Increasingly available customer generated qualitative data in the cloud and implications for Market Research
I recently came across a research forecast that marketers would shave off 9.5% from market research spend over 2009, reversing a 20-year trend of annual spending increases. It appeared in Marketing Week and here is the link. The article highlights the following as one of the research findings: "….while survey data and company sales data continue to be used by nearly all market research professionals, other methods, such as focus groups, syndicated research and scanner data, have all experienced decreases. For instance, use of focus group data has dropped from 80% for the past two years to 74% to date for 2009."
While I do not know the reason for the drop in usage of focus group data (the research, the full report of which I have not seen yet, might have some pointers), to my mind, this inflection may point to a long term trend for focus groups. I believe that the increasingly available customer generated qualitative data around attitudes, preferences, opinions, reviews, etc. in the Cloud - specifically the Social Media - will eventually lead to that.
Looking back at my role as the Market Research Manager for a well known Consumer Goods Company in India, observing focus group discussions was one of my regular activities. Typically, this is how it used to be done:
- The brand manager together with the research manager would evaluate the need for a focus group discussion. Of course, there was the budget factor.
- The research manager together with the research agency would identify the target audience
- The research agency would enlist, often on a paid basis, folks who would participate in the discussion
- A moderator from the agency would conduct the session which would be taped with the research manager observing it remotely
- The agency would analyze and present the findings back to the company
While the last step of analysis of data had a bit of technology enablement (often and more heavily for analysis of quantitative data collected through other techniques), all the other steps leading to that were rather 'non tech'. However, the advent of social media - which resulted in unprecedented amount of customer generated content available on the cloud - seems to be impacting all the steps in the process flow above. Consider these:
- With blogs / reviews / opinions abundantly available, getting customer feedback does not seem to be that hard anymore. In fact, the challenge now is to recognize one in the social space and react to it appropriately.
- With the social media tools becoming more common place and cheaper to use, there does not seem to be a need to 'evaluate' the need for a focus group discussion. In fact, it seems like it is an imperative now to be watchful and continue listening for customer discussions / feedback on the net around the your brands / company.
- Rather than waiting for someone to tag them as the 'right target audience', through bookmarking, RSS, search alerts, etc., the customers seem to be associating themselves to the right 'brand'.
- With customers becoming more 'social', the companies can potentially reach them directly without going through the agencies by going through blogs, twitter, forums, etc. With reviews, opinions, blogs, etc. there is a lot of 'free' information from customers on the cloud which no one has paid for.
- All the conversations are captured on the cloud. Even if the website hosting them does not have it any more, there is always the 'cached' page from the search engines.
- With the emergence of text analytics and other monitoring tools, a good amount of analysis work can be automated as well.
The point is not that the above developments will render the traditional research process obsolete. It is just that the cloud is accumulating a lot of data from customers, which can be gleaned to gather research insights. Now going back to the research finding, it may be interesting to know if the study has uncovered any increase in usage of this free data from the cloud. If not, that could be a good research direction!
