As soon as you think you understand market research, something brand new comes along to challenge everything you thought you knew. With the rapid evolution of technology, those moments seem to be happening more than ever.

Today’s market research campaign looks very different from how it would ten or even five years ago, and technology is one of the major driving forces behind the evolution of market research. Every year brings a slew of new tools, techniques, and platforms built to make research more accessible and more effective.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most important things that have changed in market research due to technology, and we’ll also explore what new changes could be lying in wait in the near future.

Market research technology: what has changed?

Over the last several years, there have been several significant technological changes that have impacted market research. 

Technology has changed how industries operate, and market research is no exception. Advancements in technology have seen a rise in the self-service model, where brands can implement their own short surveys. But perhaps the most significant impact technology has had on the market research industry is agility. Market research technology allows researchers to quickly test, measure, and pivot projects.

Technology allows traditional research briefs to move past online surveys. For example, eye-tracking technology enables researchers to observe shoppers exhibiting their natural behaviours while walking around a real or virtual store, making note of fixation and gaze points. This can be highly revealing in usability studies, product and package testing, and shopping research.

Here are some of the main forces driving the evolution of market research.

Social media

It’s hard to believe that social media has only been around since the early 2000s. In the two decades since its inception, social media has transformed our lives, and market research is no exception.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more offer unique insights into your market and customers. These platforms are home to enormous reservoirs of data on your audience, providing unfiltered and direct feedback around how they’re feeling, what they want, their pain points, and hopes and desires. It’s also easier than ever to share surveys and questionnaires, collect attendees for focus groups, and much more.

Another benefit of social media is more accessible competitor analysis, allowing you to gain an easy glimpse into what other companies in your space are doing and saying, what marketing techniques they are using, and what’s working.

Observing customer behaviour

The explosion in personal technology devices like smartphones, IoT gadgets, Alexa, smart cars, and wearables make it far easier to observe the behaviour of your audience members and collect valuable insights in real-time. Even mobile apps can collect customer data and establish behaviour patterns.

Wearable technology is one of the most recent developments in this area. Gadgets like the Oura Ring, Fitbit, Apple Watch, Rayban stories, and much more allow researchers to observe customer behaviour as it takes place naturally in the real world. This gives a unique insight into how customers behave that can never be truly replicated in experimental conditions and can pick up on responses that customers themselves might not even notice.

Automation

It’s never been easier to analyze data and draw valuable conclusions, thanks to the vast leaps made in automation technology in recent years. The growing amount of audience data available to marketers can now be processed and analyzed much more efficiently, allowing you to gain valuable insights and learn as much as possible about your customers and how they behave.

Chatbots are another example of the power of automation in market research. These tools can ask questions and conduct basic surveys from social media apps and websites, allowing you to communicate with customers and collect valuable information in seconds without relying on time-consuming manual work by human staff.

Increased reliance on video and remote collaboration

Spurred on by the pandemic, video collaboration tools, and remote meetings have skyrocketed in popularity and ease of access. There are many advantages to this for market research, such as a shift away from in-person focus groups. 

Researchers no longer need to hire a venue, convince large numbers of people to take the time out of their day to attend, employ multiple staff on the ground, and do all the other logistical tasks involved in a physical interview. Instead, the whole thing can occur via a Zoom call, saving enormous amounts of time and resources for both interviewer and interviewees. This also allows you to contact a much broader sample of participants without being bound by geographic location.

Reach much larger and more diverse audiences 

Not so long ago, market researchers were confined to methods like postal surveys, local interview sessions, and phone calls. Technology — specifically the internet — has allowed researchers to radically expand their horizons, reaching audiences in far-flung parts of the country and even distant parts of the world.

It’s now easy to conduct real-time interviews and focus groups with people several timezones away, allowing companies to gain a much bigger and richer picture of their audiences. This is especially important for international market research but is also helpful to achieve a complete understanding of your audience as a whole.

Build richer buyer personas

As it becomes increasingly easier to collect data from your audience and analyze it in vast amounts, it becomes possible to build much richer and more detailed profiles for your audience members.

The buyer personas of the past were often vague, two-dimensional things, often built around vague generalizations and assumptions. The small amount of data available to researchers decades ago made it challenging to construct genuinely accurate and useful personas.

Today, with the enormous amount of data made available by technology and the internet, you can learn a lot about the people in your audience and build genuinely valuable and richly detailed buyer personas to inform your marketing decisions, product development, and much more.

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What the future holds for market research technology

As time goes on, market research will likely continue to evolve, driven by entirely new advancements in technology. Some of these developments will come as a surprise and may be unexpected side-effects of existing or planned technology. We can also predict some future trends based on what we already know.

Tools like AR and VR

Virtual reality and augmented reality open up a whole host of exciting new possibilities for market research. Both tools allow for much more interactive research where participants can use products and experience services in a completely immersive way without leaving their homes.

This makes it much easier to gauge responses, observe behaviour, and collect meaningful feedback without shipping large amounts of physical products to participants’ homes or asking them to travel to a research site.

One example is how Kadence worked with Asahi, using augmented reality to research a new packaging design. Participants used AR to generate models of beer bottles, allowing them to visualize what the bottle would look like in their own homes and provide more accurate and detailed feedback around specific details.

More use of voice assistants

Today, voice assistants are already popular, with tools like Siri and Alexa quickly becoming a central part of people’s everyday lives. These voice tools allow a unique insight into customers’ daily experience and behaviour, and if this data can be collected ethically, it has excellent value for market researchers.

More agility

Increased agility is a fascinating prospect for market researchers as technology advances. In the past, researchers were forced to take risky gambles instead of using a more flexible approach and making adjustments as needed.

