The Changing Face of Market Research
One of the benefits of running Outsell is we’re of the industry we serve, a privileged position we respect and about which we have deep gratitude. From our lens and vantage point, we’re able to look at the tea leaves, connect the dots, look at the fringes of where new models are evolving and innovation is happening and then not only share that first and foremost with our marketplace but sit back and apply to ourselves. The investment we’ve made in our platform recently has been in direct response to convergence and the critical factors shaping deep vertical business intelligence. I’ve written about them in an earlier post and said to someone who recently took a look at what we built and said ‘wow’ — that yes, it’s what we call Capital IQ, meets IDC, meets GLG, meets CEB. And we’re doing it in a way where it can be a platform and others can run their business on our backs either by putting in their own third party content and tools or internal data, or by allowing affiliate partners to serve our industry in our ecosystem.
It’s a pretty powerful formula and as everyone knows it’s never done. We have the search to improve, data to add, new templates for our research to take online as we migrate away from a pdf metaphor into truly an online intelligence platform. It’s an evolution, not a revolution but what I know for sure is that we’re demonstrating best of breed in bringing business models together. And why? Well the data we gather and trends we see point to sea changes in the market research sector:
1. Take a look at Zip, Civic Science, or Whatsgoodly and see instant polling at scale. Perfect for everyone? No; a lens into what’s ahead in a mobile first world? Absolutely. Look out Gallop or Harris.
2. Social media monitoring, analyzing Twitter, getting a bead on sentiment analysis in real-time. Marketing cloud and audience measurement firms like Salesforce and Nielsen are building pieces of it in. Segment players adapt and zig while the big firms zag. Sprinklr goes into content marketing, leveraging its social listening and measurement skills. In local marketing check out LocalBlox a company with detailed real-time local data on over 200 million consumers and 40 million (or some odd companies). Local insight gets scale. Social + local data like police logs, school news, weather, neighborhood news. Versium is another upstart compiling compiling compiling.
3. Closer to home in B2B, look at HG Data and the fact that within years they displaced the content operations of the largest company in the field Harte Hanks Market Intelligence. Versium is an upstart compiling, compiling, compiling to provide predictive analytics for lead scoring, but with a twist. It breaks down data silos by combining business and consumer data, in an identity matching machine learning mashup.
4. Machine driven content creation along the likes of ISVWorld whose underlying technology we are using for our own company database. Its founder knew that the largest ITR firms were covering the top 2000 or 3000 software firms but that there were zillions more. So with technology and developers, he created a database of 120,000 ISVs around the world. No analysts, no researchers. Like the old Yellow Pages ad that said ‘let your fingers do the walking’, the new metaphor is let the machines do the crawling and that crawling is in milliseconds if not nanoseconds and way faster than humans.
5. Outsell’s Louise Garnett coined the term real data in real time a few years ago in her harbinger of the phenom we’re living today. Ahead of her time, she and we nailed that trend and it’s accelerating.
6. Market research polling — so yesterday. Focus groups? Nope. We stopped doing them for our clients moons ago. We don’t believe in taking client money for modalities we don’t think work in an era of agile development and when observations and analytics and launching for feedback gets real data in real time.
7. Are surveys dead? Hardly. Have new tools emerged? Definitely. Neuroscience in marketing and advertising is booming. Mapping human faces in real time as they watch videos is the business model of Affectiva and Real Eyes. Sensum is using machine learning and biometrics to measure people’s emotional connections to brand experiences.
The most telling example of the changes going on in market research came just the other day. Our head of product did a Google trending analysis on search terms having to do with market research reports or market intelligence. It’s down significantly from 12 years ago.
AND it dovetails with our own research amongst millennials and their information consumption habits. Authoritative sources such as market research fell to # 5 as the go-to for seeking information to do their jobs. There is a sea change underway. Between mobile, social, the machines, and a workforce with very different expectations, it’s go real time or go home.