Editor’s note: Frédéric-Charles Petit is chief executive and founder of market research tech firm Toluna.
Market research will need to keep pace with innovation alongside a rapidly changing, multidimensional society. Research will need to address the diversity in populations to truly embody being not only nationally representative, as the term is historically defined, but to capture the diversity of the ubiquitous consumer. Hyper-segmentation will become vital as research moves from simply defining key attributes of a person – such as age, social class, wealth, gender and the like – to creating unique insights relevant to consumers as individuals.
Research needs to follow the complexity of society and consumer behavior so that it can deliver the information brands need to make key decisions in how they market their products and services. Technology, driven by innovation in artificial intelligence, can capture this complexity – and market research organizations must harness this power to deliver agile, responsive insights about consumers that enable brands to remain relevant to their customers.
2022 will be the year to truly drive democratization because the technology is there to enable it.
There’s a common misperception that democratization of research means the simplification of insights. This is not the case. When we say democratization of research, we mean making detailed data available in a simplified manner and in a seamless way to any business or brand. This means that even the most junior members of an organization’s marketing team can be informed by easily available research that they can interact with, respecting the integrity of methodology, but at scale.
There is still this notion that research in the B2B market is for experts. In fact, we’re currently in a situation where the consumer has access to more data than, for example, a brand manager. Consumers simply utilize G...