MarketTools Blog

In a recent post on the GreenBook Blog, Tony Cosentino highlights the “quote of the conference” from last week’s TMRTE (The Market Research Technology Event), made by one of the presenters during Google’s demo of its new market research software offering. Cosentino related, “after a few minutes [the presenter] brought up the prompt to write the actual question. He said with all seriousness (and I’m sure without intention), ‘This is where all of your expertise is put to the test. This is where you write the question.’ I couldn’t help but chuckle and think that is how the technology industry perceives the market research industry – a bunch of question writers.”

This perception is probably all too prevalent — yet it’s missing a very important aspect of our expertise: analysis.  We can take it a step further, and make the case that market researchers were the original data scientists, practitioners of that discipline blending statistics, applied mathematics, and computer science to solve complex business problems.

Back when research was conducted primarily on paper, researchers dealt with short surveys and limited demographic data. But as the industry became more complex and able to handle data from longer surveys, the insights we provided for products delivered more and more value. Then came online surveys – and as the technology evolved, researchers were able to tease out increasingly rich information during the analysis phase, helping companies push their products forward into markets. Data modeling, together with online technologies, allowed MR to create better, more interactive experiences, to collect data in new ways, and provide new meaning about consumers and markets.

Today, as researchers continue to integrate mobile into market research, we see the platform opening up even more opportunities to gain insights into consumers and the marketplace, on a broader scale than ever before. Data science will prove to be the key to accurate insights based on mobile research. With the constraints of the mobile platform, the survey instruments must be simple, short and engaging. Mobile also requires a much more complex modeling system on the backend, since data cleansing and validation plays a much larger role there than for other platforms.

Researchers deliver these new models with ease, because their creation process has been a large part of our historical methods for delivering insights. Market researchers are more practiced at developing useful data models than any other group – and I believe we could even give the wonderful folks at Google a run for their money.

MarketTools will be showing this data science in action during our ESOMAR Webinar next week. We partnered with a sample provider who is working with the telecom industry to introduce market research to mobile users in emerging countries. Leveraging the mobile provider’s Big Data on their customers made it possible for new audiences to participate in research – by giving us the information needed for data cleansing, so we could ensure that the insights were replicable and usable for our CPG client conducting the research. With activities like these, it’s clear that market researchers bring more expertise to the table than simply fashioning questions.

To learn more about our global mobile research, and the data science involved, register for the May 15th webinar.