ChatGPT in Market Research: A Definitive Guide

Market research has historically relied on human judgment, intuition, and analysis. Today, tools available to researchers have evolved, promising more accuracy, depth, and speed.

Top of that list of evolving tools is artificial intelligence (AI), with its tantalizing prospects and considerable challenges. And amidst this backdrop, ChatGPT.

However, the interplay between artificial intelligence (AI) and market research has always been filled with potential, and challenged with pitfalls. In an age where data-driven decision-making has become the norm, the allure of integrating AI into market research processes has grown exponentially.

Voxpopme and ChatGPT seek to address the historical challenges and meet the unique needs of market researchers. In this guide, you’ll see the transformative role that this technological collaboration plays in the world of market research, how you can master it, and more…

• Why AI didn’t feel right for market researchers until now
• What makes ChatGPT different from “AI”
• How content bridges market researchers and ChatGPT
• How researchers at Fortune 500 brands are using ChatGPT
• 33 Effective ChatGPT prompts you can use to master AI in market research

We’ve also put this extensive guide into one PDF you can reference anytime you want.

Download The Market Researcher’s Guide to ChatGPT ebook.

For market researchers, AI comes with baggage

Historically, AI’s promise for market research and insights professionals has been clouded by 5 misgivings, which collectively eroded the industry’s trust for anything related to artificial intelligence (AI):

1. Statistical analysis was called AI

Traditional statistical methods were sometimes branded as AI, leading to a muddling or confusion of terms.

While statistics are methodical and produced the sentiment of analytic rigor, displaying statistics alone lacked the “evolutionary learning” facet of what research professionals expected from AI.

2. Advanced math was called AI

Pattern recognition algorithms, no matter how sophisticated, were often mistaken for AI. This overreach led to disappointment when they didn’t deliver on the AI promise, particularly on the generative facet of what research professionals were expecting from AI.

3. “AI” was non-interactive

Earlier AI models often resembled one-way, lecture sessions — they provided insights but lacked an interactive Q&A feature, leaving researchers with potential queries unanswered.

Even worse, most AI experiences didn’t give researchers the opportunity to query the data set with a question. AI just processed the data, made broad assumptions on the researcher’s insights objectives/goals, then provided a response based on its assumptions on the researcher’s objectives/goals.

In short, early versions of “AI” lacked the interactive elements available in today’s AI, and didn’t allow researchers to cross-examine AI with follow-up questions and queries.

4. Black-box syndrome

In the past, many AI tools didn’t reveal their inner workings or analytical models. Without clarity on how they derived insights, researchers couldn’t fully trust and understand the tools.

This opacity was a significant impediment to widespread AI adoption in market research, particularly because researchers want to know the underlying reasoning behind how insights were generated.

5. All the marketing hype from tech providers

Driven by competitive fervor, technology firms servicing the research industry often over-marketed or oversold the capabilities of their AI tools. When these tools under-delivered on researcher’s expectations, it contributed to an atmosphere of skepticism, hesitation, and distrust.

As we move forward, recognizing these pitfalls will shape an AI-driven future that aligns with the actual needs and expectations of the research community.

What makes ChatGPT different from “AI”?

“AI”—in the sense as we’ve experienced it before now—could display one or more of the aching misconceptions above. But ChatGPT shows promise. It’s a revolutionary tool that combines four components to redefine market research:

1. User experience

One of ChatGPT’s crowning achievements is its user-centric design. By making AI interaction intuitive, it democratized access to advanced data analysis.

As OpenAI’s Founder said:

“It wasn’t the underlying model that mattered, it was the usability of it. Both the reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and the interface.”

— Sam Altman

2. Processing power

Complex analytical models analyzing vast repositories of unstructured research data requires last amounts of processing power.

Serving as the stack’s engine, cloud providers like Microsoft Azure ensure that rapid data processing is possible and that ChatGPT can provide users with timely feedback.

3. Technical capabilities and use cases

ChatGPT’s analytical models are more than just algorithms; they represent the culmination of cutting-edge research and development in artificial intelligence.

These models serve as the discerning brain of the system, adept at navigating vast content repositories and extracting meaningful insights from them.

Here’s a brief dive into how these capabilities translate into practical use cases:

Content creation

Based on the researcher’s objective, Voxpopme’s AI Insights (powered by ChatGPT) automatically generates survey questions and answers banks.

Summarization

You can pinpoint key findings from vast datasets of unstructured, qualitative data such as video survey feedback.

Code generation

For market researchers who rely on custom software tools or scripts to process and analyze data, ChatGPT’s code generation feature is a game-changer.

By simply describing their requirements, researchers can obtain snippets of code tailored to their needs, streamlining the data analysis process.

Chat and semantic search

Search functions allow market researchers to find, cross-examine, and query their data repository—giving insights a higher level of accessibility and depth.

Theme, entity and sentiment

Automatic sentiment evaluation, theme extraction, and relevance determination enrich the quality of Voxpopme AI Insights’ responses to a researcher’s query.

4. Content

At its core, the power of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT comes mostly from the content it has access to. In ChatGPT’s publicly available version, its vast repository enables a richness in insights, allowing for varied responses based on wide-ranging data.

