The Future of Research
Over the last few years, there have been many theories and opinion pieces claiming that Traditional Market Research and Marketing is finished, that we are moving to a new era of Big Data, Social Insights and Viral Marketing. And yes, it’s true – to an extent. Our world is changing rapidly, and we are all struggling to keep up.
Having ready access to the internet has opened a world of online consumer opinion and feedback about almost everything, so to some it would seem that we no longer need to conduct traditional MR if we can just go to Google and find out the latest in thinking about our brand.
Add to this the advances in technology which have enabled us to ‘listen’ to what consumers are doing through barcode and retail data, mobile app monitoring, web browser tracking, Google Analytics, to name but a few, and we can get quite a sophisticated picture of human behaviour.
by Jane Lattimore
It’s just lacking one core component – we can know the WHAT, but we miss the WHY – and quite often it’s the WHY that enables us to be superior marketers with superior brands.
So how do we tally the two, how do we collect the WHY to accompany the WHAT? A key factor is engagement with our consumers and respondents. People are no longer willing to sit through an hour long interview, and we know that if we do push this, the data we collect will be low quality, and lack insights..
We can overcome this with gamification, by making our interviewing practices more engaging to those taking part. Gamification doesn’t have to be high tech either. One of our core Gamification techniques can be seen in our Path to Purchase methodology, where we utilise physical stickers and paper to recreate the entire purchase journey.