Editor's note: Scott Koenig is CEO of Consumer’s Eye View, an Arlington, Texas, research firm. Wendy Neuman is director, market research at National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, Centennial, Colo.

Some of the greatness of hockey star Wayne Gretzky was attributed to his style of play. Gretzky, observers noted, had the uncanny ability to skate to where the puck was going to be, not where it had been, allowing him an open shot or an easy pass to a better-situated teammate.

His foresight has applications to market research. In a rapidly changing environment, we must develop methodologies and approaches to research that place us where the market is going to be, not where it was. If we don’t, we may find ourselves trying to catch up and watching someone else net the game-winning goal.

It was this proactive, predictive approach that we took last year in conducting qualitative research for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA). The NCBA was interested in understanding beef consumption habits of Millennials (those between the ages of 13 and 30).

Given the nature of our research questions and the behavior of the respondents we were targeting, we chose to go away from a standard online qualitative platform. While we had a good relationship with an online qualitative supplier, and while we were confident they could come through in executing this project, we decided to go with a non-traditional research tool: Facebook.

While we wanted to study these Millennials in their natural environment, we felt that conducting ethnographies nationwide would not be the best use of our resources and that Facebook presented a better way. With 75 percent of Millennials having created some sort of a social network profile (Pew Research, 2010) and with Facebook being the leading social networking site, we were confident we could engage this group in a setting in which they were comfortable sharing their ...