 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific II 2013 |
| Article no.: | 11 | |
| Topic: | Understanding the data – BIG and small | |
| Author: | Darlene Lee | |
| Title: | Managing Director | |
| Organisation: | Ipsos, Hong Kong | |
| PDF size: | 229KB |
About author
Darlene Lee is the Managing Director of Ipsos in Hong Kong; she has over 20 years’ experience in the Asian market. Ipsos HK was awarded best market research company for the fifth year in a row. She successfully managed the company’s local merger with Synovate and has led several start up initiatives as well as overseen successful mergers and acquisitions both in Asia and in the US. Previous positions include: Vice President Marketing and Strategic Initiatives, Simmons; Managing Director of Retail and Lifestyle Research, Synovate Limited; Vice President Marketing and Operations, LogicLab Inc; Managing Director, TNS Taiwan; President of Asia Pacific and President and CEO To Expand Internet Usage Behaviour Research, NetValue SA.
Darlene Lee holds a B.S. in Nutritional Biochemistry from Cornell University.
Article abstract
To get the attention of today’s simultaneously-multi-screen consumer market researchers, today’s studies have to be shorter, simpler, and more entertaining. Although market researchers have always been big on statistical analysis of questionnaires and other defined data, they now need new skills to correlate data and target significant facts. They need to be data scientists, experts in teasing meaning from ‘big data’ – masses of unstructured data about their target consumers – to make better sense of the market than their competition.
Full Article
Almost unnoticed, those of us fortunate enough to reside in Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” have undergone a remarkable technological evolution in our day-to-day activities. Imperceptibly, we’ve digitized our daily lives and now expect continuous connectivity. Since the world of market research is all about how to effectively and efficiently access consumers, this has introduced both challenges of lower response rates and consumers who are both more difficult to find and more challenging to engage. It has also introduced opportunities for research to be far more real-time, real-life, within the context of the consumer’s cultural, social and in situ circumstances.
In 2011, McKinsey & Co suggested that companies can be a part of the research revolution by paying attention in four areas: 1) Leverage the Internet to rapidly obtain details about consumers; 2) Keep the limitations of focus groups in mind; 3) Learn how people shop; and 4) Link consumer attitudinal and behavioural data. In market research industry terms, that has meant 1) adapting to survey in online/mobile channels, 2) expanding specialized solutions within the qualitative space, 3) developing more retail specific solutions like virtual shelves and eye tracking, and 4) big data.
Brand owners clearly see the challenge. According to Alex Wang, Strategic Insights Director, Asia Pacific for Japan Tobacco International, “From my perspective, conducting consumer surveys via modern technologies is not just something fancy, but a must for research suppliers as it delivers tangible benefits for clients. Anyone who is late to the game or chooses not to play will soon find themselves eliminated from the competition, exactly as the Apple Tsunami did to many mobile phone and PC companies.”
Clearly, consumers who are constantly connected with increasingly smart mobile devices present one of the biggest challenges the market research industry faces. IDC predicts that by 2015 Smartphones will make up 60 per cent of the global handset market and will take an even higher share in mature markets. Customized mobile apps for surveys, uploading photos and video, rating a service experience moments after it concludes… all of this and more is now possible thanks to the new normal.
And we ain’t seen nothing yet. According to the most recent annual survey from Cisco, last year’s mobile data traffic was nearly twelve times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000. Mobile video traffic exceeded 50 per cent for the first time in 2012 and mobile network connection speeds more than doubled in 2012. Average Smartphone usage grew 81 per cent in 2012 – Smartphones account for 18 per cent of total global handsets, but 92 per cent of total global handset traffic. Two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2017. Mobile data traffic in Asia Pacific grew at 95 per cent in 2012, a near doubling of traffic. Cisco predicts that the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world’s population this year, in 2013. So growth has been massive, but due to its exponential nature, the future promises to be bigger and faster yet again.
Although the traditional research industry remains dominated by large consolidated incumbents, the increasingly simultaneous multi-screen consumer means that they too must adapt to the digital everywhere nature of today’s consumer. To capture the precious time and attention of target consumers, today’s studies have to be shorter, simpler, and integrated with other platforms to give consumers the choice to engage via a social space or from within a game, with an option for geo-location – in short, fun and easy.
