When Tom Quirk hired me in the summer of 1988, I knew I had a lot to learn, both about my various responsibilities as the new managing editor of Quirk’s Marketing Research Review and about the marketing research industry.
Fresh out of college, I had my B.A. in journalism with an emphasis on magazine editing from the University of Minnesota and years of freelancing during school so I don’t recall feeling overwhelmed by the editing or writing duties. Nor was the field of marketing research particularly complicated back then.
Once you understood the difference between qualitative research and quantitative research and knew the tools used in each approach, things seemed pretty clear. The idea was to talk to people, ask them questions about whatever it was you were investigating and then communicate your findings to whoever sent you off to do the research in the first place. Whether by telephone, focus groups, mail surveys, going door to door or conducting mall intercepts or CLTs, the relationship between researcher and respondent was pretty direct.
I still recall the excitement in the industry in the early (pre-internet) days of videoconferencing, when specialized facilities were built with T1 transmission lines to allow far-flung teams to observe focus groups on TV screens rather than traveling to be there in person. The process was fraught with technical difficulties but researchers were thrilled to see and hear respondents hundreds or thousands of miles away.
The arrival of the internet and its digital offspring eventually made that version of videoconferencing obsolete and in its place came other tech-based tools. Each wave arrived with the same promise: This will bring you closer to the consumer.
Paging back through 40 years of Quirk’s, you can trace that arc almost issue by issue. The late-’90s issues are full of debate over whether online surveys could ever be trusted. Then came the first online communities and panels, the mobile ethnography apps that put researchers in respondents’ pockets and now a flood of AI-powered everything. Each wave has arrived with the same promise: this will bring you closer to the consumer.
For most of those years, the promise of greater respondent proximity was largely kept. But more recently, I’ve been struck by how technology has gone from being a kind of miraculous force for bringing interviewer and subject together to functioning as a vexing impediment.
As technology evolved with increasing speed, so did the abilities of scammers and fraudsters to pervert the research process by lying about their credentials, their habits, their likes and dislikes.
And then came AI.
Suddenly researchers have to worry not only about who a respondent is, but whether they are even human in the first place. As if the work of insights gathering wasn’t already hard enough!
I’m not arguing that the earlier days of marketing research were free from the effects of consumers who lied on focus group screeners to get their hands on the incentive or faked their phone survey answers so they could hang up and get back to their dinners.
But now, especially with the increasing interest in synthetic respondents (yes, I know they are supposedly based on data from real people) and AI-moderated qual, it feels like a digital wall is being erected, byte by byte, between researchers and the people they depend on to generate insights.
I love technology and use it with gusto. And I am aware of the efficiencies that AI and other technologies offer to researchers, who are frequently understaffed, underfunded and under pressure to deliver findings NOW.
But I worry that the farther away researchers get from the physical presence of their respondents, the further they are from the truth.
The standard rebuttal to predictions that AI will make researchers obsolete is that, amazing as it is, AI can’t read a skeptical person’s body language or hear the fear in a patient’s voice. Maybe not yet. But if AI is powerful enough that people worry about it ending civilization, I suspect it will learn to read a furrowed brow. So I wouldn’t rest the case for human researchers on what AI can’t do. The stronger case is what researchers get from being there.
What hasn’t changed, at least in what I hear from the client-side researchers in our roundtables and at our conferences, is the hunger for the moment when a respondent says something nobody saw coming. The offhand remark in the last five minutes of a group. The shopper who stops in the aisle and explains why she never buys the brand her mother bought. Those instances are why many researchers got into the business and they’re still why the best findings land with such impact on the people who commissioned the research: you’re not reading a static verbatim in a report; you’re seeing and hearing the words and reactions directly from your target consumer.
Instead of tilting toward ersatz copies of the consumers whose opinions, thoughts and needs have the power to fuel your organization’s success, why not keep the focus on observing and interacting with real people? Kind of like researchers did way back when.