Are These Market Research Ideas on the Way Out?

As technology progresses, older tech is often rendered obsolete. This idea, known as creative destruction, can be applied to any industry and any technology. For an

easy example, just look at how a single smartphone has made obsolete digital cameras, CD players, watches, and a host of other technologies. The market research industry is not immune to creative destruction, and these five past staples of the industry are on their way out.

1. PowerPoint

Nothing is more ubiquitous or more stereotypical of MR than the PowerPoint presentation. The platform has long been dominant as a quick and easy way to demonstrate the results of research in a visible, geographical manner. Eventually, however, this (some would say) stale and old, but foundational, tool will be replaced. The only question is, what interactive, visual, and intuitive technology will replace it?

 2. Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

Just as PowerPoint forces information to be presented in a linear, compartmentalized fashion, Quant and Qual force market research into discreet segments. The time is quickly approaching, however, where this duality—this segmentation—will no longer suffice. Both methods will merge into a new way of recording, analyzing, and presenting information.

 3. Focus Groups In-Person

Focus groups are essential for market research—that can’t be denied. Already, it’s growing difficult to entice consumers to sit down in a bland boardroom to absorb media and return opinions, however. Instead, focus groups are moving into the digital arena. Communities are already forming around the idea of advanced testing and feedback; the traditional focus groups are going online.

 4. Online Surveys

Now, who has the patience to sit down and take an hour-long survey about washing machines, car commercials, snack crackers, or tennis balls? Websites offering reward points and tangible benefits are struggling to maintain their user base already, and that’s with easy-to-earn monetary incentives already available. No, the traditional online survey is doomed, and the future lies in quick, five minute or less polls delivered through mobile platforms. No one is going to sit at their computer and answer 100 questions. But, plenty of people will press a quick set of answers into a mobile app, knowing that doing so earns them a few points towards a reward.

 5. The Idea of Rationality

Almost all of traditional MR is based on the idea that humans behave rationally, make decisions rationally, and will react the same way to the same stimulus every time. For this reason, online surveys are often filled with individual motivators and rankings. Soon, however, technology is going to enable an entirely different way of making decisions, a way that doesn’t respond to the rational frame of the existing means of research. The world’s paradigms are changing, and the MR industry needs to keep up.