New Technology Requires a New Market Research Paradigm

Karlene Lukovitz reports for Marketing Daily that while the Internet and social media are a potential boon to market researchers, they've also raised concerns and ongoing debate about methodology and the ability to project results.
Now, one social media-based research firm is charging into the fray with a report that maintains that today's empowered consumers and marketers' need for faster, actionable insights requires an approach that combines the strengths of newer, "humanistic" approaches with those of traditional, experimentally-based research.
The principals of Communispace, which employs relatively small (generally 300 - 500) proprietary communities for market research clients such as The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo and GlaxoSmithKline, say that their goal is to encourage industry conversation about the "trade-offs" involved in the two approaches and how to best leverage both, given the now "blurred" boundaries between marketing and customer research. They maintain that it's time to stop equating research quality with scientific "purity," and use brand-transparent community engagement to generate insights and explore nuances of consumer attitudes and preferences on an ongoing basis, while using traditional blind, episodic, experimental research designs for confirmation and testing purposes. This means shifting our focus -- aiming not for the perfect, bias-free study, but for an approach that pragmatically applies a range of methods to generate and test hypotheses.

While some might well point out that a firm engaged in offering proprietary online community research is bound to have its own biases, in an interview with Marketing Daily, Wittes Schlack and Austin pointed out that the report includes examples and comments from consumer market researchers based on their own experiences, and stressed that Communispace is advocating achieving a pragmatic integration of approaches that reflects 21st-century realities, rather than an either/or mentality.
Humanistic or "consumer-focused" online/social media-driven research enables an "ongoing discovery process" that allows consumers and the brand to explore new questions and issues as they arise naturally from a conversation, the Communispace report notes. In contrast, "top-down, researcher-centric" methods are most useful for "confirming what is already known or suspected," since these methods by definition "do not expand a problem space, nor do they generate knowledge outside of the researcher's frame of reference."

While concerns about the ability to project results to a general population, and the risks of bias or "group think" in brand-transparent scenarios in which consumers interact, are understandable based on the traditional research mindset, they fail to take into account changing real-world dynamics. Given that most consumers are now online, the Internet population is rapidly becoming the general population and the artificial environment of blind-sponsorship studies conflicts with the reality that "today's consumers do continually influence one another."

Contrary to intuitive assumptions that consumers are reluctant to be honest or critical of a brand or product idea if the sponsorship is transparent, a "natural," conversational environment that encourages consumers to be active collaborators rather than study subjects leads to greater candor as the relationship progresses. When people feel involved, they feel ownership toward the brand, and they are frank because they don't want you to make mistakes that will undermine the product or brand. Having an intimate conversation with consumers provides a more revealing, true-to-life picture.