Perspectives Episode 02 – What’s not going to change in Market Research in the next ten years?

In the second Perspectives episode, we’ve hand-picked sixteen top-tier thinkers within market research to talk about what they think isn’t going to change in the next ten years.

I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. – Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (source)

What do you think isn’t going to change? If you put energy into it today, what will still be paying off dividends for your clients 10 years from now?

For some, it was the result of planning and a deliberate decision and for others, it’s been fortune or perhaps even mishap? Listening to other people’s experience can be entertaining or educational and this is especially true in the world of market research.

Technology promises so much and you know, automation and AI and all of these things, and they’re all enablers, they help up to understand data quicker, make decisions faster, take on you know huge computational challenges that wouldn’t be feasible if they were done manually, however there still needs to be that human element there still needs to be that interpretation of the data. – Dave Carruthers @DaveCarruthers

Survey research is not going to disappear over the next 10 years, neither will grid questions, and neither will the need for insightful and curious researchers to interpret the data and recommend actionable insights to their clients. – Ben Hogg @Sn00pHogg

People wanna buy stuff that’s reasonably priced and does the job, and that’s how companies grow, everything else is kind of fluff. – Siamack Salari @SiamackSalari

I think that research budgets will be allocated and continue to be allocated on a bit by bit basis, and they will be looking for companies that are agile. Agile and able to provide insights in real time that are incredibly insightful and impactful to the organisation and have real time meaning. Beyond that, I think social media is not going away either. I can look at my teens and see that, and their friends. – Baileigh Allen @baileighallen

In my back garden is a monkey puzzle tree, a little story, a monkey puzzle tree is a tree that’s so hard to climb that even a monkey can’t do it, it’s impossible, that’s the thing that it’s not going to change, not monkey puzzles, but business puzzles, business are still going to have problems that need research, that need consumer insight, and need our support to help solve – Dan Foreman @winifredatwell

The ability for market researchers to build narratives around the results, to build stories to try to make clients understand the implications of, and to build some meaning around this data. – Pedro Almeida @Pedro_R_Almeida

In the next ten years, one of the main fundamental thing that isn’t going to change is our client’s need for insight. And I don’t think that they’re gonna be able to get that insight from artificial intelligence, from big data. I still think that there’s going to be a need for high-quality market research practitioners being able to observe and ask questions that are going get clients the answers that they need to help them make better business decisions. – Andy Buckley @andybuckers

What is not going to change is we have an ongoing need for valid and reliable measurements of consumer opinions. That will not change. We also have a huge need for better tools. – Annie Pettit @LoveStats

What you’re starting to find with photo recognition, image recognition, kind of the artificial intelligence that’s out there today. You can actually take a photo today, and while we’re capturing it for one question, you can now start to mine that just the way we’ve been mining data over the last five, ten years. – Rick West @RickWest01

People will have to decide whether the story can be told in a way that is acceptable and digestible to the necessary and relevant audience. And ultimately people will have to implement whatever solution is deemed to be optimal. So technology will always and continue to be a great support and it will help that support to evolve and speeding up. But the one thing that will never change is the need for good market research professionals – Finn Raben @Finn01

We will continue to have an obsession with data quality. And this is going to be vital because we’re going to have so many different data sources that we can use. So ensuring that we get really good data quality and understand what’s meaningful within this data is going to be important. – Fiona Blades @FionaMESH