In October I made the short trip from our Minneapolis-area offices down to Chicago’s Fulton Market District for the fall summit of the North Central chapter of the Insights Association. The timing wasn’t ideal for me, as we were in the production process of this issue of the magazine but I have to admit it was nice to take a break from poring over copy and instead focus on learning from the array of speakers the organizers had arranged for us. (Also fun to be in a different part of the city than Michigan Avenue and marvel at how the Fulton area has morphed from warehouse-land to foodie paradise. I want to go back and eat my way around it!)
Ably filling in for a speaker who cancelled at the last second, Dean West of Association Laboratory articulated something that I had long thought but had never put into words: COVID-19 “kicked us all into evaluation mode.” His observation was that, to a certain extent, history is no longer the guide it once was in terms of serving as a predictor of how consumers will act moving forward. The pandemic’s upheavals gave us the time and the impetus to examine so many aspects of our lives, from work-life balance (hey, this working from home thing is kinda nice) to shopping habits (pulling up in your car and having your groceries loaded in the back is also pretty sweet) to how we view the government and other institutions like the health care system (when long-trusted sources of guidance fall under siege and also deliver conflicting advice, where do you turn for information to keep you and your family safe and healthy?).
One of West’s larger points was that while we have more data than ever, we also now have an unprecedented range of tools – incredibly powerful ones – to make sense of the data and that, with so much exploration and experimentation going on, everyone in the industry is now equipped to play an active role in figuring out what it will mean to be a marketing researcher in the future.
And on that front, Yogesh Chavda of Y2S Consulting flew through a great talk on AI that showcased how much AI can help those who approach the tools it offers with curiosity and creativity. With the goal of getting researchers to start thinking of themselves as “foresight creators,” he somewhat echoed West’s earlier point about not using the past or data about the past as an indicator of a potential future and to instead use AI tools to help you generate informed sketches of the future. As one of his slides noted, “The real innovation [that AI facilitates] lies in shifting from reactive reporting to proactive strategic architecture.”
He urged the audience to get in there and play around with the available AI tools and outlined several things he has tried and how much he has been able to do just as a team of one. Examples of his experimentation included using Zapier to set up a battle between ChatGPT and Claude to compare and analyze each tool’s output.
Rather than being intimidated by AI, his message was to “start small and scale smart.” He outlined a crawl/walk/run approach to taking 30 days to experiment with the tools, urging us not to aim for perfect but instead to aim for different. The “crawl” task, for example, was to use Claude or ChatGPT as a second analyst to cross-verify patterns and identify missed insights and then measure your success by documenting the time saved and the improvements in the quality of your findings, finishing with a share-out of results with your team to build confidence in the process.
The gathering was joined by students from Dominican University professor Brooke Reavey’s marketing research class and in addition to marveling at the group’s diversity I enjoyed thinking about the new places they and their peers will be able to take the insights profession, using the curiosity-driven, no-fear attitude that the speakers had outlined. Whatever the future holds, it’s safe to say the past likely won’t be a guide for what comes next.