FEATURE18 August 2022
A problem shared: Collaborating in research
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Market research should share ideas, techniques and innovation in order to collectively innovate better, faster and more efficiently, argues Bethan Blakeley.
I often think one of the hardest things about being an adult is answering the question, “So, what do you do?”. Sometimes, I work in market research. Other times, it’s analytics or data science, or research analytics. I consider myself lucky to be ‘cross-discipline’; it keeps my life interesting.
Another thing that keeps my life interesting are the tools I use across these disciplines. For the data science part of my role, I mainly use open-source computer programs. Open source is a bit like Wikipedia – written by the general public, accessible to everyone, and anyone can edit the pages if they want to.
Unlike Wikipedia, however, this doesn’t call the programs’ reputation into question – you won’t find university lecturers slapping students’ wrists if they use open-source programs such as R or Python, in the same way you would if they listed Wikipedia as a reference. In this case, it means there is a wealth of advice on the internet ...
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1 Comment
Dr. Stephen Needel
2 years ago
The issue, Bethan, is that marketing research techniques are often proprietary - most data analysis is not. I'm happy to share how I analyze my data, but I'm not about to share how we build our virtual reality simulations - that's what we sell. It's the same with all the AI claims these days - nobody will actually tell you how the machine learned or the model created by the AI mechanism, they simply tell you what they put in and leave the rest to the imagination. You also assume most techniques have been validated - most have not. It's why most proprietary methodologies die off in a couple of years. Look at what was presented at IIeX a few years ago and see how few are operating today. Sharing is great, but the current model of a marketing research business will keep that from happening to any meaningful extent.
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