Editor’s note: David Ying Hon Ho is director of international studies at market research firm Market Strategies International, Hong Kong. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here under the title, “How market research has evolved over the past decade.”
In July 2006, I boarded a plane to Portland, Ore. It was the beginning of my service at Market Strategies International. A decade is not a long time but long enough to witness some changes. Let me share with you a quick inventory of what has changed from 2006 to 2016 in the market research industry:
Web-based research has become the norm for quant
Phone and face-to-face interviews were the basic tools in the market researcher’s quantitative toolbox for quite a long time. By 2006, phone interviews in mature markets like the U.S. had already begun to fade out, and face-to-face interviews were becoming a specialty used for occasions like intercepting pedestrians for a quick poll. But in emerging markets, phone and face-to-face were still the norms of research practice. In the last 10 years, the Web has further displaced phone and face-to-face, as shown in their single-digit percentages in the table below based on ESOMAR industry reports.
| Global Market Research Methodologies | 2006 | 2014 (latest available statistics) |
| Total quantitative | 83 percent | 73 percent |
| Online | 16 percent | 23 percent |
| Automated digital/electronic | – | 21 percent |
| Phone | 19 percent | 9 percent |
| Face-to-face | 12 percent | 8 percent |
| Mobile/smartphone | – | 3 percent |
| Postal | 4 percent | 2 percent |
| Online traffic/audience | – | 2 percent |
| Other quantitative (e.g. syndicated services) | 32 percent | 5 percent |
| Total qualitative | 14 percent | 16 percent |
| Other | 3 percent | 11 percent |
When we do B2B quantitative research today, Web surveys and Web panels are our standard across the world. When we do consumer research, Web is certainly also the norm in mature markets. For emerging markets, Web is also gaining feasibility, availability, efficiency and economy.
Research and other technological advances
The birth of Apple’s iPhone in 2007 started a mobile revolution. The rise of the smartphone since then has enriched the research toolbox with a new mobile approach, which is showing at 3 percent as of the 2014 statistics in the table above. Also note that there are other technology-based research methods listed that were not present in 2006.
Many innovative market research technologies have been introduced in the past decade. Eye-tracking is now a common approach. We track consumers’ eyeballs beyond asking verbally what they look at or buy. Other innovations include fMRI or facial expression coding, which I am eager to explore. In short, research methods have shifted dramatically to technology-based solutions in the past decade.
Social media as data and method
I must admit that I had never heard of Facebook in 2006 but its rapid ascension has become an important application. Social media, in general, is now a fundamental component of the consumer lifestyle around the world. In market research, there are three primary uses:
- Social media as data – we now study social media content created by consumers on Facebook and Twitter, to name just a couple.
- Social media as method – quite a few research companies now use social media as a platform to interact with consumers. For instance, a researcher could join a chat room for sports car fans to conduct an online ethnographic study within the target community.
- Social media as data and method – there are market research online communities, which are often described as online focus groups on steroids. They are closed communities that typically involve well-focused target respondents recruited for a participation of four to 12 weeks.
Using big data for layered insights
Big data has been the industry buzzword for the last few years. Big data certainly existed before 2006 but it had not become that prominent in market research. At one point, market researchers perceived big data analytics as a potential career threat; however, our industry soon adopted it, blending its power with our other research tools for better insights.
Research in emerging markets has exploded
I work primarily in the APAC region. In 2006, market research had just taken off in India and was gradually picking up in Indonesia and most Southeast Asian markets. Now India is a regular market, and Indonesia has entered the main stage. In 2006, China’s market research industry was estimated at $583 million U.S. As of 2014 (the latest statistics available), China had tripled the revenue to $1,780 million U.S. That already is the fifth largest market globally, after the U.S., U.K., Germany and France. In 2016, I cannot imagine that any global study in almost any product category would exclude China or India. In just one decade, emerging markets have exploded in both scale and importance.
Most of these developments contribute to one outcome – the market researcher is now more efficient in collecting and blending data from multiple sources than in any other time in history. Our work is always to distill data into information, to add business and cultural insights to build a story. I look forward to another decade of my career of storytelling.