RAY POYNTER, Director,

Vision Critical University

The Smarter Researcher How to survive in the changing

market research landscape

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.

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.

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.

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.

Separate the Signal from the Noise

Identifying what’s important—the signal— and what’s just noise is critical for researchers.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Download The Smarter Researcher for more info.