10 ways ChatGPT will affect your job as a marketing researcher

How will you use ChatGPT in your marketing research?

Editor’s note: David Boyle and Richard Bowman are the authors of PROMPT, a resource for marketing professionals looking to use AI to grow their brands. Boyle is director of Audience Strategies, London. Bowman is director of This Is Insight, London. 

Are you tired of spending so much valuable time and brainpower generating hypotheses and insights for your market research projects? In this article, we'll share the 10 ways that ChatGPT will affect your job as a market researcher by streamlining existing processes, exploring new categories, hypothesizing about audience behaviors, understanding customer feedback and enhancing your creativity. Not only can ChatGPT save you time and effort, but it will also open new possibilities for your research, leading to increased reach and impact. 

1. Streamlining existing processes: Put an end to slow and short-sighted hypothesis generation and find insights in vast volumes of data.

ChatGPT's ability to condense, analyze and find insights in vast volumes of data is one of the most significant benefits it offers market researchers. With its natural language processing and machine learning capabilities, ChatGPT can quickly and easily process large amounts of data, identifying patterns, trends and insights that would take a human hours or even days to uncover. This can streamline the research process and make it more efficient, allowing market researchers to focus on high-level tasks, such as strategy and communication. This will allow you to take on more projects, go broader than before and increase the chances of getting great answers.

2. Exploring new categories: Imagine being able to explore new categories and identify audience needs with just a few clicks. ChatGPT can help you quickly understand new industries and audiences.

Using ChatGPT to explore new categories and identify audience needs is a powerful way to quickly understand new industries and audiences. This can be useful when entering new markets or industries.

3. Hypothesizing audience behaviors: ChatGPT can help you think through how to engage your target audience and hypothesize about their behaviors, saving you time and effort, and increasing the chance you’ll get to great answers in your work.

ChatGPT can also be used to think through and hypothesize about audience behaviors. With its ability to understand and analyze large amounts of data, ChatGPT can identify patterns and trends in audience behavior, and generate hypotheses about how to engage with them. You can now take these to the pitch meeting and spend the project improving them rather than waiting until halfway through the project to surface a first draft. 

4. Understanding customer feedback: ChatGPT can help you gain a deeper understanding of customer feedback and social media conversations, giving you a more comprehensive view of your audience. You can unlock this as a capability in new situations.

ChatGPT can quickly discover insights from your customer feedback and social media conversations, which can be loaded on a project-by-project basis. This can help you better understand audience needs, preferences and pain points. An increase in the use of customer feedback by more people for more brands is going to make a big difference. 

5. Generating hypotheses and insights: Stop wasting hours coming up with hypotheses and insights from scratch. ChatGPT can generate them for you at scale, freeing up your time for curation, strategic guidance and communication of the implications.

Spend time on more high-level tasks such as strategy, selection and communication of the implications. You can use ChatGPT to refine and narrow down a hypothesis to identify the most relevant and actionable ones rather than having to come up with them from scratch. 

6. Writing content: ChatGPT can help you write content for your research projects, from reports to presentations. You’ll communicate more frequently, leading to increased reach and impact. 

ChatGPT can also be used to write content for research projects, such as reports and presentations. Its natural language processing and machine learning capabilities allow it to understand the style, tone and structure of your written content, making it possible to generate high-quality writing in your style and at scale. 

7. Enhancing creativity: ChatGPT can inspire new ideas and enhance your creativity by providing new angles and perspectives on your research. You’ll see the world differently. 

ChatGPT can be used to generate many ideas that can then be refined and narrowed down by a human researcher to identify the most promising or interesting ones. 

8. Job security: AI will allow everyone to work on more projects and at a higher strategic level. You'll be more valuable to more clients, securing your job and career growth.

AI technology such as ChatGPT can help automate many repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Additionally, as AI technology becomes more prevalent in market research, developing skills in using and interpreting the output of AI tools such as ChatGPT will become increasingly valuable, making market researchers more well-rounded and versatile in their field.

9. Meeting tight deadlines: ChatGPT can help you meet tight deadlines by generating insights and hypotheses quickly and easily. Perhaps you’d otherwise have declined the request or answered in a less-than-comprehensive way. ChatGPT can help you take on more projects, increasing your reach and chances of success.

10. Having fun: ChatGPT can make research more fun and interesting by providing new and exciting ways to approach your projects. 

We all need a bit of fun in our life. ChatGPT is so fast and comprehensive that it feels like cheating. We’ve been heavy users for nearly two months now, and it still brings a smile to our faces whenever we use it. We learn new things, tackle new projects and present our work more clearly and powerfully than we did before. That’s fun! Take a moment to enjoy the magic. 

Balancing AI with human expertise 

ChatGPT is a powerful tool, but it's not without its challenges. One of the biggest challenges is balancing AI with human expertise and creativity. Another challenge is remembering that the accuracy of the results generated by ChatGPT is directly related to the quality of the data used to train it. Lastly, ChatGPT is a tool that can generate hypotheses and suggestions, but it's not capable of providing context to the results or an understanding of cultural or societal implications. 

To dig further into the potential and challenges of ChatGPT, watch for our article in the March/April edition of Quirk’s magazine.