Assessing and delivering what the customer needs, requires extensive analysis of customer behaviors, transformation, and expectations from a business. The survey industry is rapidly evolving and is expected to grow to $75.78 billion in 2023. Market research is a demanding and essential task to keep a business ahead of the competition. The year 2023, will be a year of delivering cohesive and comprehensive online and offline experiences. Top 5 challenges the research industry is bound to face are:
Empathy-Driven Insights
The relationship between a brand and a consumer is empathy driven. An understanding of how consumers make purchase decisions can help streamline the marketing processes. These deeper insights regarding consumer empathy are not achievable via questionnaires. But, can be done by utilizing non-survey-based data such as that available via wearable devices or on social media. With this comes the additional challenge of leveraging rich data sources like images and videos to gather insights.
Integrating Online and Offline Experience
Customer journeys can be bridged with the help of artificial intelligence-based solutions. As ecommerce giants help retail businesses expand, footfall, demographic and ethnographic analysis can help in the efficient planning of physical stores. This helps in building an understanding of the non-western cultural groups, especially the ones who have not kept up with the pace of global development. Additionally, AR/VR may be used to deliver rich customer experiences. This can help in optimizing the shopping experience as well.
Observational Market Research
Using consumer neuroscience principles can enable businesses to understand behavioral patterns and the dynamics of evolving consumer choices. It enables observational market research that can generate many opportunities to transform market research using interdisciplinary data. Digital transformation has provisioned a powerful tool to dig into the psychological decision patterns of consumers. More advanced tools such as non-invasive brain imaging and magnetic resonance may also be applied with due respect to the compliance requirements. This aids product design and branding.
Improved Data Quality
AI, machine learning, and big data facilitate a coalition of huge amounts of data. However, there still is a need for businesses to ensure that the data being used to get insights is relevant. Relevance may be temporal, geographic, demographic, or industry-specific. The goal remains the same across them- bridging the gaps in data sets and targeting the right survey audience while eliminating duplicate inputs that may have been received via diverse digital channels. Data quality has a direct impact on research outcomes; analysis of data quality to ensure the reliability of reports is of utmost importance.
Audience Segmentation
Research is generally conducted with a limited set of audience or collects data from a random set without the knowledge of audience-specific details. As businesses focus on delivering hyper-personalized products and services research and analytics must incorporate the same. This can help them build consumer personas and transform operational data into experience data. Consumer segmentation right from data collection can improve how business handles customer grouping at the frontend.
In Conclusion
Market research must transform as an enabler for a holistic business perspective and a deeper understanding of consumption dynamics. 2023 and the coming years need research methodologies to combine technology, audience segmentation, and ethics and generate agile business insights at scale.