With the ubiquity of data in today’s world, businesses can now take a more agile approach to market research, making quick and frequent changes and course corrections in response to the feedback they get from various channels. This trend could mark one of the most significant changes in how we conduct research over the coming years and suggests a step away from over-reliance on guesswork and individual opinion.

Technology has had an enormous impact on how businesses conduct market research, and as time goes on, that impact is likely to increase. The best thing market researchers and companies can do is be open-minded and prepared to embrace new technologies as they evolve.

At Kadence, we can help you harness all the newest and future technologies to conduct market research most productively and effectively, gaining valuable insights into your audience and getting ahead of the competition. Find out more.

Concept and pack testing is an area that’s ripe for innovation – a need made ever more pressing during the Covid-19 pandemic. Watch this 15 minute video to hear how we worked with Asahi UK to pilot the use of augmented reality for this purpose, testing pack designs for Fuller’s London Pride.

We’ll share our key findings, focusing specifically on what we discovered about the value of using AR versus static 2D images. These insights will have value to any researcher looking to broaden their toolkit and harness new technologies in the “new normal”.

This is is the first of Kadence International’s Micro Masterclasses, 15 minute videos designed to provide fresh thinking and a new perspective on research methodologies.

We partnered with our friends at Measure Protocol to take part in a first-of-its-kind trial to harness blockchain for market research. Watch the video to discover what we learnt about the potential for this new technology.

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At a time when there is concern that news outlets are feeding coronavirus panic and confusion, it may have been easy to miss some of the more positive news stories emerging in the last few weeks.

Chief among them is the impact that digital technology has had across Asia, as parts of China in particular have gone into lockdown, and the implications of this.

Across China, as The Economist reported earlier this week, subscriptions to digital health services have increased exponentially – a shift in consumer behaviour that previously had been expected to take five whole years. Similarly, we have seen reports that mobile, social media and streaming services are experiencing a strong uptick in usage whilst people are stuck indoors. Schooling has also moved online, with students taking classes through grade-specific TV channels, and the internet.

Above all, we’ve seen people using digital resources to overcome the loneliness of isolation. Gyms are offering sessions via WeChat, clubs are hosting club nights online, and gamers are congregating online to play together in increasing numbers, with Tencent’s Honor of Kings game reaching a peak in average daily users.

So will there be in any digital silver linings for the market research industry?

Non face-to-face methodologies are hardly new in our industry, but a shift towards online – particularly when it comes to qualitative research – now feels unavoidable. Where once a traditional focus group or face-to-face interviews may have sufficed, we’ll undoubtedly see digital techniques coming in to play more and more.

But herein lies a word of caution: because not all digital techniques are created equally, and not all solutions are suitable for certain projects: the most appropriate methodology will always depend on a study’s objectives.

There are plenty of digital options available to researchers: online focus groups, skype depth interviews, mobile diaries, and online communities to name but a few, but how do you work out which methodology is best suited to your study?

First of all, it’s important to start your thinking with your objectives, not your methodology. Just because you might have once used focus groups or face-to-face depth interviews in the past, doesn’t necessarily mean an online focus group or skype interview are the best ways to meet your objectives using digital tools. Start by asking:

  • Are you looking for breadth, or depth of insight?
  • Who are you looking to influence with your findings? What kinds of asset are most likely to have impact and support real change across your organisation? How quickly do your stakeholders need access to your insights?
  • How important is it to observe discussion and interaction between respondents – are you looking to compare different points of view?

How you answer these questions will heavily impact the methodology that’s right for you.

For instance, say you are conducting a concept or product test. Typically, you’d use a focus group setting so your product and design team could observe respondent reactions, and make on-the-spot changes to your product.

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If you’re looking for breadth, speedy insights, and discussion between respondents to understand how views differ, you might automatically think that an online focus group session, with respondents and stakeholders logging in from separate locations is your answer. However, while online focus group technology mimics the experience of a focus group setting, in practice, it is much harder for respondents to communicate with one anyone other than the moderator – you’re unlikely to meet your ‘discussion between respondents’ objective.

Instead, an online community would allow you to hit the nail on the head of all three of your objectives and then some. The key difference versus an online focus group is your ability to nurture and observe conversations between respondents in the community in a much more natural environment.

You can even use the platform to segment different audiences together, or keep the community broad to observe discussions across the whole group. Stakeholders are able to log on at any time they choose, to observe conversations, and input suggestions for additional questions to the moderators. And say you have one or two topics you’d like to explore in more depth? You can always set up private questions, to conduct one-to-one research as part of the community. And when it comes to final assets, online communities are really unrivalled when it comes to video and photo content that can be used to help land insights with your stakeholders.

If, however, observing interaction between respondents really isn’t a key necessity, and you’re looking for depth of insight, you may want to consider depth Skype interviews instead of your traditional focus group. Digital depth interviews work beautifully for concept and product testing as part of a staged programme of research, especially when you meld multiple touch-points together. You could consider following an initial Skype interview with a selfie-style filmed product review in-home for example, to really dig into consumer views.

Ultimately, while all of these methodologies have been around for some time, it’s likely that a reduction in face-to-face research will see us being far more creative with the digital options available to us. It will be fascinating to see whether or not these changes result in a long-term shift towards digital methodologies. Back in 2014 during London’s tube strikes, commuters were forced to find alternative routes to get travel around the city. Following the strikes, Transport for London reported that one in 20 commuters actually stuck with the new route they’d discovered. Will the research industry see a similar permanent shift? Time will tell.

Kadence has a wealth of experience in using digital research methodologies to help answer critical questions for brands and businesses. If you’re looking for support to help you find the best approach to meet your business objectives, please get in touch.