April 5, 2011

As the market research industry evolves, it’s no longer good enough to provide stand alone informative data sets and longitudinal benchmarking to marquis clients who have gone through several vendor reviews and expense line analyses. We must provide well-rounded sets of information that directly address a client’s burning questions or current business needs.

Purchased data must be tied to actual business results.

A key to success in the current market research environment is to develop a true understanding of a client’s business and have the capabilities to proactively deliver relevant, timely information in a usable format. This may sound obvious, but in my life of running business groups for large corporations I have found it far from the norm. Vendors did not know what kept us up at night and few provided consistently meaningful data. At a high level, we needed to know:

• How a target population interacts with a growing set of communication channels (e.g., websites, mobile applications, bricks and mortar stores, call centers)
• Drivers of purchase behavior (features, pricing, location, service, etc.)
• Steps a company could take to attract incremental, profitable business

In order to deliver this information, industry expertise and strong client management resources are needed, as well as truly integrated data sources. My focus in this piece will be on the latter.

I have found that actively managed online consumer panels that are thoughtfully integrated with other pertinent and vetted data sets are a great base for the development of a well rounded, single-source view of targeted consumer segments. When I quickly reviewed some recent questions my Lightspeed Research clients asked me, it further supported my conclusion.

• I was asked by a global CPG client to provide information about a target segment including the online content the target segment was searching for, their level of engagement with the various sites, and the content they found valuable.
• I was asked by a large U.S. bank to show the competitors it shared its credit-worthy segment customers with and what types of loan products that segment found most attractive.
• I was asked by a cellular phone company to provide data showing what drove a segment of its former customers to switch carriers and also show how the reasons for their switch differed from the consumers that had recently switched to become their customers.

All of the above questions focused on driving or maintaining profitable market share. We successfully answered these questions for our clients by tying various sets of survey derived data, passively collected behavioral data, credit information, qualitative community information and client segment data together.

In future posts I will explore the business value of specific research products and I will further develop applicable client experiences.

Category:Future of Online Research, Integrated Data, Research Products
Posted on April 5, 2011



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