Important trends and tendencies in market research

Market research today

Market research plays a central role for companies when it comes to launching new products, researching buying behaviour or predicting sales figures. Market research has changed and evolved over time. New technologies create new opportunities to conduct market research faster, easier and cheaper. And it is precisely these technologies that enable companies to conduct market research in-house, as a self-service, as the automotive group BMW does.

→ BMW case study

For companies today, five factors play an essential role in market research: the technology used, speed, agility, the combinability of methods and the simple and quick retrievability of research results for different stakeholders. The QuestionPro market research platform offers solutions for all these requirements on a central platform.

Technology

Using the right tools is the be-all and end-all in any profession. With its many predefined question types specifically tailored to market research, as well as extensive evaluation and analysis options, QuestionPro's technology offers market researchers a wide range of tools that cover almost all requirements for conducting qualitative and quantitative market research studies.

Here some examples

• Conjoint Analysis
• Semantic differential
• Online focus groups and video discussions
• Sentiment and text analysis
• Pricing modeling tools
• Community framework
• Easy connection to panels
• Intelligent and automated data quality checks
• Logic checks, plausibility checks, validations
• Customisable analysis dashboards
• and many more

→ Overview of the market research platform QuestionPro

Speed

Speed plays an essential role in market research. The faster you get meaningful insights, the faster you can make important decisions. QuestionPro's intuitive user interface and the many predefined question sets make it quick and easy to put together questionnaires and tests. Questionnaires are published and made available almost at the touch of a button, for example via the integrated serial mail function or sharing buttons for sharing in social networks. In addition, QuestionPro generates HTML code for embedding a questionnaire on a website. Furthermore, with QuestionPro Connect, market researchers can use an online panel that guarantees quick results with 22 million panel members.

“The flexible and responsive project management particularly meets our requirements for short-term and rapid studies. The quality and proactivity of the project support as well as the speed in the implementation of the reporting also meet the highest standards.”
Dr. Josef Köster, market research team leader at BMW

→ The online panel from QuestionPro

Agility

Speed, flexibility, adaptability, simplicity. These are the keywords that many market researchers associate with the term agility. Setting up studies quickly and being able to adapt them just as quickly if necessary ensures enormous speed and flexibility. Companies that use smart technology to conduct market research studies need much less time to turn a question into an insight. Today, they have received a research request from the business department and will deliver results in a very short time. Some time ago, this was not possible. Increasingly, companies are therefore conducting smaller, less extensive ad hoc surveys, for example with the support of an online panel or within their own research community. There is a clear shift towards high frequency, high cadence studies where turnaround times are incredibly fast. Small surveys or surveys that can be set up and conducted in minutes, with responses and analysis available within minutes, are the future of market research.

→ Agile market research with QuestionPro

Combined approaches

A mix of research techniques and methods has massively increased among market researchers. What used to be very costly and time-consuming can now be implemented quickly and cost-effectively with innovative technologies. QuestionPro's Community Framework offers the possibility to use a variety of qualitative and quantitative research methods "out of the box". Companies are now able to conduct focus group discussions online with the latest tools such as video conferencing and virtual whiteboards without much effort and also to launch a comprehensive quantitative market study. And if your own community does not offer a large enough sample, you simply call in an external online panel.

→ Market Research Community by QuestionPro

Quick findability

Especially in large, widely dispersed companies, real research silos were not uncommon. Each department did its own thing, which meant that valuable findings that had cross-departmental relevance were not visible. This even led to superfluous studies being conducted that need not have been conducted. This is different today. Today, central storage locations as well as processes and workflows are defined on how information, research data, reports and insights need to be filed. Going one step further, QuestionPro's Insights and Research Hub is not just a rigid storage location, but can also be used as a central project management tool for market research studies. All studies conducted with QuestionPro's Insights and Research Hub are automatically stored there according to specific rules and criteria. Intelligent search functions make it easy to find all information on all studies conducted.

→ Insights and Research Hub from QuestionPro

Other important trends in market research

Crowd research

Crowdsourcing in market research helps solve problems on a large scale and at a lower cost, and is one of the top trends in market research to watch out for in 2021. Because crowdsourcing uses the Qual-Quant method, the insights that can be gained from a diverse audience are enormous.

Social Listening

Due to the wide reach of social media, it is becoming increasingly important to listen to what is happening in these open networks and to deduce sentiments from the comments. As social media is very emotional, there is more scope to get to the bottom of ideas, complaints, buying behaviour, macro and micro trends, etc. With social listening, you can narrow down the qualitative data that matters to you and gain valuable insights using AI-based sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis & natural language processing

Analysing open texts is a painstaking process, but it can give you insights that you would otherwise not have been able to get, or would have had great difficulty getting. Natural language processing technology can read, understand, decode and make sense of human languages. Processing linguistic data using AI-based sentiment analysis saves market researchers from tedious tagging and reading, for example, comments on social media or review portals.

→ Sentiment analysis

Emotive Research

One of the biggest trends in market research is the additional use of technology to capture behaviour via various factors such as facial recognition. Emotive Research helps you gain insights where, for example, test subjects don't need to interact with an external device at the experience site, such as a feedback terminal, and moods can be captured directly through facial and visual cues only.

Qualitative online research

One trend in market research that has clearly emerged as a by-product of COVID-19 is online qualitative research. Given the limitations of face-to-face focus groups and other qualitative research methods, the only option is to conduct these models online. Since online focus groups have emerged around the world, the understanding of their value and importance has changed significantly.

→ Online focus group

Longitudinal studies via online communities

One of the biggest trends in market research will be longitudinal research and tracking. With the help of community platforms where the number of community members is constant over a longer period of time, longitudinal research can be used to observe changes in behaviour and identify trends. In addition, the activity level of a community can be maintained very easily with so-called engagement tools, so that participants remain loyal to the community and also like to participate in surveys and group discussions because they are rewarded for doing so.

DIY research

For a long time, market research was considered a complex and labour-intensive process that could only be managed with extreme expertise and external service providers. Today, there is a clear shift towards do-it-yourself market research in-house with smarter, technologically advanced research tools. In our handbook "Self-Service Market Research" we describe all the question types and functions that allow you to quickly, easily and cost-effectively. Do it yourself be able to conduct market research.

→ Market research manual

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KEYWORDS OF THIS BLOG POST

Market research | Trends | Development