Eight top trends shaping Market Research in 2019

The ever-changing market trends have continuously challenged organizations to stay up-to-date with their market research and come up with interesting consumer insights that help them take right decisions and stay ahead of the competitors.

Companies are gradually shifting their focus towards consumer centered experiences and trying to come up with most effective solutions to their customer’s problems.

In this blog, we will be discussing eight top trends that might be shaping market research in 2019.

1. Artificial Intelligence and Automation

While traditional research methods such as qualitative research, surveys, etc continue to be crucial for gathering consumer insight, artificial intelligence (AI) is slowly becoming an indispensable tool for conducting market research. With more and more consumers spending time online, there is no better place for researchers to be to analyse the latest market trends and patterns and use them to enhance their sale.

Conversational chatbots like Amazon’s Echo, Google Home, etc have already paved their way into our homes and our lives, and are extracting data on a daily basis.

Automated text and voice analysis AI tools are fully capable of learning from experience and can be trained to process huge and varied data and identify recurring trends and patterns.

Automation is another trend that will be on the rise as there is no surprise that it leads to higher productivity as well as saves time. Automation trends allow both consumers and providers to focus on predictive analysis. Researchers and marketing managers want specific answers to questions way before they start their marketing campaigns.

Automation helps speed up data gathering and saves money with viable predictions and targeting. In short, automated market research allows businesses to gauge highly profitable marketing opportunities and enables them to highlight their biggest profit potentials.

According to greenbook, “the key drivers for most companies have been cost, but speed is becoming an even bigger driver. Stan Sthanunathan has for a couple of years been spelling out the message by saying we have to “double the impact at half the cost” “.

For a deeper understanding of AI-based market research, check out our previous blog, where we have discussed at length the crucial role AI plays in gaining optimum consumer insight.

2. Eye Tracking

Eye tracking has been present as a market research tool for sometime now and is only expected to grow. Eye tracking is an excellent tool for gaining accurate consumer insight. It examines precisely what the consumers are focusing on. It allows accurate product-view assessment and provides information about what stands out to the consumer’s eye.

Most importantly, eye tracking can measure the subconscious behavior of the consumer, which would be difficult to record accurately with the help of traditional methods.

Eye tracking is particularly beneficial for retail businesses as they can easily conduct product package testing and create product placement strategies accordingly. Karna AI has this excellent eye tracking tool called SmartGaze that has proven to be a truly automated gaze-coding solution for retail eye tracking methods.

3. Dashboards and Real-Time Reporting

Integrated dashboard and other real-time reporting are powerful tools that offer techniques of presenting visually appealing market research data to decision makers. The dashboard helps save a lot of time and resource by tracking various research parameters simultaneously. With data visualization, end users can quickly see summarized data analytics in comprehensible formats. These data reports can be used for various purposes as per the needs and requirements.

4. Neuroscience Market Research

Neuroscience based market research provides window into the subconscious of the consumers to help map their decision making patterns. This insight is difficult to obtain by merely asking questions or relying on self- reports.

To overcome this limitation, researchers are adopting an exciting method where they use electroencephalography (EEG) technology to directly measure the consumer’s brain responses while they engage with the product. The implementation of methods of consumer neuroscience enables the gathering of data based on observation, and is therefore more objective.

It is important to highlight that the methods used in conducting research through neuroscience technology are mostly conducted in environments that do not resemble an actual shopping environment.

5. Emotional Advertising

Emotional advertising market research involves analyzing data collected by evoking an emotional response from the audience. The technology is capable of building uniquely interactive digital experiences that read and respond to human emotions and gives insights to improve marketing
messaging, creative, and execution in order to optimize campaigns, content, etc.. You can check the demo by ParallelDots here.

Using smart tools, researchers capture the non-verbal communication signals, such as facial emotions, body language, hand gestures, etc and try to analyse what draws the person’s attention to certain situation and their emotional response to it. These insights provide valuable data about consumer’s emotional response to the product or service, and help device further valuable strategies.

A pragmatic approach to emotional advertising is a sure shot method for businesses to keep their game up and going.

6. Design Thinking

According to Sarah Faulkner, design thinking is “a form of solution-based thinking that starts with a special goal and goes through multiple stages of iteration — divergence and convergence — to solve complex problems in a human-centered way”.

Market research through design thinking involves evaluating a situation or problem and determining reasonable a plan to address it. The process of design thinking is often described to have seven stages — define, research, ideate, prototype, choose, implement, and learn. In these seven steps the problems are addressed, the right questions are asked, solutions are ideated, and the best approaches are chosen and implemented.

Design Thinking allows industries to get into the customer’s mindset in order to pinpoint their real needs. It can be applied to process of any scale or size.

7. Social Media Platforms

Social media is all about the “latest” and the “trending”. An upsurge in social media websites have provided businesses with excellent opportunity to easily interact with their consumer base in order to establish long lasting relationships.

According to a report by Mashable in 2017, “there are now over 3 billion social media users in the world — about 40 percent of the global population”. This staggering percentage is a clear revelation that social media platforms have effectively become one of the largest and most important spaces for conducting market research.

Using social media as a method of market research allows researchers to easily engage in open discussions with the target audience. These discussions provide clear insight into what is it that the consumers truly desire. Direct engagement with potential customers can provide businesses with valuable information regarding consumer behavior, thought process, preferences, etc. This candid and unprecedented information can then be used to create useful business strategies and implement them accordingly. ParallelDots has 10 different text analysis APIs which can help in social media monitoring. You can try a free demo here.

8. Customer Experience/ User Experience

A substantial way of creating a framework for understanding consumer experience is through mapping the Customer Journey. It has emerged as a hot topic in market research. Companies are focusing more and more on customer/user experiences and devising innovative ways to keep them surprised and engaged.

This mapping of Customer Journey involves defining every major and minor touch points between the brand and the customer. It would also involve analyzing the environment in which the touch points occur and the emotional and rational aspects of customer reactions and predispositions.

This fundamental method of market research is capable of reaping substantial rewards — increased revenue, brand differentiation, increased collaboration across the company, etc — for the brands. ParallelDots has just the right tool, called SmartReader, for analyzing customer experience. You can get a free demo for SmartReader here

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