OPINION7 February 2012
Steve recently sat on a panel looking at where the research world may be in 2020.
A good client of ours recently held a session looking at the future of research and what they should be thinking about for the year 2020. I managed to sneak on to a distinguished panel to discuss this, which included some senior management consultants, ad people, marketers and researchers, who all provided very different perspectives.
The focus was clearly on what client research departments would be doing in eight years’ time and much of the response was about preparing to manage ‘big data’. The consensus was that internal insight people would spend a lot of of time trawling through (or getting others to trawl through) large databases to try and discover insights. I’m sure this mining for insight is very valuable but it struck me, a humble qualitative researcher, as far too complicated.
To me the future is more about how we can understand people and how brands relate to that (note, not the other way round). I think much of the recent advances in qualitative research, particularly more time-based approaches such as communities and the influence of behavioural economics, are helping us do this better. Also, mobile approaches are giving us a much better way of understanding consumers in context, something we as an industry have tried to ignore before.
Of course I know prediction is bound to fail but has anyone got any better ideas?