking, it's not very nice, but what are the death rates, what are the number of cases. And at the end of the day, those are statistics that are coming back, and those statistics have to be accurate. Everybody's been a lot of questions about the accuracy, maybe more in some countries than others, but what are those measures being measured over? For example, in Ireland they were reporting 71 deaths two days ago, but then they said that was over a period of three days, not over a period of one day. So the reason I'm saying this is that when we're all locked down in our homes, we're hungry for information and we're hungry for the right information, accurate information, because there's so much information out there. And for our clients, I think it's going to be, our clients span all different industries, whether it be consumer packaged goods, whether it be healthcare, automotive, high tech. Everybody's looking for accurate information right now, and I think the best that we can do as an industry, market research industry, and as a company, is to provide accurate, timely, fast information that can guide us in making decisions. Because you even look at what's going on at a governmental level. The governments, our leaders, our elected leaders, most of them elected anyway, are relying on experts to govern how they make their decisions. You will see that whether it be prime ministers or presidents or whatever, they're relying on experts in healthcare, in virus control, to help make probably some of the biggest decisions that are affecting a generation. We've never had anything like this. So the reason I'm saying all of this is that information is so important because it guides our decision making. That's where I think market research has a role to play. Not at the very center, but we have a role to play in all of that.

Like most market researchers, I fell into market research. Very few people come out of university saying 'I want to be a market researcher,' and that doesn't mean I'm putting down the industry by any means. It's just most people kind of fall into market research. So how I ended up doing it: I studied a Bachelor of Science in Business in Trinity College in Dublin. Then, as was the time when I came out of university, there was very high unemployment, even higher than what they're predicting for next year, which is terrible. It was normal back then in Ireland to have mostly educated people emigrate. So I went to the States and I was in Washington DC, and I took up a part-time job while I was looking for a full-time job. That part-time job was working in a market research agency doing what they call coding, which is essentially going through all the questionnaires of open-ended responses and putting them together in an understandable manner. Anyway, I was doing that as a part-time job, and then the owner of the agency, a guy called Dr. John Wolfe, a small agency, offered me a full-time job. So that's how I came into market research. It was a great starting place because it was a small agency of 25-26 people. He was what I consider, I've met a lot of market researchers, probably one of the best market researchers that I've ever come across. He had a PhD from Michigan in Sociology, that's where a lot of the top researchers would come from in the States. And he believed in knowing all of the basics. So I had to go back and restudy a lot of stuff that I'd studied in university that I thought I'd never use, a lot of statistical methods. I was not allowed in front of a client until I could explain things like regression on paper, perceptual mapping, a lot of scientific stuff, statistical methods. But it was great training because it got you on the basics. I spent six years there. Then I had an opportunity, I want to talk about life decisions. I had two offers at the time: one was to work for one of the big telcos overseeing their division in the Caribbean, and then I had another offer which I didn't know what to do with but sounded very interesting, which was to start a business in Russia. That was back in 1994. The wall had just fallen, market research didn't exist in Russia, however there were a huge number of sociologists and statisticians. So anyway, I want to talk about decision making. I had one week to make up my mind what I was going to do. That week is probably one of the most important weeks of my life when I look back on it, because life is all about the decisions that you take at any particular point in time. I didn't know anything about Russia, I didn't speak Russian (I still don't, by the way), but I decided it was a chance and it was an adventure. I also had ambitions at the time to be an entrepreneur. I was very lucky that I was put in contact through some friends with the global CEO of Citibank at the time, and he had just started business in Russia. People who knew him put me in contact with him, and I'll never forget speaking to him on a Sunday night. He said, 'If I was a young man trying to make up my mind what I was trying to do, and if you have any ambitions to be an entrepreneur or be a millionaire, go to Russia. That's the place to go.' I was very lucky that somebody knew the global CEO of Citibank and he gave me 15 minutes of his time on a Sunday evening. Was he right or wrong? I didn't know who the guy was, but you certainly listen to somebody like that. I look back on it, it was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. Anyways, I moved with an American company in 1994, then I saw the opportunity to start my own business, F Squared, together with a partner Michael Fodor. So it was Fodor and Farrell, that's where the F Squared came from. We opened doors on April 1st, 1997, and we always said April 1 was our favorite date to do that because we didn't want to take ourselves too seriously, we wanted to take the business seriously. We built the business up, but after one year we had a crisis in 1998. We had to make a decision: do we go back home or do we keep going? We decided to keep going. I look at this crisis now and I compare that with what we did back then. That crisis lasted for over a year, and that's where people I think need to understand today that this crisis is not going to be over the middle of May when we open the lockdown; it's going to go on for the year. If you want to get through a crisis, you've got to have a long-term plan. Anyway, 2002-2005 we sold the business to Ipsos. I've been with Ipsos ever since. I was looking after their Central Eastern European business, after EMEA, now looking after Europe. I've had a number of different jobs. So yeah, I've spent about eight years in Russia and about eight years in the States.

