Market Research No Longer as Popular as Miley Cyrus
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sun, Jun 06, 2010
Andrew Jeavons, managing director of Nebu USA, closed out the CASRO Technology Conference with a presentation on the future of market research that was alternatively amusing and terrifying. He set the stage by showing some Google search trends.
To prove that Google search mapped to real world behavior, he showed how searches for "Miley Cyrus" came out of nowhere with the debut of the Disney show Hannah Montana and then climbed steadily as her music career took off.
In contrast, interest in Michael Jackson had been slowly decreasing but spiked with his tragic death.
Word processing, once the state of the art in high tech ("remember Wang?!"), has become background noise, taken for granted.
But the recession has spurred a renewed interest in "customer".
But not, alas, in "market research", which hasn't been more popular than Miley Cyrus since she was 13.
Will our industry quietly fade away or will it collapse catastrophically? Andrew pointed out that the financial industry showed us that change could happen suddenly and dramatically. Just because it hasn't happened to MR yet, doesn't mean it won't.
It's easy to contemplate incremental change. Social media is "not a vastly different set of technology, integrates with current practices, an easy learning curve: comforting." The industry can absorb social media research.
But others want slices of the market research industry. The large consulting companies have already come in and cut off a big slice of customer loyalty research. Cognitive neuroscience is "very different technology, with radically different practices, a steep learning curve: complex". The cognitive neuroscientists are interested in taking their own slice of market research as well.
What will be left for us?
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