Today's empowered customers have greater choice, are less loyal to brands and expect more from the companies they choose to support. Researchers need to become more agile and resourceful, and move beyond traditional research, ad-hoc surveys and sample panels. It's a choice between survival and irrelevance. In this presentation at the 2015 Vision Critical Summit, legendary market research expert Ray Poynter examines the major trends reshaping his industry and provides 10 do-or-die strategies for survival.
2. Smarter
Researcher
Customer-
centricity
Complexity
Faster
The World Has Changed
The insight that companies require has changed. Today’s business world is complex,
requiring companies to act faster. At the same time, there’s tremendous pressure for
companies to become more customer-centric. The need for meaningful customer
feedback and insight is greater than ever. Researchers need to become smarter and
more agile and resourceful.
3. In a recent ebook, I examined the major trends reshaping market research. I also provided
recommendations on how to adapt and thrive in the evolving insight landscape.
4. Separate the Signal from the Noise
Research is now too diverse and complex for any one researcher to master the whole
process. From neuroscience to semiotics, social media to smartphone ethnography,
big data analytics to online communities, the field is vast, with fast-moving parts.
5. Separate the Signal from the Noise
A key skill for insight professionals in the future will be the ability to collaborate with
providers of different services and, beyond that, to manage multidisciplinary teams and
the relationships between different providers.
6. Separate the Signal from the Noise
Identifying what’s important—the signal— and what’s just noise is critical for researchers.
7. Response
Rates
Complexity
& Neuro
2Traditional Surveys Are Not Enough
For the MR professional, research is no longer about asking long sets of direct questions:
it’s about creating an ongoing dialogue, so that meaning can be uncovered and interpreted.
Old methods like traditional surveys don’t provide answers that are meaningful.
8. Big Data Isn’t Enough
Big data is a black hole that researchers have yet to decipher meaningfully.
Researchers must develop more appropriate analysis and application of big data so
that it’s easier to interpret and provides more actionable and impactful insights.
9. Engage Customers in an Ongoing
Two-Way Relationship
The days of methodological certainty are gone.
Quantitative market researchers can no longer take for granted that sampling and measurement
procedures will produce a set of statistics that indicate how good an estimate is likely to be.
Quantitative researchers today need to learn from qualitative researchers, who use more than one
source of information to help check and confirm findings.
The best method: a customer intelligence platform, which allows a company to engage with
customers in ongoing, two-way conversations to better understand their wants and needs.
10. Become a Storyteller
In a recent study in Connected Wisdom, Vision Critical’s insight community:
37% of researchers said that they have a clear understanding of what their organization is
trying to achieve
18% were enthusiastic about their team’s goals
27% felt they knew what was expected of them
9% felt that understood the KPIs
11. Go Mobile
33% 50%
One of the key reasons to go mobile is to be with customers all of the time, opening up chances to
be in the moment, to collect passive data and to collect multimedia such as photos and videos.
12. Embrace Innovation
The rate of change this year
is the slowest you will ever
experience!
Researchers need to keep adding items to their toolkit in order to stay relevant, blending
traditional methods and skills with new options created by technology.
13. Connect the Dots
Insight professionals are the people best placed to ensure that information is connected,
turned into a story and used to support evidence-based decision making.
14. Translate Business Problems
“How can mobile technology raise
awareness of clinical trials, and be
utilised to sign up patients?”
Laween Atroshi, Medical Trust
Market researchers must be able to take business problems (as expressed by marketing,
production, brand management, logistics, finance and HR) and turn them into research problems.
15. Breakout of the MR Silo
Marketing
MR
Project
The key role of market research is to provide illumination to decision makers across
the whole organization.
Top 250 grossing fire hydrants 2013/14 – Ben Wellington
If a soccer team would have had these same scores only four players would know which goal was theirs.
Only two would care.
Only three would know what position they were playing.
And only one player knew the score.
In 1854 a map produced by Doctor John Snow, altered the world.
In the world of the 1850s, cholera was believed to be spread by miasma in the air, germs were not yet understood and the sudden and serious outbreak of cholera in London's Soho was a mystery.
So Snow did something researchers do now, he mapped the cases. The map essentially represented each death as a bar (circles in image above).
It became apparent that the cases were clustered around the pump in Broad (now Broadwick) street. Although there were some outliers though and Snow wrote that:
“In some of the instance , where the deaths are scattered a little further from the rest on the map, the malady was probably contracted at a nearer point to the pump”
At a local brewery, the workers were allowed all the beer they could drink - it was believed they didn't drink water at all. But it had its own water supply too and there were consequently fewer cases.
In nearby Poland street, a workhouse was surrounded by cases but appeared unaffected: this was because, again, it had its own water supply.
It turned out that the water for the pump was polluted by sewage from a nearby cesspit where a baby's nappy contaminated with cholera had been dumped. But he didn't just produce a map; it was one part of a detailed statistical analysis.