Why traditional market research alone is not enough

Market Research started to be put in practice in 1930, in United States. Back in those days, advertisers started to realize the significance of demographics for creating successful campaigns. Of course the resources were limited, so the solution they could implement was, for example, organizing focus groups, running face to face interviews, or sending questionnaires.

Nowadays, companies keep conducting Market Research the same way they did decades ago. Even though technology has made huge improvements in the last years, companies still rely on outdated methods to gather feedback.

In today’s video, our CEO Riccardo Osti will explain the main 4 problems when relying on traditional Market Research.

We hope you like it!

Hi everyone, I am Riccardo Osti, and on a daily basis, I help some of the largest brands to become more successful by investing in consumer experience. With this video, you’ll learn why traditional market research, alone, is not enough anymore.

Market Research started to be put in practice in 1930, in United States. Back in those days, advertisers started to realize the significance of demographics for creating successful campaigns. Of course the resources were limited, so the solution they could implement was, for example, organizing focus groups, running face to face interviews, or sending questionnaires.

Have you watched Mad Men? It’s a TV series that shows how Advertisers worked back in the sixties in America.

Still, companies keep conducting Market Research the same way they did decades ago. Even though technology has made huge improvements in the last years, companies still rely on outdated methods to gather feedback.

In my experience, there are four main reasons why traditional market research is not enough anymore:

When someone puts you on a chair, make you try a product, and ask what do you think about it, you probably have a different opinion then when you’re at home, using it.    The fact that someone is asking you questions, forcing you to experience something, is already creating bias for your results, because the situation is not natural.

You might argue: well, if the problem is to reach more people, I could run some multiple choice questionnaires. Problem solved.

Well, what if your problem is something that you’re not aware of? For example, a company may run a questionnaire with questions about the catering. But what if you haven’t even eaten during the flight? Actually, your concern was about something else, that wasn’t on the survey. So this problem couldn’t be solved through a questionnaire.

If you have run interviews with customers, you might realize how time consuming it is to analyse all the things interviewers said. Organizing the interviews, doing them, organizing the data, and creating the report, may take months. And by this time, your customer might have already changed their mind about it. So, the insights are already outdated.

In a focus group for example, decisions are made based on the opinion of just a few people. Can we generalize for a whole market an assumption based on their opinion? Probably not.

But don’t worry, thankfully we are not in the 60’s anymore. Now-a-days, customers volunteerly do part of this job for you. Sources such as Amazon.com provide you with tons of reviews, freely created by your customers about your products. They just need to be read and analysed. And that’s when NLP takes place, helping you to analyse a huge amount of data in one shoot. Curious to know how? Watch this video, where I explain you how to analyse consumer feedback

I hope you liked the video. Please let me know what you have learned by leaving a comment here.

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