Digital market research in the 21st century
Modern market research as we know it today originated in the 1930s with the US presidential election. At the time, the magazine “Literary Digest” had written that Republican challenger Alfred Landon was ahead in the election. The magazine had conducted a broad survey of the population.
The prediction was wrong and cast a shadow over the renowned publication. The incumbent president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, remained in office. The then young “American Institute of Public Opinion”, through the social researcher George Gallup, who was later considered the founder of market research, had predicted the actual final result by a few percentage points. And with far less effort than a survey.
Gallup did not conduct a mass survey, but applied a new method. They only interviewed a few tens of thousands of people, but selected them very carefully according to age, gender, education and profession. This panel corresponded to a realistic average of the American population, and the result was more precise than the arbitrary survey of tens of thousands of people. Today, Gallup is still one of the leading polling institutes in the US, working for institutions and companies.
Representative instead of mass
The magazine's miscalculation during the presidential election and Gallup's new method fundamentally changed market research. The representative sample was considered the new standard and put an end to straw polls.
After World War II, market research was no longer just about political predictions; companies also wanted to find out more about their customers and consumers. The economic miracle made companies curious, and they wanted to find out how they could boost consumption and sales. University teaching also began to focus increasingly on market and opinion research.
Social media changes the playing field
These written and oral interviews were eventually replaced by the telephone, which had previously been considered representative and was used as the main instrument of market research well into the 1990s. Online surveys then emerged at the end of the 1990s. Social and market researchers quickly began to adopt this new communication technology because it was cheaper and required less effort. With the advent of Facebook and other social media platforms, the playing field changed again. Market researchers no longer had to ask everything from scratch in their research, but people themselves expressed their consumer habits or political views on social media.
But there were also distortions there – for example, due to duplicate or fake accounts. Nevertheless, social media still contributes significantly to market research today. Market tests of new products on the internet are also popular. For the first time, customers can express their opinions online before the launch of a new product, enabling the company to avoid a possible flop that fails to meet customer needs and to adjust the product if necessary. Can the company convince consumers? How big is the potential in the market? And what is the optimal price?
Bridge between company and consumer
The goal of market research is, above all, to connect with the consumer and to recognize his needs in order to create a demand for a new product. There are five central elements that market research uses to do this:
- Stimulus: initial impetus for marketing budgets
- Prognosis: how are the market, trade and consumers changing?
- Evaluation: alternatives are shown to circumvent uncertainties
- Control: market research and marketing work hand in hand
- Selection: information from the range and the product are determined
Market research is also used to gain time and to make the right decisions. It is also about justifying marketing expenses by means of market research and using it as an argument for budget items. Increasingly, market research results are also used as a tool for consumer habits and for corporate PR campaigns. Through market research, a company can make a statement about consumer habits and use this as an argument for the use of its products.
Market research for the consumer
Today's consumer is critical and wants to form their own opinion of products as far as possible. That is why they see through marketing temptations more quickly than before and look for purpose, sustainability and traceability in consumer goods. Market research must therefore increasingly assume an informed and thus self-confident and mature consumer.
This consumer society pushes market research to its limits. The mechanization of market research is having a significant impact here: online surveys have increased markedly, leading to a flood of such surveys among the population. This in turn has led to a decline in the willingness to participate in such online surveys, which has been observed for years. Those who conduct them must offer the user added value and give them the feeling that they can actively participate in the development and launch of a new product.
With the omnipresence of social media and the new possibilities of Web 3.0, consumers have a greater need for direct communication than ever before. Their consumer behavior can no longer be evaluated only by means of market research; instead, consumers give direct feedback on online platforms and social media and seek direct exchange with companies. Influencers today represent the purchasing and consumption habits of many and allow companies to exchange ideas directly with their target group.
Customers express themselves on social media
Due to changes in data protection laws, market researchers have to approach customers directly and point out that their data will be used for market research or advertising purposes. The online user can then decide for themselves whether they want to or not. It is therefore essential to create clearly defined samples in order to limit the group of respondents.
Surveying such panels is also well remunerated these days. The importance of online surveys in the market research portfolio will continue to grow in the future and will allow more data to be collected on consumer behavior. This is at the expense of telephone surveys or direct feedback on the company.
For market research agencies, this more direct contact means that they have to be active on social media platforms and present on a variety of channels. In the future, market research will have to engage in much more direct dialog with users and offer them the opportunity to express their opinions through a variety of channels.
In this way, clear trends for the future of market research can be identified:
- Crowd research: approaching a large crowd online saves costs and provides a broad range of opinions from a wide variety of users.
- Social listening: the reach of social media is increasing and reveals consumers' opinions by means of comments and likes. This data is also increasingly being evaluated using artificial intelligence.
- Natural language processes can read and decipher language and evaluate it using AI. This can reduce the time-consuming task of reading social media evaluations or rating portals.
- Emotive research is one of the biggest trends in market research at the moment. It is designed to explore people's feelings about a product, also using facial recognition. Test subjects are directly associated with the product and exposed to a user environment.
- Qualitative online research was met with a certain amount of scepticism for a long time. However, the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting lockdowns have prevented personal contact with a focus group, leaving no choice but to conduct qualitative research online. This has led to a rethink in terms of quality and value.
- With online communities, it is possible to research a consistent number of consumers over a longer period of time. Engagement tools can be used to analyze behavior and tracking to bind the subjects to the research.
- Thanks to new online tools, consumers can now navigate their way through a market research process independently and take it into their own hands thanks to user-friendly instruments. With this independent execution of market research surveys by users, a wider variety of surveys can be conducted.
The possibilities of online market research will be even more sophisticated in the future and will be able to evaluate user behavior directly and in real time. Users can be asked questions directly, but their activities on social media can also be analyzed in the background. In the future, more usability tests of new products can be carried out online using easy-to-navigate tools.
This enables cost-effective and timely market research that can have a direct impact on the development of new products. This combination will enable online market research projects to be even more powerful and accurate in the years to come.
