The business of delivering primary market research insights is changing. As a 20-year market research veteran, I can testify to this and, most of the time, the changes are for the better. Big picture improvements in information technology lead to reduced friction between asking questions and listening to answers, increased analytical firepower, and simplified presentation of research insights. With the additional improvements in machine learning and general artificial intelligence we will, as an industry, make big leaps in efficiency and, you guessed it, agility.
While technology has continually made insight gathering easier in the way of data collection, analysis, and presentation of data, research design and execution, they are still critical to ensuring the insights developed based on your research are able to be readily used in decision making for marketing, product development, and other functional needs. Making connections between a product’s future market (for pipelined products), current market (for inline products) and the next product in line for its succession is a human perception project. And human perception, for the next 10 years at least, is still distinctly human; it requires the abilities of abstract thought and relation to the human condition, or empathy.
How does this all relate to the common factor in all successful marketing research efforts? It should determine which people you choose to work for you as partners, suppliers, vendors, and consultants. This upcoming Actionable Research blog series is focused on the factors or attributes you use for choosing a great partner for your marketing research efforts. As we will progressively reveal, this is much more important than the latest, cutting-edge technology that offers to integrate all of the data you can collect about your customers and your products (even though that is important and relevant), or the latest non-conscious research tools. Who you choose to design your research, the degree to which they know your market, and the depth of their empathy with your target audience are among a set of critical success factors to consider when you choose a marketing research company to assist you with your project.
For example, an important factor to consider when you engage a consultant to help with your research effort is whether they understand where you are in a particular product’s lifecycle. Quickly understanding why a particular product is a solution to a specific market or audience-related problem is a must for a partner of choice, as knowing where you, the customer, are is critical to creating an effective research design. It is essential to know, before the execution of the research, specifically where you have designed into the data and the analysis the solution to each of the research objectives. All too often, this is lost in the tactical delivery of a research project, or worse, it is not even addressed because it was thought the shiny new technology was supposed to do it for us.
Of course, if a research partner can’t bring along the latest technologies in gathering and wrangling data, effective methodologies for solving research problems, and tools which make it easy to “cross-analyze” your data from many sources, you will not be able to realize the full benefits of their experience and expertise.
And that has always been part of the mix, hasn’t it? The ideal research partner needs experience, empathy, effective research methodologies, current data gathering strategies, and analytical and reporting methods and technologies that can bring all of the gathered data and developed insights into one place, so they can be viewed from many different perspectives.
Throughout our new series, our team will be sharing their experience on the importance of choosing the right marketing research partners – a partner that will bring optimal value from the very technologies for data science, analysis, and insight sharing that so dominate the buzz surrounding what’s new in primary marketing research. Stay tuned for some great stories to bring us into 2019!
Throughout our new series, our team will be sharing their experience on the importance of choosing the right marketing research partners – a partner that will bring optimal value from the very technologies for data science, analysis, and insight sharing that so dominate the buzz surrounding what’s new in primary marketing research. Stay tuned for some great stories to bring us into 2019!