And in proprietary instances of ChatGPT, market researchers are using it to analyze large repositories of unstructured research data to discover insights.

How content bridges market researchers and ChatGPT

Despite AI’s current capabilities, 70% of organizations are only exploring the realm of generative AI but not fully committing. This shows many are yet to realize practical use cases for the technology.

Why? To realize these benefits, you need vast content repositories. Already, this content repositories are available to research and insights teams. If you can accurately analyze them (with AI), they can unveil a multitude of practical benefits.

Take a look at the bare mechanics of Voxpopme AI Insights: It takes input (content made of unstructured qualitative data) to produce an output (insights).

Let’s dig deeper into the crucial role that access to content and data—balanced with tight control over user access to the platforms that process the data—plays in enhancing the efficacy of products like Voxpopme AI Insights.

Foundation of learning

Voxpopme AI Insights relies on diverse, large datasets for better learning and accuracy, mirroring the fundamental principle of AI and ML models.

Security and privacy

Market researchers value security and privacy in managing their data repositories; hence, access to Voxpopme AI Insights needs strict control to ensure the integrity and ownership of the data.

Breadth and depth of knowledge

The extensive underlying dataset of Voxpopme AI Insights enriches its knowledge base, enabling a wide understanding of various research projects and facilitating insights across multiple use cases.

Quality and precision

The quality of responses from Voxpopme AI Insights is directly tied to the quality of the data it’s been trained on. Fresh, diverse, and high-quality data contribute to accurate and contextually relevant insights.

Enhancing complex tasks

Beyond answering questions, Voxpopme AI Insights assists in complex tasks like predictive analytics and strategy formulation for go-to-market and positioning, leveraging insights derived from multiple research projects.

Contextual understanding

Voxpopme AI Insights, through analyzing previous interactions or related content, can better understand the researcher’s intent, making interactions smoother and more meaningful, showcasing the importance of context in conversational engagements.

Content and data are the foundation upon which tools can learn, adapt, and evolve. Without content and data, it is like a library devoid of books—structurally existent but functionally empty.

As Voxpopme continues to shape the future of market research, the importance of data access will only grow, making it paramount for market researchers and businesses to prioritize quality data acquisition, management, and security.

How researchers at Fortune 500 brands are using ChatGPT

In an era where understanding consumer sentiment is pivotal for brand success, Fortune 500 companies are turning to AI to gain a competitive edge.

Voxpopme, with its innovative applications Smart SurvAI and AI Insights, powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is at the forefront of this evolution.

Here’s how researchers at leading brands are leveraging these tools to optimize their market research endeavors:

Applying ChatGPT’s components using qual content housed in Voxpopme

Market researchers often use Voxpopme to run video surveys, resulting in many hours of video feedback. Going through all this video to find important insights for business decisions usually takes a lot of time and effort.

But with tools like Smart SurvAI and AI Insights in Voxpopme, powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, this task becomes much quicker and easier. These tools help researchers launch survey projects and sift through the video content faster, finding the insights they need in much less time.

Generate goal-based survey questions

By integrating ChatGPT, SurvAI simplifies ‌creating engaging video surveys tailored to the researchers’ objectives. They simply input their goals into Smart SurvAI, which then proposes three questions to kickstart the survey creation. 

Researchers can then use, edit, or omit these suggestions, ensuring the survey aligns with their objectives while saving a lot of time.

By reducing the time spent on question creation, researchers can channel their focus towards deriving meaningful insights from consumer responses. This AI-assistance in drafting questions also mitigates potential bias, paving the way for more accurate and insightful responses.

Key insights in minutes

Voxpopme’s AI Insights tool speeds up the usual process of understanding video survey feedback like never before. It works 60 times faster than going at it yourself, helping researchers quickly move from gathering data to making sense of it, which helps in making decisions on time.

Interact with their research repositories

The AI Insights tool lets researchers have a back-and-forth with their data, almost like having a conversation. They can ask questions, get helpful hints, and dig into their data through a simple chat. This makes looking through customer feedback easy and full of discoveries.

Generate follow-up research projects

Once researchers have initial findings, it suggests follow-up questions for subsequent research projects, enabling researchers to deepen their understanding of consumer sentiments. This feature accelerates the iterative research process, helping brands stay updated with market trends.

Create competitive advantages (security and privacy)

Keeping data safe and private is really important in market research. Voxpopme makes sure researchers completely own their data while keeping it secure. This safe space helps create special insights, giving an edge to brands like Airbnb, Pepsico, McDonald’s, and Microsoft in their markets.

In super competitive markets, understanding what consumers want and quickly adapting to market changes is key. By having ChatGPT in Voxpopme’s toolkit, big brands are moving towards a future where they make smart decisions quickly by understanding what people say in video feedback, encouraging new ideas and faster strategic decisions.

Effective ChatGPT prompts within Voxpopme

Optimizing the insights you generate involves crafting precise prompts. Depending on the study type, these prompts can range from demographic comparisons, consumer needs assessments, product positioning evaluations, to competitive analyses.