Jim Sailor, General Manager ASEAN region for IDC notes, “With the proliferation of mobile devices and access, research companies will have to keep pace with how consumers integrate these tools into their lives. We are not far away from a world where mobile devices replace credit cards and even wallets and we’re already in a world where BYOD (bring your own device) is blurring the lines between personal use and integration within enterprise technology ecosystems.”
So what exactly is different about the consumer today? Isn’t this just a matter of carrying around a bigger or smaller device? Not so, says a recent survey from Pew Research Center: nearly 90 per cent of surveyed teachers agreed that digital technologies were creating “an easily distracted generation with short attention spans”. Those students are already consumers and become more so once they leave school. Already adept at rapid attention shifts in a world of heavy stimulation, the rising expectation to be entertained also impacts how the market research industry asks questions. Lengthy ranking lists or complex matrix questions now trigger record rates of consumers dropping out of surveys. Smart organizations are learning how to ask questions with a more real-to-life component to make it more fun and engaging. Instead of the classic: Please rank these 20 destinations in the order in which you are most likely to visit them – a survey might instead pose the more engaging scenario: “Imagine you’re a travel magazine editor, which five of these destinations would you feature in your next issue and why?”.
The need for entertainment parallels the fragmentation of the consumer attention span. The convergence of devices means games, cameras, social media, traditional media, music, navigation, messaging, voice, and video can all be going on at the same time. This risks overloading the now very busy consumer who looks to be opting for the simple and intuitive. For survey makers, that means a simple and intuitive sliding scale between an unhappy and happy face where dragging one’s finger across the screen moves the button; no numbers, no rankings and instead, an easy to understand and simple to use interface that is humanely designed.
John Puleston, VP Innovation at GMI Interactive, concurs, “We need to recognise that surveys are pieces of creative communication akin to advertising. Advertising’s challenge is to grab people’s attention and persuade people to buy things. Our challenge is grab their attention and persuade them to concentrate. To do this we need to cross over the entertainment divide more. Start asking the question to ourselves why would anyone want to answer this survey? The future is a push towards what I describe as “bonsai” surveys; shorter and more entertaining experiences.”
Puleston continues, “We also need to make more of the technology we are sitting on. For example, take advantage of implicit measurement. Answer time is a good example: it’s practically free to gather it and it can tell us a huge amount about what people are thinking – yet who is using it? The other big step I see is the industry taking is a switch from closed to open questions and us exploiting text analytics software to interpret this.”
The need to uncover emotional drivers from a customer perspective has seen the rise of increasingly specialized qualitative solutions like ethnography or consumer journey mapping. Whether brand owners use global frameworks like Censydiam or Needscope, the drive to find out how consumers feel has never been more imperative.
At the other end of the spectrum of technological developments that impact market research (massive and stationary), brand owners are looking to turn big data into smart data. The rise of big data is driven by three main factors:
1. Immense amounts of constantly flowing digital information that consumers generate daily (on top of the already large streams of transactional data)
2. Huge increases in digital data storage capacity
3. Dropping costs of processing power needed to manage, analyze, and categorize the data
Smart companies can now leverage a suite of solutions to link with real business metrics like customer satisfaction, emotive segmentation, or with the automated deployment of customer touch points. The ability to link to, and effectively analyze, massive and disparate datasets will differentiate truly customer centric companies from their wannabe competitors. Market research organizations will increasingly need to be able to link their customer data with disparate datasets to help develop robust predictive models as well as identify the key metrics that most impact the business.
According to Arjan Toor, Chief Marketing Office for Cigna Global HL&A: “By leveraging our internal analytics experts, we realized a huge opportunity to link details about how our customers behave with more emotional and lifestyle components of what they expect. This has been of tremendous value to our front line teams.”
On the other hand, cautionary voices counsel patience and working through the process. Thomas van Manen, analyst at VINT (Research Institute for the Analysis of New Technology in the Netherlands) says “Considering Big Data was still on almost every trend list for 2013, the reports on the huge investments within the Big Data market and the fact that a lot of companies are still figuring out how Big Data might apply to their business… I would argue that we are still working our way towards the peak of inflated expectations”.
“The truth is that market research will be around for a while to come. We still need survey methodologists and storytellers, but what is starting to change is the need for more diverse skills within the team. We need to be data scientists, data fusion experts, data quality controllers and data visualization designers. The emphasis on data in the team is not accidental. The onus on research and insight teams across our industry is still very much to identify (and verify) the truth from data,” says John Carroll, Senior Director in Ipsos MediaCT and chairman of the Media Research Group.