That's true. I think the industry is gaining some more exposure than it used to have. We used to be the guys and girls that were locked in the back room, and all the colorful creative ad agency guys and girls were the ones that were out front, taking the front page of the news in the marketing world. I think it's changing a little bit now because data is now at the very core of everything. Market research is needed more now than ever. I think we could probably do a better job as an industry in promoting itself in terms of encouraging people to take it on as a career, maybe joining up with the universities a little bit more. It is a science; you need to have training in it, you need to know about statistics, you need to know about sociology, you need to know about behavioral areas. It's growing in so many different areas, whether it be behavioral science or now we've got social intelligence, social media tracking and so forth. Quite technical, it spans a lot of different areas. It's quite global as well. It doesn't have to be as much on the ground as it used to because you can do so much more remotely now through online interviewing, mobile interviewing, social media tracking. But the industry follows the clients. At the end of the day, if I look at the big clients that we work with, we work with all the big CPG companies, whether it be Unilever, Nestlé, Google, Facebook, and so forth. All those companies are global companies and they want to have global information, and that's where they need companies to be able to give them that global insight. People who are able to speak globally, or at least be able to speak across multiple countries regionally. Ultimately they want people to be able to speak globally, but information is getting transferred at a global rate now. So if you're not able to do that, you're limiting your offering to your clients.

I'd say the changes that market research have gone through in the past five years are more than the industry has gone through in the past 50 years. But it needs to change, and it's probably been a little bit slow to change. But what I would say is that the science behind it, the statistics, the knowledge, still remains at core importance. So what has changed is the means of data collection. One of the most important approaches that companies are looking for now is multiple data sets. So you've got your internal data, you've got external data, you've got social data. They need companies to be able to help them pull all of that together. Of course there are platforms that help to do that, but then at the end of the day you still need people to be able to join all the dots. I know when we work for companies like Google, who have more information than probably any company out there, they still come to companies like Ipsos for two reasons. One is that Google is founded on science, a couple of guys who are data scientists and engineers, and they appreciate people who also have that knowledge because you're not just born with it, you need to be educated in it. And then to be able to interpret the information. While huge advances have been made in terms of algorithms and pulling information together, they still need people to help put that story together afterwards, or to help pull together different pieces of information to put the story together.

Yeah, I think the industry still, well, to give you an overview, lots of other industries are now entering into the market research industry. So you've got a lot of consulting companies who are coming in, indeed you've got a lot of data-only companies that are entering, like platforms. The industry is going through huge change in that it has been expanded because it's included in all different areas, but it's also getting a lot more competitive. And then let's face it, a lot of the traditional big spenders on market research in the past number of years, the CPG companies, a lot of those companies were very challenged over the past five or six years. Their budgets were cut because they were not growing at maybe the same rate. Five, six years ago everybody was going global and everybody was growing at a steady five to ten percent per annum, and then boom, the whole world changed. Companies suddenly were only growing at about maybe three percent, and there's a big difference between growing at three versus five to ten. Because of that, they cut back in some budgets. But then we have new companies like Google and Facebook that need huge amounts of help with their information as well, and they're beginning to fill the void of where some of the more traditional companies used to be at the forefront.