For instance, for Target Consumer Studies, prompts like “How do Millennials and Gen X differ in their views on eco-friendly products?” can provide layered insights, while for Product Positioning Studies, questions like “How do respondents describe our latest smartphone model?” can help brands refine their messaging.

Below is a guide of prompts that you can use to generate insights for specific research objectives.

Prompts based on type of insight/project

ChatGPT prompts for foresight studies

A foresights research project aims to anticipate future trends, events, and possibilities, helping organizations prepare for and shape the future through informed decision-making.

Here are some prompts you can use to support these research objectives:

1. What desires or needs, in relation to our product or service, will occur in the next three years?
2. Which emerging technologies or innovations are mentioned in this project? How will these influence our product’s utility or relevance?
3. How do consumers see our product fitting into their lifestyle in the next five years?
4. What challenges or barriers might deter consumers from choosing our product over competitors in the forthcoming years?
5. What new product features or enhancements will be critical to maintain our market position?

ChatGPT prompts for target consumer studies

A target consumer research study seeks to profile and understand a specific segment of the market, delving into their broader demographics, income levels, preferences and behaviors to influence go-to-market approaches.

Here are some prompts you can use to support a Target Consumer research project:

1. Based on the demographic information, can you find different groups or cohorts that have differing views?
2. How do Millennials and Gen X differ in their feelings towards (insert topic)?
3. What are commonalities across all demographics in this study?
4. Are there any patterns or trends in the responses, and what do they reveal about the population being studied?
5. What do (insert demographic) think about this topic vs (insert demographic)?
6. What does the study say is the relationship between (variable A) and (variable B)?

ChatGPT prompts for consumer need studies

A consumer needs/wants study aims to understand more specifics around consumers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors, gauge their perception of products or brands, and derive insights to further refine marketing strategies.

Here are some prompts you can use to support these research objectives:

1. What does this study tell us about consumer needs around (topic)?
2. Based on the study’s results, describe the perfect (product) that consumers want?
3. What specific challenges or problems did respondents encounter when [activity]?
4. Show me respondents describing a situation where they felt dissatisfied or frustrated with [product/service]? What caused these feelings?

ChatGPT prompts for product positioning and messaging studies

A product positioning and messaging study aims to determine how a product is perceived, identify its unique value, and craft compelling messages that resonate with the target audience. And depending on the questions asked in the research project, it can also be used to identify competitive dynamics.

Here are prompts you can use to support a Product Positioning and Messaging study:

1. How do the study’s respondents describe [product/service]?
2. What unique value or benefits do respondents associate with [product/service] compared to similar offerings in the market?
3. Based on the study’s results, describe the ideal customer profile for [product/service].

ChatGPT prompts for price and demand optimization studies

A pricing and optimization study seeks to assess how pricing and promotions affect consumer decisions, pinpoint optimal price points, and gauge potential demand shifts based on varied pricing strategies.

Here are prompts you can use to support these research objectives:

1. How does the current price of the product/service influence respondents’ purchasing decisions?
2. Are there any specific price points mentioned in the study that would affect the purchase of [product/service]? What factors contribute to that decision?
3. How would changes in the price of [product/service] impact demand for it?

ChatGPT prompts for competitive research studies

A competitive research study aims to identify key competitors, assess their strengths and weaknesses, and uncover strategic opportunities to gain a competitive edge in the market.

Here are prompts you can use to support a Competitive Research project:

1. What competitors of [company] are mentioned in this study?
2. What do the findings say our competitors do better than [company]?
3. What is [company] doing better than our competitors?

Get quant insights from qual studies

A research initiative focused on converting unstructured qualitative findings into structured quantitative outcomes aims to harness the depth of narrative insights, making them accessible and interpretable in a numerical format.

This transformation allows for enhanced statistical analysis, trend identification, and more objective comparisons, bridging the gap between in-depth qualitative exploration and data-driven, quantitative decision-making.

Here are prompts you can use to convert qualitative research data into quantitative insights:

1. Imagine this study is a quant study. Generate me some quant results from the findings
2. What quant results from this study are most surprising?
3. What quant results from this study summarize its main insights?

Executive summaries

Executive summaries serve as a concise overview of the research findings, encapsulating the key insights, recommendations, and conclusions drawn from the data.

The primary goal is to provide stakeholders with a quick, digestible snapshot of the research outcomes, enabling informed decision-making.

Here are some prompts that can aid researchers in crafting compelling executive summaries:

1. Summarize the top three insights from this study.
2. What are the key takeaways from the responses regarding [product/service]?
3. What strategic actions do the study insights suggest we should take?
4. Are there recurring themes in the feedback that indicate a market trend?
5. Based on the study, how do we stand against our competitors?
6. Provide a summary of consumer sentiments towards our brand as revealed in the study.

To Learn More…

Voxpopme Platform + ChatGPT = AI Insights. That’s what you get when you combine analytical models with large data repositories, and merge processing power with an interactive interface. A potent tool for market researchers to work through complex qualitative research data and extract insights in record time.

Make your work smarter. Learn more about how you can use ChatGPT’s power to analyze and extract insights from your qual data with Voxpopme.