The Time for Faster Marketing Research is Now

Every few years something comes along that fundamentally changes “business as usual”. For a short time, about 20 years ago, I would have signed on and asked Jeeves. Not long after that, I switched to asking Google. Nowadays, most of us have built-in personal AI assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Bixby right in our cell phones. The personal computer brought the internet into our everyday lives, connecting us inexorably to one another, and now with the rise of smart technology, we have the world literally at our fingertips.

Not too long ago, smart technology was nice, but just not something we thought we needed, and now we struggle to imagine life without it. There’s no going back. And while this technology has drastically reduced the time needed to collect information, it has also sped up our need to quickly and repeatedly gather and synthesize multiple streams of data. The speed of communication has both changed our pace of life and our need to make quick (data-informed) decisions.

Riding (Not Just Adapting to) the Wave of Change…

Everything is becoming faster, easier-to-use, and more customizable. Market research is moving in the same direction.

For those of us who are familiar with the custom research project, we know that it typically takes 2-3 months from the proposal to the final report, and costs upwards of $25,000, depending on the level of complexity and the sample, to complete. These projects provide both depth and breadth of market research insights in areas from product adoption curves, preferred concepts, complex segmentation, and so on.

But what if you don’t need the depth and breadth of information that a custom project provides? What if you need something faster, not as complex, and more affordable? Your team has a big meeting in 3 weeks and you need answers to a few key questions, but you don’t have 2-3 months to do a custom project and a secondary research report is just too general.

You could turn to one of the quick-hit, do-it-yourself tools available online. They are definitely cheap and fast. But what are you giving up?

Research without Insight is Just Data

In our data-streaming world where we want everything now and for the absolute lowest cost, we can’t fail to consider the tradeoffs. And the most obvious tradeoff of using online, do-it-yourself survey tools is the lack of professional question development and survey design on the front end, and the lack of analyzed insights on the back.

Most people contracting marketing research studies are not experts in many of the phases of qualitative research design and execution, especially proper methodology selection and question crafting for unbiased but informative, useful results. They also tend to struggle with obtaining and compensating the right audience for their research needs.

Do-it-yourself survey tools cannot help with any of these.

On the other end, there’s the problem with results. Online survey tools can provide data. But they can’t deliver insights. There is no analysis performed and no connection developed between the study’s goals and objectives and the numbers.

 But there is a solution to quick-hit research – a research design that fills the gap between underdeveloped, cold, impersonal, do-it-yourself online research tools and expensive, time-consuming custom research that is overkill for a targeted, single-objective studies.

Our answer is Insight Streamer. Over the next few weeks, we will be unveiling our new research service concept that will deliver market research insights, faster and more affordably. Taking advantage of the smart technology that fuels the always-on generation, Insight Steamer is bridging the gap.

Why Insight Streamer?

If you have a deeper interest in learning more about the changing landscape of marketing research, and what influences have brought about a need for a service like Insight Streamer, join us July 27^th for the webinar, “The Future of Marketing Research Today!”