With technology platforms and customer expectations constantly changing, the future of marketing research and data stands at a pivotal juncture. With escalating concerns about data privacy, research approaches in 2024 will need to adapt to gain meaningful insights while upholding privacy rights.
The oft-professed ‘Father of Advertising’ David Olgilvy has been widely quoted as saying: “Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.”
Market research has always been vital for advertisers and brands, as it brings to light important and often hard to spot consumer preferences, behaviours, and trends. It can guide strategic decisions (including around branding), hones targeting efforts, improves product development, enhances messaging to meet customer needs effectively, and is key to building competitive advantages and reaping the rewards of better ROI.
With this in mind, there’s no doubt harnessing data and research is a key element of all successful marketing efforts. However, it is also clear that in this modern landscape and context, changes in research approaches will be necessary, particularly where AI is concerned.
Research expert Duncan Stuart says privacy concerns within market research are important and although some researchers understand where the lines are, large data sets and AI are making this space more complicated.
“The Market Research Code of Practice has engineered into it an ethical approach to privacy. And members of the Research Association of New Zealand have a generally clear grasp of where the boundaries are,” he says.
“But the advent of Big Data and AI have put pressure on from clients to capture and integrate individual respondent answers. The lines are getting blurred and I think it’s only a matter of time before some marketer stumbles into a sticky litigious situation.”
Drawing attention to privacy champions within the industry, Duncan says proactive and experienced individuals play an important role in identifying potential pitfalls and building ethical data capture methods.
The first priority for 2024 is to “take a fresh focus on privacy,” he says. “There are champions of privacy – Rali Andreeva (a customer behaviour and privacy expert) is one – who can quickly spot potential traps and apply a positive approach to designing ethical data capture. A well-designed privacy regime can actually enhance the
customer experience. It isn’t just about compliance.”
He adds that, although it also brought complexity, the rise of AI has revolutionised the approach to market research as it’s now much easier to decipher open- ended questions, enabling researchers to get more out of
their data and understand the nuances of verbatims.
“AI has delivered a big win to clients of market researchers who have long been loath to ask open-ended questions in their surveys. Now the process of making sense of all those verbatims is easy, enabling market researchers to go deeper and offer a much more qualitative understanding of the market. We may see fewer bar-charts and a resurgence of qualitative research as a result. I hope so.”
In light of the rapid evolution of digital platforms and the constantly expanding global market, businesses will need to be smart to make their data sets work for them and to provide the information they need
to succeed.
“The insights from Big Data are limited unless you have real scale, such as Amazon, or the grocery chains who pick up masses of transactional data. For most marketers their Big Data isn’t nearly big enough to deliver particularly insightful information,” Duncan says. “To make that work you need geo-location data, transactional data and detailed information about individual customers and prospects.”
He admits that only huge retailers even come close to having all three of these “rivers of information” but “the smart algorithms aren’t likely to be much help” even if you are in the business of marketing breakfast cereals or software solutions across the world.
Market researchers instead need to remind the market that research provides the quickest access to the consumer voice, he says.
“It gets straight to the point without getting bogged down in spreadsheets. The customer of breakfast cereals can share their opinions directly.
“At the same time market researchers need to explore ways to integrate their insights with a composite of databases that factor in such variables as the weather, the mood of the market, the impact of advertising and whatever else influences the marketing objectives. The future is still about building useful models that help marketers navigate the risks and complexities of today’s world of commerce.”
Research is also key in the branding space and companies like Re:brand have embraced a systematic approach to branding that places data and research at the forefront.
By delving into the thoughts and perceptions of consumers and stakeholders, businesses can gain invaluable insights into what drives their target audiences, in turn enabling them to create brand narratives and stories that connect with their desired audiences.
As Re:Brand’s Sarah Bonnefoy puts it: “Marketers should be ready to navigate through huge piles of data, analyse them, and build recommendations from them more than what they could have ever done.”
This speaks to the core of this trend for 2024: data analysis is no longer optional but essential for crafting successful marketing and branding strategies.
Sarah says these days most companies understand the importance of building their brand strategies on proper data rather than expert assumptions.
“At Re:brand for instance, we follow a thorough process to ensure we provide our customers with branding recommendations that support their business objectives. We base ourselves on their consumers and stakeholders’ thoughts and perceptions, not on this list of 2024 trends!”
Companies that have been gathering data for many years and have mastered using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are realising they have “gold in their hands” and can use this to tailor their branding and use it to their advantage.
“Our thinking is that marketers should be ready to navigate through huge piles of data, analyse them
and build recommendations from them more than what they could have ever done.”
Ultimately, researching and harnessing data in the right way for the job, will continue to be the key to navigating the increasingly complex web of the commercial landscape and ensuring your efforts are getting the ROI they deserve.
This article was first published in our December/January 2024 issue.
