Data
mining: the marketing research of the future
Shawn Hessinger shares
results of a recent study by Cambiar Partners, a market research consulting
firm, which suggests data mining will rule market research in the future, and
Web-based data companies like Google and Facebook could be the top marketing
research firms.
For the study, Cambiar asked
274 corporate researchers and research senior executives to project out to 2020
about the changes they see coming for the field of marketing research. It
compiled results in its Future of Research Report, released late last year.
Hessinger shares the most
significant findings, including:
•
Three out of four researchers believe “mining of existing knowledge” will be
the main kind of market research conducted in the future as opposed to new
research projects. A majority also believe “emotion measurement” will be
significant, though exactly what form this measurement might take remains
vague. “The jury is still out” on whether techniques like neuroscience and
biometrics are viable options, Cambiar noted in the report.
•
One quarter of corporate researchers surveyed think the leading research
company of 2020 doesn’t exist today, and another one-fifth expect that leading
company to be either Google or Facebook. In a world in which “mining of
existing knowledge” becomes the main kind of market research, it makes sense
that a search tool or social platform already managing almost limitless data
would lead the pack.
The findings may suggest a
major role for text analytics and sentiment analysis in the future of marketing
research. Market researchers would use text analytics to identify brand
mentions in social media and other customer-generated data, and sentiment
analysis to measure the general attitude toward those brands.
For more details, see the
full blog post on allanalytics.com. For more on harnessing data for marketing
effectiveness, check out this white paper.
What do you think? Will
collecting and mining existing customer data take the place of new market
research projects? Leave your comments below.