Trends in marketing research

2022. April 28. 09:17

At the end of 2020, our research team published the Marketing Research 2.0 book, the introductory chapter of which is about the factors and trends that influence marketing research.

 

It is not easy to keep this issue up-to-date due to the constant changing of trends, but we are seeing influences that have been present in the market for years and have been affecting the marketing research industry. In the following, we summarise – without claiming to be exhaustive – the ones we see as most influential in marketing research.

SUPPORT FOR QUANTITATIVE SURVEYS

Evolution of DIY tools

In particular, today’s firms need to be flexible, adapting to the market, external factors and other unforeseen influences (such as a global pandemic). And data-driven decisions are more important than ever. DIY solutions have been growing in popularity for some time, and in the current uncertain economic situation they are becoming more prevalent (also) due to decreasing marketing research budgets.

And we are currently witnessing a reinterpretation of questionnaire surveys, with many creative possibilities seen.


More clever and shorter surveys

If we want to find out anything about today’s consumer, we need to do it cleverly, in the shortest and quickest way possible. This is particularly true when surveying Generation Z, the generation that is growing up with digital devices, as this is the age group that is typically interested in ‘snack’ (easy to consume) content. Why would this be different for surveys?
The ever-shortening questionnaires have long been a concern for marketing experts. The specificity of micro surveys is that they consist of a few questions, only, significantly reducing response time. Although these questionnaires are not suitable for in-depth analyses, they are extremely useful for supporting everyday marketing work.

Fields of application are as follows

  • user feedback (development support)
  • consumer reviews (marketing support)
  • a more detailed understanding of user pathways
  • increase interactivity with our customers


The advantage of micro-surveys is that you can collect real-time feedback from your target groups quickly. Some tools can even store demographic data, which can be extremely useful for companies’ own transactional data processing.


Examination of user experience with and without questioning (Hotjar)

Hotjar specialises in User Experience (UX) analysis of websites, offering several solutions for this kind of research.

  • It supports the work of marketing staff, product managers and UX developers with heat maps and user journey analyses. Heat maps in a non-classical sense show clicks, mouse or touchpad movements and scrolling, while the recordings show the entire visit to a website or to a subpage of the website. This can be used to analyse customer journeys, as it is possible to filter the resulting images according to the stage of the purchase process that each user has reached, for example in the case of a webshop.
  • The application can also be used to conduct a variety of short surveys, for which pop-up micro-questionnaires can be created within the site, allowing you to gain a more detailed understanding of the conscious aspects of the user experience.


Automated content analysis (Zurvey)

Neticle’s content analysis application called Zurvey is an innovative tool for a wide range of researches. It allows automated text analysis of longer textual content (be it the answers to open-ended – also known as unstructured – questions in a questionnaire or texts collected in a secondary analysis). The application groups mentions according to keywords, and can analyse the polarity of these keywords in addition to their frequency. It can also analyse the relationships among these keywords. Zurvey is a Hungarian startup with a large number of international clients, as its innovative content analysis solutions allow for efficient researches. We have to put together a survey of open-ended questions and then can see the responses and their analysis in real time. The analysis is based on keywords and the software can filter out brand names, and also positive or negative feedbacks with human accuracy. With Zurvey we can effectively analyse customer feedback and reviews.

This was the method that we used to process structured interviews made during our 2020 consumer change research.

 

ONLINE QUALITATIVE RESEARCHES

International experience shows that the significance and share of qualitative tools in marketing research projects is increasing, with more and more clients turning to them for more valuable information and cost-effectiveness. The isolation brought by the epidemic and, to an even greater extent, the opportunities offered by technology are driving researchers’ interest in online qualitative solutions. Classical face-to-face qualitative research tools such as focus group discussions and in-depth interviews have moved into the online space, in fact, old methods have been reinterpreted and new ones have emerged in this field


Digital ethnography

Observation as a qualitative research methodology has been used in social sciences for many years, with ethnography being a special case. In this method, the focus of research is on the individual and his/her environment and consumption, which we try to understand in as much detail as possible during fieldwork.
Digitalisation has given a new impetus and new possibilities to ethnographic researches. The people observed typically follow the instructions of a moderator and record what happens to them in a diary-like way, in the form of texts, pictures or videos, using a mobile application.

The method is suitable to

  • map consumer habits,
  • track purchases or
  • understand the conditions of consumption.


Online communities and research forums

In our reading, the methods of online communities and research forums are very similar, typically differing in time and the number of participants. The point of these methods is to have a group of respondents answering the researchers’ questions or even each other’s comments online, maybe over a long period of time (months or years). There is also the possibility for participants to solve tasks, either individually or in groups.

An online community is a group of consumers who are interviewed from time to time by the researcher or the creator or maintainer of the community in order to gather information. These communities are not necessarily created for research purposes, but they can be “used” for such purposes as well, as they represent a brand’s or company’s own closed or public group. They are characterised by the fact that they are usually larger in number and exist for longer periods of time, which also means that, like panels, they need to be maintained, and participants encouraged to become members and contribute to the success of the company or brand by expressing or writing down their opinions. It is a way to get the views of consumers who are more closely associated with a company or brand, and can thus provide answers to research questions that are related to that company, brand or product.

A research forum, on the other hand, is usually an online community created for a specific research purpose, where participants (15-20 people) are recruited on the basis of a specific brief and criteria, and usually spend 5-7 days answering questions and solving exercises. This method, by its very nature, allows research on more general topics.

Vanilla and QuestionPro Communities provide a useful platform for these activities.

 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND VR TECHNOLOGY IN MARKETING RESEARCH

Big Data

Of course, the marketing research industry is also increasingly affected by the challenges of data mining. The management of large amounts of quantifiable data is nowadays solved, and the challenge is now more about automation and the integration of artificial intelligence, while data from different systems and external sources (e.g. social media) are not necessarily expressed in numbers.

Big Data has enabled marketing, and applied marketing research in particular, to make a meaningful contribution to supporting strategic decisions. Managing data warehouses is a new challenge for most companies, but there are many good examples that have demonstrated the usefulness of user data. So much so that a new concept has emerged in this area: marketing insight research, which, unlike the traditional understanding, is the study of user behaviour over a longer period of time and the incorporation of lessons learned (algorithms, patterns) into marketing activities.


Virtual reality technologies

A technology-intensive area of observational methodology is the field of virtual reality techniques (VRT), which now has many applications in marketing research:

  • One of its first uses was the design and testing of virtual shop interiors, which allows not only shelf design but also the testing of packaging.
  • They can also assist the monitoring of the purchasing process and even
  • can support research into the consumption of specific products or services too (e.g. tourism research).
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