The future is high-frequency personalised research
There is a greater need to get the right data and insights faster for global brands and researchers alike
Jackie: How would you categorise your company in the overall data, analytics and insights industry?
QuestionPro is positioned as a market leader in the insights space. Collecting data and making sense of it is as easy for a novice and a seasoned professional within the QuestionPro ecosystem. There is a fit for everyone, from the most powerful free survey software to robust tools that cater to advanced researchers. QuestionPro consists of many products built on a survey engine, including the Research Suite, which has a community platform, an enterprise-grade survey tool with point-and-click logic, advanced modelling and analytics, a customer experience platform, and a workforce platform.
Dan Fleetwood
Jackie: What would you say are some of the key trends you’re seeing in the industry right now?
The global market research and insights industry is expected to grow from $71.86 billion in 2020 to over $100 billion by 2025. There is a greater need to get the right data and insights faster for global brands and researchers alike. Some of the key trends we are seeing while working with our global customers and partners are:
Continuous discovery:?A recent study indicated that 74% of organisations employ some form of an online community to collect actionable feedback from their target audience. Communities bring out from a tightly knit group of your brand promoters since it helps with co-creation using qualitative and quantitative research methods. Brands prefer continuous discovery as it helps with small but frequent studies and also allows for longitudinal tracking. This research method allows brands to be agile and make more intelligent decisions faster.
High-frequency research:?Another considerable change we are seeing in the research industry is the need for quick turnaround studies without the upfront investment of time and resources to lean into a community or maintain a specialist panel. High-frequency research allows brands, marketeers, and researchers to get a pulse from a representative population on various topics, including consumer preferences, brand affinity, competitive benchmarking, product and service upgrades, and more. QuestionPro’s InstantAnswers, a Slack integration, caters to this market with a purpose-built tool to deploy quick survey questions and get answers within minutes to prove or disprove hypotheses or use the results as a stepping stone.
Hyper-personalization in research:?With the use of smarter research techniques, the proliferation of social media, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in research, there is a noticeable reduction in reliance on extensive sample size research studies with a lot of qualifying and demographic questions. There is now a shift towards hyper-personalized studies where redundant information is accounted for, not captured. Some of these parameters are qualifying information, demographic information, past behaviour with brands, consumer preferences, and more. This allows for smarter data collection, faster turnaround studies, and more significant ROI.
Data quality:?Another critical factor the industry spends a lot of time and resources on is eliminating bad data. Sifting through bad data causes issues at the data collection level and the insights management phase. Checks in place for high-quality samples and respondents, the proliferation of technology to weed out inattentive users, and click farms at the data collection stage is where many researchers and research facilitators are turning their focus to.
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Insights repositories to eliminate tribal insights:?Research has traditionally been known as a disjointed industry where similar studies are conducted in silos, and past research isn’t accounted for. Insights repositories help to lean on past research, draw inferences and trends, eliminate tribal insights, create a single source of the truth and help to get to actionable insights faster.
Dan Fleetwood
Jackie: Where do you see growth in the industry coming from?
Three major scopes for growth in the industry I see are:
Automation of research:?A significant growth factor that I see is the greater use of technology in market research; automation with the help of technology. With more competent data collection and data management, right from the point of experience to longitudinal tracking, technology can help automate research based on milestones achieved or steps taken. This eliminates the need for human intervention and allows for continuous monitoring and improvement. Smart surveys, geolocation-based research, automated data analysis, onboarding of respondents, and taking them through the research process - there is scope for all of these with better automation. With this, data collection and analysis, plus getting the right data to the right stakeholders at the right time, makes it easier and beneficial for everyone involved.
Qualitative human understanding:?With the use of artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) in qualitative research, there is better scope to understand how humans react in certain situations and collect underlying but significant information that impacts research value. The use of video focus groups and questions that capture human emotions during the research process makes it difficult to rig the system and draw more remarkable inferences about emotions, feelings, and more.
Inclusive research:?Many research studies tend to alienate various subsets of people based on their impediments, demographic groups, ability to work with technology, and more. A lot of times, engendering resentment causes respondents not to feel a part of the research process or, more importantly, that their opinions are not valued. Underrepresented audiences are also significant in a lot of research, being unrepresentative of a larger population. Inclusive research brings in various subsets of groups of people who are either differently abled and hence don’t feel like they can participate due to technological constraints or not meeting demographic criteria. Further, diversity in research allows for better representation of the people, which is a significant growth area in the industry in 2022 and beyond.
Dan Fleetwood
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This article is an extract from?The Evolution of the Data, Analytics and Insights Industry?report published on 24 November 2022.