In the last two or three years we have seen an explosion of interest in Research 2.0, e-ethnography, semiotics, and a growing concern that the traditional model of doing market research is broken.
The worries about traditional research include:
- Falling response rates mean that assumptions about random probability sampling are unjustified.
- The use of online access panels also means that models built on standard sampling theory, i.e. a sample of the population predicting the whole because of Gaussian assumptions, do not apply.
- The revelations by people like Martin Lindstrom (in his book Buyology) that most customers do not know why they do things, throw real doubt on the way that many quant studies are presumed to work. This is especially true of customer sat and concept testing.
- In a ‘long tail world’, consumers have too many choices to readily capture them in most surveys. Increasingly, quant surveys are like a trawler throwing out a damaged net into a small part of a large sea and hoping he will catch the most important fish, or, indeed, any fish at all.
- Many clients are voicing a worry that research is too slow, too expensive, and that it usually fails to provide actionable advice.
However, I believe answer is emerging; an answer that I think is best defined as New MR. I will be writing more on New MR shortly.
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