Tom Anderson of Anderson Analytics asked the KLC team to put up a blog post on what we feel is hot and what’s not. So, here’s our list!
In honor of the rules, we have resisted looking at any of the other postings (A.K.A. The folks who actually got their post up on time!).
What’s Hot!
1. Mob
ile – This goes beyond iPhone Applications to traditional online surveys. This is recognizing the fact that MR can and should take place out in the wild (A.K.A. the supermarkets, shopping malls, and town squares that make up real life). Armed with the ability to journal in the moment, it elevates the research experience.
2. Social Media – Clearly, Social Media represents both a threat and an opportunity to MR. It is a threat if you realize that clients can scrape the blogosphere to find the information they might have typically assigned to a category survey. It is an opportunity if you are bold enough to merge it with your own findings to both validate your responses and amplify them by reaching a more robust, richer understanding of the consumer.
3. Collaboration – In our opinion, this is truly the lynch-pin of NGMR. Taking full and willing advantage of your best and most passionate customers and inviting them to participate in new product/service innovation…talk about your ultimate no brainer! This is a win/win for all parties. Well maybe not so much for mid level brand managers, but allowing your customers to feel they have skin in the game is a watershed moment for our industry.
4. Holistic, not silo research – Quant MR, with its roots in psychology, would take it upon itself to prove or disprove the Null Hypothesis; as if the Null Hypothesis was truly the issue. Actionable insights require a complete, full understanding of the business opportunity in question. We need to be able to see and address all points of view (and for that matter, all available data points) to provide our clients with a holistic, complete perspective. In our minds, this point is related to consumer collaboration as both collaboration and holistic integration represent breaking through the glass ceiling that held back traditional MR.
5. Actionable Insights instead of Key Findings – Of course, this relates closely to the previous point, but it’s all about being an integral part of a company’s strategic direction and not merely a fact gatherer. At the top of the corporate food chain, they are looking to make the decisions that will keep everyone (especially themselves) gainfully employed. That requires a blueprint action plan, not “Here are some key findings, good luck making sense of them”.
What’s Not
1. CATI (OK, that was like kicking a dead cat) – I suppose we’re still traumatized from our battle over the past decade with the WATTS houses over the representation of online research. Some CATI shops still like to consider themselves the gold standard of quant data collection. I suppose if you want to reach a bunch of senior citizens with nothing but time on their hands, this is still your gold standard.
2. Brick and mortar focus groups – A great innovation from over 50 years ago that has long ago lived out its usefulness. What speaks insights better than having a stilted conversation in some non- descript industrial park? And how does the wisdom of crowds take place when two minutes into the session, group think has already taken place.
3. ISO Standards – Keep in mind, the faithful advice of Deep Throat “Follow the Money!”
4. Online chat (that is so 20th Century!) – At KLC, we were doing online focus groups back in the 1990’s and we considered that a step up from online chat. With the recent advances of mobile and online ethnography, we look at BBFG’s as the minimal admission for acceptable online qual practices.
5. Power Point Reports – Power Point was never meant to house market research reports. I would say that 90% of all market researchers don’t even know what the power point of a slide is, because if they do, they sure don’t act like it. That said, there are some very cool new ways to present your findings. New presentation tools like www.prezi.com or www.sliderocket.com are great ways to both animate and/or provide real time social media elements (e.g. Twitter) to your presentations. If your end user is only going to read the Exec Summary, it becomes a core challenge for the insights team to make sure they absorb the clear direction they need in as short a period of time as possible.
