Brands and products have to adapt to the demands of today’s consumer — and this change must happen fast. Traditional market research – phone surveys, panel discussions, and field research for example – is not keeping pace. According to a recent report by GreenBook Research, market researchers say the biggest challenge they face are the methodologies of market research. These methodologies take significant time to execute, typically taking six weeks to six months for a study. When compared to traditional market research methods the analysis of non-traditional unstructured data – social media for data collection – is far more compelling when it comes to cost, scale, speed and action.
Issues with Traditional Market Research Methodologies
The way consumers are interacting with technology continues to evolve; shouldn’t research methods follow suit? Traditional market research relies on antiquated technologies that misalign with today’s consumers’ lifestyle. Survey participation, which is at historic lows, is a key data point. According to Pew Research Center report, typical response rates have fallen dramatically from 36 percent in 1997 to just 9 percent in 2012 and continue to decline. We all have demands on our time, and we are beginning to create boundaries around when and how we are contacted. Modern consumers are becoming increasingly more private and more suspicious of research organizations asking them questions about their thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
“as society continues to change and technology evolves, the future of social research is likely to involve some combination of surveys and other forms of data collection that don’t involve interviews.” – Pew Research Center
The growth in the number of unsolicited phone calls has resulted in the growth of more sophisticated technology for screening calls (e.g., voice mail, caller id, call blocking and privacy managers). This coupled with our concerns for personal privacy and government legislation that regulates who, how and when consumers can be contacted has led to more people opting out of surveys, panels, and interviews. To get the most participants and statistical significance, survey farms are incentivizing survey completion, resulting in unreliable and sometimes skewed results. What’s more, participants sometimes simply tell survey-takers what they want to hear, giving answers that are heavily biased and extremely expensive due to the time, effort and incentives.
Introducing the Disruption
There is a sea of information out there in the social media realm that is raw, unstructured and unbiased. Contrary to traditional market research methods, opinions from consumers on social media are free, genuine and encouraged to be transparent. With traditional market research methodologies, the flow of information is generally in a single direction – survey and panel results are updated and delivered to the brand marketers with little opportunity to interact and collaborate with the study’s participants being almost non-existent. With new media, the flow of information is bilateral so that interaction and collaboration are commonly applied. The problem with all this unstructured data coming from social networks is that it is often completely disconnected from the business because legacy analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) software is unable to capture and process it. Yet with the right set of tools, you can find the patterns in the waves of data, and the chaos can be converted to a gold-mine of ordered and actionable data. Increasingly, marketers are employing teams schooled in computations linguistics such as functional machine learning and NLP. They hope to address everything from pinpointing unmet customer wants and needs, to understanding customer sentiment with respect to different aspects of a product or service, to gaining insights into the buying preferences, behaviors and affinities of different target audiences. There is now a way to “quantify” the qualitative insights from social media with the rigor of traditional market research methods.
Allow for Dynamic Growth
The Pew Research Center, the gold-standard in traditional market research, understands this shift too. Their team of methodologists are engaged in ongoing research into improving their existing survey techniques while also looking at alternative ways of measuring the attitudes and behaviors of the public. Pew concedes that “as society continues to change and technology evolves, the future of social research is likely to involve some combination of surveys and other forms of data collection that don’t involve interviews.”
Stagnancy is like a death sentence for those companies hoping to be leaders in the marketplace. Just as the human brain is a dynamic force, so is the business. How do you tailor your growth to match the target consumer’s growth? Disruption.
Disruptive marketing is the prime method to not only grow and change with the consumer, but also to catalyze and anticipate that growth in today’s fast-paced market environment.
By adhering to more traditional marketing methods, you are allowing stagnancy in your business. Surveys and panels are expensive, and slow to process. Though it may seem chaotic, unstructured big data is plentiful and can practically be analyzed in real time.
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