Conference-going can be a draining experience. Sure, the learning is exhilarating and it’s always great to (re)connect with friends and colleagues, but when the speakers aren’t especially informative or engaging, or when the title of a presentation ends up having little to do with the speaker’s actual focus (what is up with that, BTW?), the process quickly loses whatever excitement it initially held when you scanned the list of talks you wanted to attend.

But then a guy like Stan Sthanunathan comes along and makes it all better.

The always-quotable, always-substantive vice president of marketing strategy and insights at Coca-Cola delivered the goods last month at The Market Research Technology Event in Las Vegas. As part of a wide-ranging talk on the impact of technology on research, which included his thoughts on some more immediate realities facing researchers, he also offered some predictions for research in the year 2020.

What I always appreciate about his appearances, whether on a panel or as a featured speaker, is his ability to exhort without scolding, to enlighten without condescending, to alert without grandstanding. And despite his position at a $175 billion company, his ideas and insights have import and relevance to organizations of all sizes and on both sides of the client/vendor spectrum.

So where are things headed? Here are a few of his predictions:

  • Focus groups will go virtual. “The days of recruiting people and bringing them to a hostile environment will be gone,” he said.
  • As biometrics become mainstream, asking questions to get answers will almost be history.
  • A list of the top five research agencies will have three new entrants that weren’t traditionally or previously there, such as Facebook, Google or a consulting firm like McKinsey & Company.
  • Mobile will be the primary way of collecting data, thanks to ever-growing and -improving cell phone access around the world.
  • Television rating points will turn into connection rating points (CRPs).
  • Technology vs. privacy battles will be bigger and more frequent.
  • Random sampling will die.
  • Situational research will become the new mainstream. It’s more effective to gather shopper insights while people are shopping, he said, as opposed to two weeks later.
  • The next wave of researchers will come from the so-called digital natives, those most immersed in technology, who have never known anything but our always-on lifestyles. Thus, as a profession, marketing research will have to compete for this new talent with the Googles of the world and make an attractive case that a career in marketing research is as desirable as one in a more stereotypically tech-focused industry.

New skill sets

To stay relevant in this changing world, researchers will need new skill sets, he said, and move from: striving for precision to greater comfort with higher levels of ambiguity; being focused on statistical significance to being skilled at making deductions; a conclusive mind-set to an exploratory mind-set; analysis to synthesis (data and the analysis of it will become commoditized and thus the ability to synthesize data from disparate sources will be important); viewing technology as a driver rather than just an enabler; and delivering presentations to delivering visualizations and realizations.

Dreaded trio

As if things weren’t difficult enough, against this backdrop of dizzying change, the better-faster-cheaper drumbeat isn’t going away. To keep the research function relevant, he said, we need to resign ourselves to the fact that delivering some combination of that dreaded trio the only option going forward.