Getting Traditional Research to Evolve in Innovative Ways

• October 28, 2019
• Claudia Velilla
• no comments

This third interview clip is part of Wonk Bridge’s article on ‘Bringing the Power of Data Back to the People’, where we talk about the challenges of evolving from traditional market research to more innovative and beneficial ways of doing market research.

Have dogmas in the field disappeared?

This has perhaps been one of the biggest challenges in CitizenMe’s work. Change is always a challenge; it essentially involves re-adjusting and re-educating a specific sector on a different way of doing things. 

On that note, we discovered that for people who have spent thirty years doing market research the old way  (i.e. 3 months or 6 weeks of research involving a week in the field) versus doing this research in literally thirty minutes, this was a big step. They can now get all their research responses and insights back instantly. For a lot of people in the industry who have been doing things in a certain way, this change involves a big education piece. On top of that, they also understandably need reassurance, since they are in the middle of this disruption. After a hard year of work, we are finally picking up engagement among this group. 

So what makes CitizenMe’s innovative approach different from traditional market research?

Traditional market research is all about taking 1,000 people’s responses and trying to extrapolate what 10 million people are going to do – there’s a lot of science and art around the questions, statistics at the back, setting quotas, etc. 

We are combining all this with Big Data, where you take what 10 million people are doing in terms of data sets and then trying to look at some probabilistic modelling to work out what they are going to do in the future. 

Chief Marketing Officers of large organisations love the platform. They are interested in talking to their customers right now, in real time. You can go beyond asking them questions by seeing how active they are online (such as what app they use the most), always anonymously and with full permission.

An example would be if you had a loyalty app for the supermarket, you could see what other supermarket loyalty apps they are using, what bank apps they are using, where people are spending their time – is it Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn? You can see all kinds of psychometrics, and you can get that in a moment snapshot. This is why brand marketers love the platform but for these same reasons, for traditional market researchers it’s a bit of a leap. 

This is just the third bit of our story, so watch out for the next part! And if you missed the second interview clip, check it out here. 

Join us as a Citizen or client today! If you have any questions or would like more information, don’t hesitate to contact us at hello@citizenme.com.