Be it shifting budgets or new research goals, client-side marketing researchers are constantly working to find the right tools to take on their next project. In addition, the push to evolve is very much alive in marketing research and insight departments. So, what tools are client-siders turning to? What methodologies and technologies do they hope to use in 2020?
To get a better sense of the trends and tools that are truly affecting the day-to-day work of client-side researchers, we dove into responses found in our Before You Go series, “10 minutes with a corporate researcher” – a short Q&A-style conversation published in each issue of Quirk’s. In the last year, we’ve had the opportunity to ask several researchers what tools and/or methodologies they are turning to and why. The following responses provide a quick glimpse of what we learned during these conversations with end clients.
AI/machine learning
“Tools on my radar run the gamut from techniques leveraging mobile technology for agile and contextual insights to behavioral-science driven tools; social listening for anticipating signals of potential behavioral shifts; and leveraging observational and ethnographic insights vs. System 2 responses.
“With the online consumer digital footprint, I see a trove of unfiltered, honest consumer interactions that I want to continue to mine via AI/machine learning techniques. This will help teams with immediate brand insights but also provide signals to create hypotheses and new sparks that we can unpack and understand for the business.” La Sridhar, Molson Coors
Natural language processing
“One we are getting more involved with now is understanding deeper natural language processing. National Geographic has a large social footprint across the globe and while there are a number of great syndicated services out there, many that we use, they aren’t great at really digging into true insights from our social footprint. As we pull in more and more comments into our own data lake across our social platforms, we can better evaluate and try out new methods of NLP. We’re focused on this for the next few months at least as we look to enhance other survey, qual, ethnographic and research initiatives with commentary direct on our content. While it can’t replace everything else, there’s a lot to learn and a lot that can help feed other systems – personalization, as an example – that we haven’t unlocked yet.
“We are going into this with specific questions as we look for correlations with behavior with what our fans are commenting on in our social platforms and what content they are interacting with across our business. We are looking at ways to better understand complex characteristics of word use – the semantics and syntax of words and the context with which they are used have incredible impact on our brand. Too often, these factors are glossed over or summarized to the point of not being useful.” Brad Dancer, National Geographic Partners
Biometric testing
“One of the new things we’ve been exploring is biometric testing. It’s done on our feature film side, especially as it relates to our positioning and advertising. We’re trying to see if there are ways to incorporate that not just into the marketing of our television programs, but potentially into concept and content testing as well.” James Petretti, Sony Pictures Television
Jobs to be done framework
“JTBD [jobs to be done framework] is something we’ve been playing around with for a number of reasons. Our product teams are adapting this approach, there’s value in trying to solve for pain points that people have, it’s efficient and innovative and supports an agile product development cycle. There are a number of reasons why this is important to my team. But because my team does a lot of research – not just market research but product, customer experience, brand, marketing/communications – it almost feels like we need to slow down in order to adapt to this methodology. And although we recognize we’re so reactive to what our stakeholders want, we know that slowing down for one thing slows us down for everything else. So, what we’re doing is talking to our research partners about their technologies to try and make JTBD more efficient for us. How can we standardize JTBD so that it’s not always an ad hoc and timely research project? I know there’s a way to do it with the partners I work with today. They just have to build it.” Tiffany Ng, Experian
Real-time surveying
“Though not new to the space, I am interested in real-time surveying via mobile. I feel like the targeting technology has gotten to the place where reaching broader populations is now more feasible. The prospect of getting nearly immediate answers to polls and targeting consumers as they are actively engaging with the brand has great potential to augment other methods.” Nina Guest, Olive Garden
Database system
“I’m all about turning insights into action and I am excited for the day where I can come into my office, log into the database system and guide my team on what should be done next. I am embracing this model and I understand that it is not replacing me. It is allowing me to become a more powerful resource for my team, partners and stakeholders. The humanistic aspect is always needed, so this data output is going to arm my team more than ever as I continue to help them understand the voice and behavior of our visitors.” Lauren Phillips, Visit Fort Worth
If you’d like to learn more about the state of the industry from the client side, watch for new Q&As in each issue of Quirk’s magazine.