Earlier this summer, a conversation thread in the Quirk’s Marketing Research & Insights Group on LinkedIn sparked a series of passionate and well-considered posts. The thread – titled “Is there still room for the human researcher or has technology taken over?” – sought to address a question that’s being asked, in various iterations, across the industry.
I moderated a brief panel discussion at the Market Research in the Mobile World (MRMW) conference in Minneapolis in July that used the question as its jumping-off point. You can read a recap here and I would of course urge you to visit or join the LinkedIn group to read the thread for yourself but I thought it might be worthwhile to present a selection of observations (edited for clarity) made by group members who responded to the post.
In pleading the case for the role of the researcher, a common approach among some of the LinkedIn commenters was to outline the skills that analysts bring to the process and the roles they play – from framing the questions at the outset, so clients know what it is they are looking for in the mountains of information, to being there to analyze the data and deliver the guidance on the next steps to be taken in response to the data.
Often the client doesn’t really know what questions they need answered, so if we only have the skills to code what the client SAYS they want, they aren’t going to get all the value they can out of any data set, big or otherwise! — Steve Willson
By definition, technology can never “think out of the box” because it IS the box. It takes humans to generate insight – putting 2 and 2 together and coming up with something greater than 4. — Robert Cuervorst
Technology is doing to market research what it has done to other categories: it is stripping away the value-add that used to be in acquiring, organizing and reporting *data* and, to a degree, *information* (which I would define as simply data that has been meaningfully organized to show patterns). To the extent one limits “market research” to these tasks, I absolutely think technology is going to take over a lot of that work from humans. It already is. Unfortunately I think a lot of market researchers, both supplier-side and client-side, have made comfortable careers doing that kind of work. Which is also, by the way, why market research is so often marginalized inside large organizations. In reality we are often much more of a data and information factory than we are a business partner. – Brian Lunde
The market research industry has always been dependent on technology. It has been effectively used to improve productivity, costs and, most importantly, insights. Unfortunately, the competitiveness of the industry has driven some research agencies to overly depend on technology at the expense of human assessment. The results reflect poorly on the research industry. Improvements in technology is an ongoing process but the human researcher remains crucial to identify the problem, decide on the best process in solving it, look at data quality and identify outliers and inconsistencies which would impact on any modelling output (garbage in, garbage out), interpretation of model results and finally generating specific conclusions and recommendations for the client in line with their business issue. This is why technology will never and should never overtake the human factor. — Lucio Milan
We are moving from a measurement platform to a monitoring one. The speed of the analytical loop is now significantly driven by technology as opposed to humans. In theory that should leave all this time for the researcher to interpret and predict, build behavioral trend models and focus on the future, impacts, etc. Stepping away from the day-to-day gathering and crunching is to be encouraged. However, my own experience to date is that the technology seems to be producing more insight than the team/organization can handle. The dashboards and reporting processes are not being designed and updated fast enough to cope with the increase in the data flow, resulting in thousands of research hours still lost. At the end of the day, it takes a human to make a call and a leap/connection from what the “data says” to “here’s what we’re going to do.” Creativity can’t be automated and the key role in any insight department is to turn the data/findings into insight, action and strategy/tactics which change behaviors. That can’t be automated. It’s one of the reasons I too stopped calling myself a “researcher” and moved to a “behavioralist.” – Ken Hughes