The Survey Superpower in a Multi-Polar World
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, May 10, 2010
Saturday was the 65th anniversary of V-E Day: Victory in Europe. That's my grandfather (on the left), toasting the Allied victory with a bottle of Hitler's wine that he had helped "liberate" from Hitler's private cellar in the Berchtesgaden hideaway. With the 101st Airborne Division, he had fought his way across France, the Netherlands and Germany. I think that was one well-deserved glass of wine.
He returned to an America that made up 50% of the global economy. By the time he died a few years ago, the United States made up just 20% of the world economy. Some spin that as a story of American decline, but it represents a reversion to normalcy. In 1945, the largest economies in the world had been crippled by the war; their subsequent rebirth and growth significantly increased the size of the global economy.
Surveys, especially online surveys, have been the sole superpower of the market research world for too long now. They are fast and inexpensive and can be used for almost anything - as I've written before, they are the Swiss army knives of research. The big change in survey research, from telephone to online, has already happened.
But qualitative research has been much slower to move to the Internet. While a survey is a survey is a survey, with only minor differences whether it is done on paper, via telephone or online, a focus group or depth interview can be quite different over the Internet. Online focus groups were experimented with in the early 1990s, but never really took off. Bulletin-board focus groups have grown slowly but steadily and still aren't widely used. MROCs have exploded in growth and look to become the first online qualitative technique used by a majority of businesses.
Meanwhile, the web has evolved from a library to a store to a social sphere. The web is now more widely used than ever before, and for ever more purposes. As it has expanded its reach into consumers' and business professionals' lives, it has become a rich source of qualitative information. Social media market research (blog mining, web scraping) lets businesses hear the Voice of the Customer in powerful and inexpensive new ways. Bloggers and participants in third-party online communities can be approached and engaged in conversation to learn their point of view and opinions. Online ethnography provides for the surreptitious studying of all this online activity.
Taking the web away from the desk, mobile technology is enabling new ways to engage people in qualitative work. Research participants can snap pictures of their closet, their cupboard, their garage with their cell phone and email them to researchers. They can take video footage of the stores they shop at and email that as well. The devices can periodically remind them to complete diaries or can prompt them for information based on their location. As webcams become more widely used, researchers can conduct IDIs (In Depth Interviews) over such cameras.
In short, technology is enabling a tremendous expansion in the types of qualitative research that can done. It's easy to describe the rise of these new qualitative techniques as predicting a fall in the use of surveys, but that's not really what's happening. Surveys will continue to play an important complementary role to qualitative research, as they always have. As online qualitative techniques catch up to where surveys have been for years, more market research will be done than ever before. And that's something we can all toast to.