Need for Automation in Market Research

This is the era of Automation. We are already seeing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in various walks of life. From digital wallets to ordering groceries from a kiosk while waiting at a subway station, automation has changed how we go about doing our chores. Automation is widely being used in the marketing world. Programmatic ad buying, chatbots and other emerging technologies are changing the landscape and bringing with them new efficiencies and ways of working.

Consumer market research can also reap the benefits of automation. Brands want answers to specific creative questions (around proposition, claims, pricing etc.), to assess how the target audience is responding) in order to track opportunities and risks, trends and competition for improving products and services. Market research is the at the heart of the whole business. Any strategies built around marketing, communications, partnerships etc. need to stand on the sturdy foundation of market research. Automation improves the accuracy of research, speeds up the collection of data and can save brands a lot of money. It makes quick iterations possible. It also makes testing more intuitive so that human researchers can spend more time analysing the results to produce the actionable insight that brands crave.

With brands, we have started to play with digital tools to make our research faster and more effective, it allows us to observe our consumer online and analyse the results to craft a better data driven hypothesis., and improvise the innovation process.

In the traditional FMCG world, the consumer is very distant from the marketing function separated by layers of distributors and retailers etc. Automation is a necessity today to come closer to your consumer and always stay connected, to not lose touch with the evolving needs of your consumer. Automation allows big brands to work with the agility of a startup-The ideal recipe for growth in today’s world.

Role of automation in market research

1. Drive innovation based on past data

Automation can be used to study past results to predict future results, such as understanding how a target audience responded to a product, campaign or a service, ROI of past campaigns, which marketing channel worked the best, which messages resonated well etc. Automation makes processing of large amounts of data possible in a shorter span of time to drive smarter decisions, enabling insight experts to spend more time analyzing results to make more informed business decisions.

2. Social listening

We live in the era of Facebooks, Instagrams and Snapchats, where the big brands can humongously benefit from information, opinions, and consumer preferences. Imagine how difficult it would be to collect that data manually, but the #hashtags have made the bucketing of data so easy and insightful. Brands can use these insights for product development, customer service practices, and marketing approaches.

Automation helps insight professionals to focus on specific customer responses about their own brands, products, unmet needs etc. as well as in understanding consumer sentiment around their competitor brands and identify the gaps.

It’s a two way street - Brands get the information they need so easily and consumers get more customised products/services to meet their unmet needs.

3. The way we carry out surveys

The traditional method relies on insights from a small sample population collected from one small interview. Of course, interviews definitely help, but there are smarter ways to validate our assumptions and our learnings from these interviews by gathering more natural reactions from more customers when they are not pressed for time. And this can be made possible by automation.

Online communities and discussion forums enable market researchers to study customer preferences and feedback over a long period of time and from a wider population sample. With the rise of automation, CMI can implement that data into strategies. Automated community tools can also create easy-to-read research reports and forecast for future studies.

Researchers can also use GPS tracking technology to automatically deploy in-the-moment surveys. This means they can reach customers exactly when they are engaging with their brand and for entrance and exit surveys. Imagine the huge amounts of insight that teams can generate to help data driven innovation for the brands, if this is used rightly.

4. Collecting feedback is easier than ever

Automation enables CMI to collect real-time data while testing their MVP. Be it a pop-up to understand the reason why a visitor is quitting your landing page (whether it is price point, proposition or claim) or it’s an email sent after a delay of 5 days of delivering your MVP at their doorstep to test.

Automation makes it possible to collect the data at the right time. This enables the brands to improvise the products or service before they actually make it a big launch.

The learnings collected from these tests and experiments also provide a starting point to the marketers for advertising content. What’s better than learning from the consumer what they really want to hear you say?

Improving accuracy through automation

Automation can be used to study consumer behaviour on a granular level and in understanding where people hangout and how long they spend there. I like to call these spots as hotspots. Imagine if we could introduce automation into other areas of its research, such as observing the consumers end to end throughout their journey and understanding their hesitations at different points. This kind of insight driven innovation will lead us to create products that these customers really want knowing their hesitations will help us solve the A visitor on your landing page is equal to a footfall on your store in this digital savvy world where people like to go window shopping online more than in stores now.

While working with brands, we are trying to use as many digital tools to enhance our learnings as much as possible. From using facebook ads, google adwords and to run experiments in problem discovery to building digital MVPs to collect consumer feedback, we are working on myriad ways to bring automation to light in Consumer Marketing Insights.

We need to acknowledge the need to keep evolving every day. there is a need to produce customer-centric products and services at lightning speed. To keep up with the global economy and be of top value in a fast-paced economy, market researchers must be able to provide affordable, fast, and accurate insight on time.