Hyping Research Methodologies
Posted by Vovici Blog on Thu, Mar 17, 2011
While researchers often bring significant skills to new product development, they are sometimes shy about applying those same skills to innovations within the industry itself.
As I think about the social reaction to adopting new technology, I wondered: Where do various research methodologies fit on a hype curve?
- Hype
- Research games: Richer web user interfaces is the trigger for more interactive and entertaining research experiences but are games are a new frontier in market research and little used yet. (See Research Games Pass Go, Collect $200.)
- Mobile research: The rise in smart phones provides smarter ways to interrupt respondents at the “moment of experience”. (See Best Practices in Mobile Research.)
- Inflated Expectations
- Social media research: I was just talking with an analyst who sincerely believes that social media research will replace survey research. That’s a sure sign that hype for this has clearly reached a crescendo, despite the fact that few organizations are using it successfully today. (See Social Media Research: From Buzz to Biz.)
- Text analytics: A close kin to social media research, text analysis looks to many more sources of information, including emails from customers, call center logs, warranty reports and survey responses. Requires a much larger investment of time and money than most prospective users realize. (See Customer Feedback Listening Posts.)
- MROCs: Market research online communities are less hyped than they were, and there is a greater awareness of what they are good for and what they aren’t good for. (See The 8 Myths about Successful Research Communities.)
- Disillusionment
- Sentiment analysis: Disillusionment? Yeah, we’ve got your disillusionment. Carol Sue Haney, speaking at the NewMR Listening 2011 event, said “Sentiment is the snake oil of 2011.” I recently told one client who was trending data from an untrained automated sentiment analysis system that “Sentiment is the biorhythm of brands.” (See Sentiment Analysis: Man, Robot or Cyborg?)
- Online surveys: Does anybody still do these?! Oh, yeah, the majority of surveys are conducted online. No wonder we all hate them. (See The Survey is Dead, Long Live the Survey.)
- Enlightenment
- Online access panels: Users of commercial online panels are clawing their way out of disillusionment, after widespread reports of problems with panel quality. Organizations are starting to realize when such panels can be used successfully, and when some unhyped alternative has to be used instead. (See Commercial Online Panels from a Total Survey Error Perspective.)
- Productivity
- Phone surveys and mail surveys: So boring that they are invisible to the chatterati, even though such surveys are the backbone of social and policy research today. (See The Phone Survey in Decline.)
- Focus groups: Fun to make fun of, focus groups remain the predominant method of qualitative research today. (See Focus Groups in Focus: Link Roundup.)
That’s my take on where the research industry as a whole would place each methodology, not necessarily my own view of where each belongs. And it is certainly not my view of the eventual utility that each method will prove.
Meanwhile, for those of you hard at work on the productive but unhyped side of the market research business, here’s to you!