Page 96 - The EDIT | Q1 2017

96
Thoughtleader
At the end of the day it’s all semantics. Research, insights, behaviour science, user experience research, design thinking... the core idea of them all is the desire to deeply understand how people think and behave in order to better meet their needs and ideally, shape their behaviour. At the last marketing conference I attended in Sydney, almost every presentation was about a brand recognising new consumer needs and how it adapted to better serve those needs. Research is an evergreen industry — as long as consumers and culture continue to change, the need for new understanding will always be there.
How technology is transforming research
Like many industries, the market research and insights business has undergone massive change and fragmentation over the past 10 years — often driven by technology: sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
On the positive side, we’re excited by the use of smartphone capabilities for research, text analytics and passive data collection: Imagine if homes with Amazon’s Alexa home assistant could opt-in to be part of a research study that has Alexa “listening” to what you watch and play, and what conversations you have about brands. That data could be de- identified, aggregated and then analysed for insights.
On a more sour note, one tool undermining
the industry has been the introduction of DIY online surveys like Survey Monkey which has
taught too many inexperienced people to launch questionnaires that are full of methodological flaws, and frankly are generally pretty awful to take: Think of those giant “matrix” survey questions with 10 statements running down the left and ten choices running across the top — the kind of survey questions that inspire a person to click randomly due to mental exhaustion. Poorly asked questions will always yield poor quality information. “Crap in, crap out” as we say.
The art of asking questions
There actually is an art to asking questions in a way that doesn’t inject bias or create a horrible user experience. But it takes practice and commitment.
THE EDIT ISSUE 05 | Q1 2017