Two weeks ago I wrote a post titled “Is market research useless? Or is that a dumb question?” Within a few minutes of the post going live, someone rated it a 2 out of 5. I felt puzzled and vaguely disquieted. Had I said something dumb in the post? What was it the person did not like? I’ll probably never know. And for me, that confirms that knowing what happens does not always give you insight into why it happened.
Unfortunately, in their eagerness to mine the digital data trail, people seem to have forgotten the need to understand the “why” behind the “what.” Yes, there is a ton of data out there, but that does not mean you can easily render it into relevant and useful information. You can’t always correctly intuit why people behave as they do.
While writing an article for Research Magazine (click here to read), I had a similar issue in mind. When asked to expound on the future of brand research, one of my points was the following:
I know that observational data sources will never completely replace the need to talk to consumers directly. For instance, though neuroscience can tell us when and how strongly someone responds to an immediate stimulus, it does not tell us how people might feel about brands over the long term. In order to go beyond passive understanding, we must be able to engage and interact with people, to propose ideas and gather feedback. The form of that interaction may be as different from traditional survey research as chalk is from cheese, but we will still need to talk to people. Today we use blogs, online ideation sessions, and video chat one-on-one interviews. Tomorrow we will use new methods. I don’t know exactly what they will look like, but I am willing to bet that question-and-answer will remain a core component.
While I used neuroscience as an example, I might equally have used digital data mining. And I am not alone in believing that the online data trail needs to be augmented by explicit questions. In an interview with Kai Ryssdal on Public Radio’s Marketplace, Professor Andreas Weigend, previously chief scientist at Amazon, suggested that companies need to combine “implicit” with “explicit” data if they are to make sense of what their users really want.
Weigend suggested that implicit data comes from sniffing “the digital exhaust,” that is, examining the behavioral data traces left on Facebook, Amazon, and the like. He continues, “Explicit means that you create incentives for users to share stuff with you. And why do they do this? Well, on the surface because they want to get some value out of it. Maybe they want to get a camera which fits their needs better, or credit card that suits them more. Deep down, however, I think it is the need for belonging, for self-expression.”
Implicit in Weigend’s commentary is the belief that you have to ask people questions in order to really understand why they do what they do. Perhaps more important, however, is that his comments point the way forward for market research. What is required to truly mine meaning from people’s activity on the Web is a much closer integration of listening and questioning. I’m not referring to the big formal survey of yesteryear, but rather to quick, targeted one-liners that help identify people’s true needs and motivations. And in order to get people to answer those questions, we may need to be willing to share more information in return—to explain why we are asking and what someone can expect to get in return.
So what do you think, and why?
(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ...
Email This Post
December 3rd, 2009 at 11:04 am
Agree completely. A lot of our research would be laughed at if we just gave our clients a + or - rating without any insight as to reasons why.