Kantar's Profiles Blog

As we settle into 2015, now is the time to be thinking about the future of marketing and what this may look like.

Research doesn't need to just be about learning what is already there; it can also be leveraged for making predictions. This is a trend that is expected to take traditional marketing into a new realm of intuitive, planned and, as a result, effective activity and positioning.

I recently attended a conference on the seven habits of highly effective people. When thinking about what I could take back to my organization, one of the most intriguing concepts centered on the fifth step, “seek first to understand, then to be understood”, a.k.a. listening with intent to understand. This intrigued me for many reasons, some of which were related to our internal organizational effectiveness and others that related to our work product with clients. The latter being that, in the same way we need to listen with the intent to understand, we should really be asking questions with the intent to understand. (If it’s the former you’re interested in, I highly recommend attending a seminar!)

As connectivity and technology continues to develop, it is becoming easier for consumers to engage with businesses across a range of devices. This is not only giving consumers a more diverse experience, but it is also increasing the ability and the pressure on marketers to listen to their audience and respond.

Within the online data collection industry the constant drumbeat is around automation and do it yourself technologies, and rightly so, as the execution of market research undergoes radical change. In the era of the smartphone, surveys will get shorter and behavioral data will fill the gap. There is no question that technology will play an ever larger role in market research data collection.

As market researchers we like to classify people and in particular we like to classify how people make decisions, but we have a dreadful habit of thinking that there are different types of people who think and make decision in these different ways. We define segments like loyalist and switchers, impulse vs. considered shoppers.

Multicultural consumers are of increasing importance in market research as they represent the fastest growing segment of buyers. Most of today’s market researchers understand the importance of multicultural research, but many of us struggle with the question of how and when to apply it. Evidence of that is research from The Center for Multicultural Science which estimates that, “Most syndicated research under-represents the size of Hispanic sales by ~20-60%.” To offer examples of how you can realize the value of multicultural research, we took a look at brand fans of two cosmetics industry leaders, Estee Lauder and L’Oreal.

With 2014 industry events behind us, we reflect on how each conference and event reshapes and energizes the marketing research industry. Our competitors are tough; the industry is shifting, and our client demands change day to day. Lightspeed GMI established a new identity -- to make research easy and in doing so, we will streamline the company's diversified portfolio across the consumer, B2B, financial and healthcare business segments. No matter the brand, no matter the conference, one thing remains the same – the universal focus on clients.

The world is changing, and the way consumers view, access and consume media is evolving faster than any of us could have imagined. There are now devices that people can access on the move, wear and even link into their everyday activities. But as this evolving digital consumer develops, how are researchers keeping pace – or are we falling behind?

Depending on who you ask, the idea of a ‘lie detector’ might spark visions of Orwellian instruments of torture or Tom Cruise sweating it out in Minority Report (or Tom Cruise sweating it out under E-Meter for that matter!). At Lightspeed GMI, we think about lie detectors as less sinister and more scientific. As part of our commitment to helping clients ensure they’re drawing business conclusions from accurate data, we spend a lot of time thinking about measuring and ensuring quality. We even have a suite of services that we offer as standard on our business to make sure we’re truly delivering on our promise of making good research easy to conduct. Lightspeed GMI Honesty Detector is one of services we use. ‘HD’, as we affectionately call it, helps evaluate the extent to which survey respondents are truthful in answering questions. It’s these respondents who provide a portion of the foundational data for a client’s business decision.

“We’re in a crisis situation, there’s not enough talent coming through the pipeline, and organizations will experience difficulties…the truth is, data is a very creative science; being in IT does not make you better at data. Some knowledge of marketing is very important to understand customer data but a lot of marketers are not very numerate - it’s a big challenge for the future,” commented by Edwina Dunn, CEO of Starcount and founder and former CEO of Dunnhumby, in a recent interview with the Market Research Society.