Yeah, I think when we talk about diversity, diversity can mean a lot of different things. I know there's a push on within Ipsos, as there are across a number of different companies, to make sure that there's more of a gender balance especially at the more senior level. If I look at the area that I oversee within Europe, Eastern Europe is actually a good role model for what we're doing there. A large number, if not the majority, of our managers are female. Our country managers, our managing directors are female, and they are very successful businesses as well. They're not just average businesses; I'd say some of them are some of our highest performing businesses. They produce very high growth, they produce very high profits. How that came to be, I don't know, I'm not a historian, but I think if you look back over communist times, there was maybe more of an acceptance of females within the workforce. And then sadly when the wall came down, it was very tough on the change in society, and I think maybe the females were the stronger of the two genders and they were able to deal with those changes a little bit more than the males. And maybe also there's been a bit of a tradition of a higher percentage of females within our industry anyway. But if I look at our business in Russia, female managing director; Ukraine, female managing director; Poland, female managing director; Romania, female managing director. A lot of our big businesses across Eastern Europe, not just in Eastern Europe, Western Europe as well, in Norway, so forth. That's one side, gender. But I don't know, especially during these times where we're all in contact with each other through Zoom or Microsoft Teams, I just get the feeling that gender and nationality goes out the door. Nobody cares. At the end of the day, the most important thing is whether you can perform or not, are you able to do the job. I don't think nationality, certainly when you're dealing at a global level within Ipsos, is an important factor. And I think that's a great thing. The more we can promote that, the better. And just to hold it up as here are businesses that are successful, and of course we should have equality, but it's not having equality for equality's sake. It's just the right thing to do, because half the world is equal genders, so why should it be skewed otherwise? And then in terms of international mobility as well, I think it's important that it's based on what their success is, not what their nationality background is.

That you go in with an open mind, and it's down to how successful the person performs a job. It's just an open-mindedness, and then it's up to the individual to prove themselves.

Yeah, I'm not sure I'd consider myself a highly successful person. I don't know. If you think about mantras, I don't know. Take a chance, but only do so if you're ready to persevere. Because if you're not ready to persevere, taking a chance is gambling, right? That said, there's a fair bit of gambling when it comes to entrepreneurship, I think. And it sounds like you definitely took a couple of risks in the air for sure. I know I would agree with that, but I think you've got to be ready to persevere as well, because some people get lucky, but I guess it's just with hindsight. If you're going to take that chance, take that chance with in mind that you're going to have to put in a lot of work, a lot of hard work behind it. And if that's what you want to do, then it comes down to: is this what you want to do? Then you'll happily persevere.

Oh, I don't know. Maybe my father. I don't go around with big heroes or whatever. I think heroes are maybe too influenced by idols and celebrity and all that kind of stuff. My father was a guy that I hold up in high regard. Bright guy, but had a very well-rounded life, you know, in addition to his job, his family, his hobbies. Sad is the man or the woman that doesn't have a hobby as well. So I think maybe the first guy that I worked for in Washington because he was a brilliant researcher. My former business partner, I would call him an inspiration because we're partners; if partners can't inspire each other, it's not a good partnership. Ipsos CEO, Didier Truchot, you know he took it from a two-person company up to 18,000 employees today, so he's an inspiring guy. They'd be some of the people that I would think about. But I don't think in terms of the Jack Welches. I don't know Jack Welch and what he's about. I think about people that are actually new. They say that heroes, daily heroes, would be ones I would consider more.

Don't be afraid to have confidence in yourself, I guess. It's very easy to look around and think everybody else knows it better or other people know better. So trust your gut, trust your billions of years of evolution. When the hairs go up on the back of your neck, they go up for a reason, and trust them. And then maybe to have confidence in that, not to second-guess yourself too much. It's not all going to go right; things will go wrong as well. But if it feels right and it's what you want to do, that's over 60% of it, I think.