Virtual assistants, real issue

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Of all the buzzwords that have emanated from Silicon Valley over the past 20 years, ‘disruption’ may well be the one most often repeated in boardrooms around the world. The theory of disruption is fairly simple: it’s an aggressive form of innovation that involves rethinking a business or industry, but outside of the rules or assumptions that currently govern it. The catch being, of course, that it’s more difficult than it sounds to think outside of those assumptions, so ingrained are they in our day-to-day work.

Last week, a friend of mine uttered a sentence that suddenly made me see the assumptions that underpin the market research industry in a more fragile light, and think more about future disruption to our world: ‘Alexa, order me some batteries.’

If we think back to the Jobs To Be Done framework that I’ve written about previously, the real functional need in this example was that my friend was going camping in a few days and she needed her torch to work. As long as that happened, she would be happy with her purchasing experience. The convenience of being able to voice her need aloud and have the product arrive the next day vastly outweighed any mild brand preference she might have.

A lot has been written about the implication of voice/virtual assistants for brands. As platforms such as Amazon Echo or Google Home become more common, consumers essentially delegate the responsibility for choosing a specific brand to an algorithm.

For many researchers though, the primary focus of our jobs is to understand why a consumer might choose one brand or another – to help marketers connect deeply with what goes through a consumer’s mind at the moment they choose a brand off a shelf.

This type of shopping clearly risks eroding the importance of brands. Although the impact would be most immediately felt by everyday, commoditised, packaged goods brands, it’s important to recognise that a large proportion of the research industry’s work comes from brands exactly like these.

Voice/virtual assistants not only disrupt marketing by changing the role and importance of brands to people, but they could also reduce the need to understand consumers’ choices – and severely disrupt the market research industry, too.

Ultimately, if more people buy batteries in the manner that my friend did, it may become more important for brands in that industry to understand the algorithms that might select their product over their competitors’ than it is for them to understand the consumers themselves.

This poses some questions for the research industry: what would our new purpose be in a future where understanding consumers is no longer such a high priority for brands? What if choices are defined by algorithms rather than consumers? 

In my opinion, there are two possible paths to take if we are to anticipate this future challenge. First, understanding which brands are most at risk of being overlooked by consumers who start to shop like this is going to be critical in the short term. We should be helping marketers anticipate this change and start building new consumer habits. If we can understand, for example, how to ensure consumers retain a degree of brand preference – and think to say ‘Order me Brand X’ – then that will delay the risk.

Second, as our industry continues to develop more advanced skills in data science, we have the opportunity to help brands decode these algorithms. Just as the discipline of search engine optimisation (SEO) emerged to help brands navigate the new world of search in the late 1990s, there will be a need for a similar role to decode shopping algorithms in the coming years.

If you have any ideas on how to reimagine or disrupt the research industry, and break some of the assumptions with which we all work, please do share them. It’s a topic that I’d encourage us all to think about. 

This article was first published in Issue 23 of Impact.