Need for more Market Research
If you are a Market researcher, chances are you have already noticed this trend in your organization – Ever-increasing requests for conducting new surveys to closely track changes in consumer preferences. In this post, we examine some of the reasons for what drives changes in consumer preferences rapidly than ever before:
Impact of social media in Market Research:
Through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Brands now have more ways to reach consumers than just traditional channels like mass media. This creates opportunities for creating great advertising content and tapping into the social network for distributing that content much easily. Additionally, there is the effect of Influencers that can create brand loyalty for a product/service a lot faster than in the past. These two factors amplify the effect of marketing, more so for smaller companies because they can create viral effects and quickly eat up market share from leaders. In addition to this, there is an ‘always on’ feedback loop where consumers can publicly post their opinions in mediums like Twitter, Facebook etc. This situation forces the companies to communicate proactively in the social sphere to manage the narrative and stay on top of the competition.
Innovation cycles have become shorter:
For manufacturers, changes in technology have enabled them to produce products faster than ever before. For example, take the case of 3D printing that has dramatically reduced the cycle times from prototyping to manufacture at scale. This has created an acceleration effect in product innovation - less time to conceptualize a new idea, even less time to go to market. Because of this change, marketers are under pressure to increase the share of innovative products dramatically in their offerings. As a result of this, there is an increasing need for conducting experiments (like Test and control) in order to identify those innovations that will have a higher likelihood of survival/success.
Personalization and Customization
The traditional way of targeting based on clusters created using demographics is soon becoming obsolete as more and more data becomes available about customer behavior and preferences. Also, Companies are leveraging newer digital marketing channels to reach consumers, and this provides the opportunity to tailor the marketing message to the granularity of individual users. So, marketing departments that are sitting on top of this mammoth information need to make sense of their customers more effectively than ever before and to talk to them more personally. This situation is especially true for current market leaders that have built a successful identity from the distant past as they are no longer guaranteed market domination purely by having an old successful message. The winners of today’s marketing trend will be those products/companies that speak to the individual user addressing their personal wants/desires/beliefs in a personalized fashion.
We believe these factors are huge drivers for Market researchers to conduct more surveys and address challenges and/or capitalize on new opportunities. What do you think?