A Symphony Services press release just gave me a jolt. The head reads, “blah-blah-blah Featuring Leading Independent Analysts John C. McCarthy and Bruce Richardson.” What’s this? John McCarthy quit Forrester, Bruce Richardson quit AMR Research, and they’re independent analysts now? No. I misinterpreted Symphony’s use of “independent.”
“Independent” gets my vote as one of the most over-used, confused, and divisive labels applied to the industry analysts.
Many vendors regularly refer to analyst research studies as “independent”. You’ve seen it in press releases and SEM ads: “An independent study shows…” That always seems a bit odd to me. Think about it. In the first place, why would you bother to promote an analyst study if you felt that right off the bat, you need to convince people that it’s “independent”? In the second place, what’s the benefit of any vendor calling any analyst report “independent”? Either your sales target is already a skeptic and holds a negative opinion about the objectivity of the analyst firm in general (which is now rubbing off on your company by association), or you’ve just raised an objection that your sales target may not have had. You lose either way.
I’m just as guilty as any other culprit in taking liberties with the word. I say “independent analysts” when I mean “SOHO analysts.” It’s a courtesy, from one SOHO (me) to another. Plus, I’ve always disliked “boutique analysts.” What does a boutique analyst do? Sell trendy, overpriced research from Italy? Wouldn’t that mean we should refer to IDC, Gartner and Forrester as “big box analysts”?
We can agree that Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Richardson are well known analysts. We can agree that they’re competing analysts. Chances are we won’t agree on whether they are “leading independent analysts”, until we take some of the “I” out of the meaning of independent.
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