Editor’s note: Susan Frede is vice president of research methods and best practices at online research firm Lightspeed GMI. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here under the title, “What are marketing researchers discussing?”
The Cincinnati AMA Marketing Research Shared Interest Group meets on a monthly basis to discuss industry issues, trends, techniques and methodologies. During the January 2015 meeting, we debated the group’s burning research questions.
How to gather deeper insights? The discussion started with how to gather deeper insights. Doing a blend of quantitative and qualitative research can go a long way to getting to the why. Qualitative, however, doesn’t have to be face-to-face. Several attendees have used online discussion boards quite successfully. With a good moderator you can really probe and clarify, plus participants will build on each others’ comments.
What are the benefits of geofencing? The discussion then moved to new tools that can help with consumer insight. Geofencing is opening up a new world where researchers can reach consumers in-the-moment. This may help increase accuracy although – even if asked questions in-the-moment – many consumers don’t know why they do something as many purchase decisions are made unconsciously. It could be that they have always bought a particular item and as long as they are happy with the product they don’t consider other brands or options. Daniel Kahneman discusses two ways of thinking in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Fast is more intuitive while slow is more deliberate. Many purchase decisions seem to take the fast route. One challenge with geofencing is the fact that respondents still wait and take surveys at home – even when the survey reaches them a mobile device – so it can be hard to reach them in-the-moment.
Are physiological tools useful? Physiological tools such as eye tracking, facial recognition and other biometrics were also mentioned. Technology is making these techniques more readily available. For example, facial recognition can be accomplished with just a Webcam. Some caution should be used with these tools because not everyone will agree to participate, which can impact your sample’s representation.
How to improve survey design? The discussion then turned to bad survey design. Many are seeing unrealistic surveys that simply haven’t been thought through. Researchers need to spend more time thinking about how survey instruments impact the quality of their data and ultimately the accuracy of business decisions. This has become even more important given the increasing number of respondents using mobile devices to take surveys. The best surveys have to be device agnostic. Unfortunately, even when presented with research-on-research suggesting better survey design, there still seems to be a lot of resistance to making the necessary changes.
What is the impact of big data on marketing research? Finally, there was a short discussion on big data and the fact that most in the marketing research industry have been using it for years. We just didn’t necessarily call it big data. Everyone agreed that the big data craze shouldn’t make marketing research obsolete.