Latest Technologies to Adopt in Market Research & Insights

From AI-driven automation to Digital Analytics-enhanced insights, the new avatar of Market Research is beginning to flaunt speedy results, minimal human dependency, and stunning agility in adapting to new research requirements.

By Poonam Dave
VP – Operations, Course5 Intelligence

The market research world is in a state of stasis. As reported by Statista, the global market research revenue for 2016 was estimated at about 45 billion USD. Beyond 2016, studies and forecasts on the industry of insights began to talk a new language. According to another study on Statista, the worldwide Big Data market revenues for software and services are projected to increase from $42B in 2018 to $103B in 2027, attaining a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 10.48%. It is worth noting how the parameters of projection for a growing number of studies are now ‘Big Data’ and the massive insights it can possibly bring us to enhance customer experience, optimize marketing efforts, improve business processes, and much more. The lines are further blurred by newer terms on the block such as ‘Big Data Market Research’. According to the Global Big Data Market Research report offered by Research and Markets, the global big data market is expected to rise with a CAGR of about 18% during forecast period 2016-2023. If traditional market research is assumed to be a sub-segment of this shiny new big data market, we don’t know.

So is Market research (MR) a thing of the past? Or can it step up to the times and provide irrefutable value? In our opinion at Course5 Intelligence, the MR industry is here to stay and has very distinct advantages when compared to modern age technologies.

As other Data and Analytics departments increasingly jostle with market research departments for research budgets within organizations, MR departments as well as business leaders must remember the baby that’s in the bath water – it’s the bath water that needs to change.

What Market Research lacks in today’s world is speed and agility. In the rapid pace of today’s business environment, business leaders cannot afford to wait weeks after they commission a study to act on the results. The value in other data techniques is the use of advanced technologies and high processing speeds that enable businesses to drive “timely” insights from data (often in real time) and respond to new insight requirements swiftly and easily.

What Market Research needs is to evolve to a new digital age approach to conduct its studies quicker and provide this data more real-time. MR departments and agencies need to adopt new technologies that can speed up the entire research process and deliver higher speed-to-market at competitive costs.

I believe we can use a spectrum of AI technologies to transform market research creating efficiencies in several ways. It can –

Automate the entire effort-intensive scripting and survey link generation process, cutting processing time by half or more with zero error rates
Expedite the time taken from study launch to results through self-service cloud platforms, eliminating the need for multiple handshakes and consequent gaps and lags in communication
Use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to rapidly adapt to changing study requirements and make incremental research process improvements
Reduce people dependency by creating digital knowledge pools
Apply analytics tools and platforms to draw/corroborate insights from survey data at high speeds
Enable quick access to results through advanced visualization and digital dashboards

And this is only the beginning. Once Market research opens up to new technologies, its business value will be massive. The attitudinal insights gained from Market Research will begin to amplify transactional insights and give businesses huge competitive advantage through stronger understanding of their customers, markets, and competitors.

For now, whether used in conjunction with other methods/techniques or independently, Market Research needs to start acquiring technological sophistication. By engaging new tools, techniques, and platforms, Market Research can deliver rich qualitative insights at competitive speeds. When the pace of Market Research meets the pace of today, the value of a considered answer will be incomparable.

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