Fielded in the summer of 2015, this edition of our corporate researcher work life survey tackled a range of topics identified in consultation with some wonderfully helpful Quirk’s readers: budgets; techniques in use and under consideration; how they seek buy-in for new MR tools; how they deliver results; outsourcing; internal views of the insights function; vendors; and the impact of big data and other non-MR-gathered data sources. We received 691 usable responses.
As you might guess, the vendor-related responses ended up meriting their own section but let’s dive into the data on the other topics.
Budgets appear to have held steady for 2015, with 44 percent saying their spends stayed the same as in 2014 and about equal numbers reporting some sort of decrease (25 percent) or some sort of increase (30 percent).
The story is similar for the amount allocated for outsourcing marketing research, with 46 percent saying things have stayed the same in 2015 and an aggregate 22 percent citing a decrease and 31 percent citing an increase.
As we have found with previous Quirk’s reader surveys, while the omnipresence of terms like disruption and innovation at industry gatherings makes it seem like the use of longstanding research methods is (or should be) declining, results from this year’s study show stalwarts like traditional focus groups and secondary research as still in wide use. Even telephone interviewing makes a respectable showing, with 61 percent saying they currently use it. At 97 percent currently using, online surveys are clearly a go-to method. Up-and-coming methods like big data analytics, text analytics, mobile ethnography and gamification all garnered respectable (30 percent or above) percentages of respondents considering using them while non-conscious methods like neuromarketing research, facial coding and biometrics have consideration percentages in the 20s.
The seemi...