From 1979 to 2001, Angus Reid turned Angus Reid Group into the largest research enterprise in Canada with North American revenues of $60 million. After selling to Ipsos, he became CEO of Vision Critical in 2004, and with his son, Andrew, has been revolutionizing the online research panel company. Here, Reid is interviewed by Ken Wong, professor of marketing, Queen’s University and a 2006 MHOL inductee in the Mentors category.
What is now Ipsos is a great success story, but what is interesting about you is it’s not just about one product or breakthrough insight. Do you attribute this to some kind of personal characteristic or quality?
I’ve always liked the concept of enterprise, even more than entrepreneurship. In the case of the original Angus Reid Group, we were fortunate in the sense that, because we were in Winnipeg, there were no clients [based there]. I didn’t get caught in the trap that a lot of my competitors and friends in the industry have been caught in. And that is, if you’re the principal in a market research or consulting company and in a big market, you end up getting yourself sucked into way too many client assignments. You actually become the product.
And during the 20 years I lived in Winnipeg, I was really focused on and forced to develop a cadre of very good colleagues who, in fact, were the product. When I sold that company in 2000 [to Paris-based Ipsos SA], I basically had no [personal] clients. I hadn’t dealt with a client in five years.
In what other ways did being in Winnipeg influence your business?
It doesn’t really matter where you are, you can [have] a business that can become successful. And in both businesses that I’ve known, at the very heart of them there’s been an attempt to grab onto technology. What really saved our bacon, in many ways, was the arrival of the fax machine because it meant that we could very quickly move paper around. The market research business, in those days, was a paper-intensive business. It’s a quintessential information technology business, but just being able to move things around on a fax machine suddenly gave us a lot more scope. We did the 1984 election for the federal Liberals at a very reasonable budget, with overnight polling.
And we did that, in part, by bringing together a bunch of phone centres that shared the results at the end of the evening using a fax machine. This was actually the pre-computer age. But technology really helped to give us a jump start.
Did you have someone that you styled the company after? Or was it like, be the best Angus Reid can be?
I did a little pilgrimage of sorts to the U.S. and spent a day with Lou Harris, who at the time was a very successful pollster/market research guy based in New York. He’d done Kennedy’s polling. I also spent time with Dan Yankelovich, who had done a brilliant job developing Yankelovich and Associates. And I was interested in those guys more because, in both cases, they had added what I thought was the final element that you had to have to be successful in this business; you needed to leverage technology as well as you could and get good people, but ultimately you needed good branding.
How did they brand themselves?
If you picked up a copy of Time magazine every second week in 1979, there would be a Yankelovich Time poll in there. I thought “This is unbelievable branding: this is worth much more than Daniel Yankelovich and Associates buying a full page ad in Time magazine. Why not actually partner with Time magazine?” While I didn’t read the business books and was not a commerce graduate, I had my head above the sand enough to realize there were some successful models out there that should be understood and, if possible, copied.
Is that how you came up with the name of the company?
My company was originally called CanWest Survey Research [before Izzy Asper’s CanWest was a household name], which was a very unimaginative name that I’d picked back in 1979 when I took a leave of absence from university to start this business. By 1982, we were starting to develop some business in Eastern Canada. I realized the name CanWest probably wouldn’t work that well. So a friend of mine [current CEO of Y&R worldwide] Peter Stringham, who at the time was in Winnipeg, said, “Look Angus, you should use your own name. It sounds like two people.” At the time I was 35 years old. He said it will make me seem older, and it’s kind of a weird name so people will remember it. So I made a decision that I would call the company Angus Reid Group, and that I would start to pursue some media contacts which is what I did. And that was a big part of the branding strategy that we used.
You are generating numbers to help people make decisions, but I think we both know numbers by themselves aren’t enough.
There is this tendency to almost say, “Well, we don’t actually have to pay for market research anymore, it’s free, it’s out there, it’s everywhere.” And that’s true, but what’s not out there is the discipline and the analytical focus which converts that into meaningful, reliable numbers and stats that people can make true marketing choices on. There’s a paper that I wrote for the British Market Research Journal in which I reflected that the first survey I did 40 years ago in today’s dollars would have cost $80 per survey to complete. So 1,000 interviews, $80,000–very expensive. And as a result, in those days, people really thought a lot about what they were asking and what the results meant. A huge amount of time was spent–seven or eight weeks–to collect the data. If you fast forward to today, that same data can be collected for about $3 an interview. So you have gone from about $80 dollars to $3 per survey. That just gives you some idea of the amount of information that can be mushroomed up very quickly. We are in the midst of this information revolution in market research, but you have to have some discipline.
Otherwise, there are a lot of people who are going to be disappointed with some of the decisions they make based on what could be very useless data.
What’s the one piece of advice you would give a young person today?
Most importantly, they need to think. And I know that sounds a little abrupt–what do I mean, ‘to think?’ We need thought leaders in this business. There are a lot of technicians, computer programmers, people who are good at doing the various technical elements of marketing or research. But we’re living in a time where the successful marketers and researchers and strategists of tomorrow will really be those who are in many respects the prophets of tomorrow.
