Kantar's Profiles Blog

Conducting quantitative and qualitative research can be a unique process when targeting healthcare audiences, such as physicians, payers, KOLs and patients. Best practices and techniques we use for consumer research can also be applicable to these audiences.

Survey respondents have a digital life outside their online panel community; a life as a consumer, an influencer and a potential buyer. But technology is evolving, and so is digital usage. Consumers are leaving a bigger digital fingerprint that increases exponentially by the minute, if not by the second. It expands by source, by type and by size. It is creating an ocean sized pool of third party data, which we are still learning how to best utilize in our data collection and analysis.

In our Marketing Data Integration series, we first touched upon how to get the best data output from your survey questions, now we will look at integrating third party data. How can we access this data pool? How do we link survey data to it for a holistic, enriched view of our customers and non-customers? Let’s explore…

The marriage of brands and data can often be a platonic affair; sometimes loveless, but at the same time accepted as just the way things are.

On a recent earnings call, Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of Lightspeed’s parent company WPP, talked about what keeps him up at night. And no; it’s not (necessarily) his infant daughter – it’s Amazon.

“And I would just mention the rise of Amazon, because in answer to the question, my favorite question is what worries you when you go to bed at night and when you wake up in the morning. It's not a three-month-old child (laughter), it's Amazon, which is a child still, but not three months. And Amazon's penetration of most areas is frightening, if not terrifying to some, and I think there is a battle brewing between Google and Amazon.”

One thing mobile has taught us beyond a doubt: consumers are in control. The information they need to make decisions is now at their fingertips. They are more loyal to their own needs than to any particular brand. And consumers want to move onto the ‘next thing’ seconds after engaging. Never has it been more difficult for marketers to target consumers. Mobile created and enables this behavior, but only one in five surveys is 100% mobile compatible today. To truly ‘meet them in the moment’ their survey “experience has to be fast and frictionless.”

Often, we overlook the hidden value of marketing research data. We explore how to engage consumers in a long-term, sustainable way, but how do we get more consumer insights with shorter surveys? Our clients demand that we dig deeper, but they are also tasked with the challenge of asking fewer and less tedious questions in the process. By bringing in third party data, we have the opportunity make surveys more enjoyable and engaging while still digging deeper.

Most of us know that the mobile phone industry is on a pretty serious surge of personal use. In fact, think of one person you know that does not have a mobile phone. Coming up short? This is precisely the reason why all marketing researchers should have a strong focus on mobile.

Over recent years technology has changed what the marketing research industry is as well as what it does.  Because of this, agile research has become increasingly popular for researchers and clients who need on-demand data and broader insights. With the onset of technology and data analytics companies, we have found opportunities to couple third party data with panel survey results. Clients began asking us to make it easier to combine survey responses with other types of data to better understand their targets. Given we have more than 200 profile attributes stored for sampling and or appending, clients were eager for us to add second and third party marketing data that provided broader perspective. This has also allowed clients to shorten surveys and make them more engaging. The results have provided our clients deeper insights and better data quality.