This research was done in conjunction with the Insights Association. Special thanks to Dynata, MarketVision Research, and HubUX for all the work that went into this effort.

My hope is that this report successfully helps you navigate the waters ahead that face us all.

ACTION: Before you continue, please write one trend that you see impacting the market research space over the next year.

The changing landscape of market research

The last two years have yielded unprecedented change at a global scale. These disruptions have had a dramatic impact on the market research industry. Remember this Match.com video in late 2000? It is worth a quick repeat.

For brands, it has never been more important to have the customer’s POV represented at the point of decision. In fact, brands that leverage consumer insights outperform the S&P 500 index according to research done by Watermark Consulting. But the bigger headline is those that don’t underperform by 75 points.

Today, successful brands are leveraging and will continue to leverage consumer insights to outperform their competitors.

For agencies, the established ways of doing research have totally changed.

Brands’ demands for faster insights are increasing with their increased market pressure. This is creating new opportunities which disruptors are taking advantage of. Additionally, consumer insight tools democratize research operations, potentially devaluing material aspects of agencies’ offerings.

However, as I’ve been saying for years, “Just because you have a scalpel doesn’t mean you should perform surgery”.

What we do as market researchers is hard. We are quite literally scientists. And our laboratory is the world.

I believe that just because someone can create a survey doesn’t mean they should. Additionally, there is material opportunity to do harm.

Has everyone seen the “leading questions” video from Mr. Prime Minister?

Current challenges in market research

Who has been stressed out trying to get out of field?

Participant recruitment

Back in the early 2000s, I was working on a project with Edwin Wong, now the head of insights with Vox Media. At the time, he was working at Hall & Partners. The project was a last-minute add-in Q4 which meant everyone was getting a nice EOY bonus. But there was a catch. It required a difficult recruitment to happen over Christmas.

“Participant recruitment in studies has been our biggest challenge as there is more competition for the attention of online audiences.”

In those days, not everyone was on email and smartphones had not yet hit market saturation. We used a combination of Random Digit Dialing (cold calling using a phone book), email list acquisition, and third-party sample providers like Dynata (then SSI). This multi-sourcing approach got us out of the field. Albeit, working through some of Christmas Eve to finish by Christmas Day.

We’ve all got our field war stories. It is likely some of you are in the trenches right now! In the words of one brand executive, “participant recruitment in studies has been our biggest challenge as there is more competition for the attention of online audiences.”

Competing with big brands

Recently, we built a proprietary panel for a major automotive brand. This panel consists of electric vehicle owners in four countries across North America, APAC, and Europe. Initially, we looked at just using social ads and Google Ad Words. However, after a quest budget check, we found there is fierce competition for these people. Why? Because brands like Ford and Tesla are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for their clicks because those clicks may lead to a $75,000+ purchase. Meanwhile, you have little old market researchers trying to compete for that same click.

So, how do we win? Just like we always have, by being crafty. Similarly to when I was recruiting for Hall & Partners, we used a multi-source methodology leveraging social ads on platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram, partnering with influencers on TikTok, and DMing people on social; we were able to fill the panel in only a few weeks. What is remarkable is that these participants are happy to share their feedback via surveys, but they really enjoy video questions and participating in video interviews via Zoom.

These are techniques you can use today. There are tons of free resources available to you on how to successfully build an audience.

Incentivizing respondent participation

As researchers, we have to ask ourselves, “Why would someone spend 15-minutes taking our survey?” (This is actually a direct quote from a brand executive.)

“Why would someone spend 15-minutes taking our survey?”

With CPIs around $1 and only about 25 cents going towards an incentive, we can safely say it isn’t for the money. But that isn’t exactly right. Instead, we are seeing fraud rates upwards of 30 to 40 percent. The current way we acquire participants is entirely black-boxed. We have no idea where people are sourced from or how many surveys they have been termed out of prior to qualifying for your survey.

One of my friends, who is in this room, when she was at Microsoft, she joined a panel to see what the experience was like. Shortly after joining she was invited to participate in a survey. So, she jumped right in!

Knowing when to use a survey

Let’s break it down. What is a survey? To answer that, let’s look at who uses them and who doesn’t. If you and I owned and operated a local corner grocery store or bodega, do we need to do a survey? I’d argue the answer is “no”.

Why?

Because we are talking to customers and staff daily. We know what is working, what isn’t working. We know who is happy and who we have pissed off. We know if the carrots are fresh and if the bathrooms are clean. We know if our staff is friendly or not. We know all this because we are talking to our customers and staff constantly.

Now, if we scale up to even one more location…now we need to do a survey. You see, a survey is simply a conversation at scale.

But surveys are anything but conversational. I mean, when is the last time you asked someone,”On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely…” In the next five years, there will be a move away from surveys to something we have not yet figured out

Market research trends & predictions

We’ve talked about key issues. Now let’s switch gears and talk about impact.

After interviewing over 200 consumer insight professionals in both brands and agencies, here are the top seven things that you said will impact market research in the near term:

1. Automation
2. Quality data collection
3. Data integration: Data joins/Taking data from different places and integrating it into your analytics plan and findings.
4. Data visualization
5. Agile research/method approaches
6. Hiring/staffing
7. Tight labor market

The 28 areas of impact fit into five clusters:

1. Digitization of research
2. Impact
3. Human Focused
4. Sampling
5. Methods

The importance of speed

When thinking about the impact areas of Digitization of Research, we find that Automation, Data integration, Agile research, DIY in-house research, Instant response, etc. all unlock one thing: Speed. But at the expense of everything else.

Across 100% of the 18 one-on-one interviews I did with insights executives at major brands, it was considered to be better if you were 60% right with an on-time insight vs 90% right a day late.

A changing relationship with stakeholders

But there is a shift that taking place. Many brand researchers are changing the way they engage with stakeholders. Instead of insights being more transactional with company stakeholders, researchers are fulfilling a strategic role.

What does this look like? Researchers engage with executives throughout the project lifecycle to share findings and include their POV on each phase.

One brand researcher at Adobe has been leveraging this approach for great outcomes. In a recent customer segmentation study, he built a strawman set of segments with executives, then did a round of qual. The results of the qual were presented to the execs and they weighed in which informed the next phase of the research.

This approach has totally changed the research process and greatly increased research impact.

If you’d like to chat about this research or create your own community for instant access to your customers’ thoughts and feelings, I’d love to talk to you today!

You can always reach me on social or email me.

Happy researching! 😊