Kantar's Profiles Blog

If you ever find yourself in the London Millbank office, within minutes you’ll be subjected to the company’s most pressing rhetoric: how do we shorten surveys, how do you modernise them and how do we bring innovation to a rapidly changing industry?

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.

Open ended questions generally serve a specific purpose:

• What products/brand/advertisements do you recall?
• You said X, why did you say that?
• Would you purchase/recommend X? Why/why not?

These open-ended questions generate a wider spectrum of codes than the usual standard close-ended questions, especially when the codeframe is kept to a small list, a key aspect in any mobile first survey. However, open-ended questions can also produce less impactful data (sometimes termed as gibberish data) when stock standard question wording is used, as illustrated above. The key to making an open ended question valuable is to frame the question wording to be thought-provoking, making it meaningful for the respondents and making them want to share their views fully, in an environment where this is easy to do.

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.”

Video is gaining as a way to communicate and consume media and now, we will see increased usage of video in research. The qualitative and quantitative worlds are coming much closer together, within five years the differentiation will no longer be meaningful. New tools to manage video content will enable video processing much like other data types; open ended questions will gain importance as a way to glean insights from respondents. 

Technology is now part of our everyday lives- in how we communicate with friends, family, colleagues, how we function in all facets. But how can we leverage technology to gain deeper insights and benefit users of market research?

Real time insights and predictive analytics build better strategies and better business performance. As we re-write the rules of marketing research, data has become the digital fuel to deliver genuine insights. However, as industry stakeholders, we must capture data that is insightful, not invasive.

This year’s CASRO Digital Conference concentrated on the collective knowledge of research in the digital space with a focus on three key areas: implementing Mobile First, focusing on the panelist experience and the emerging importance of video.

Video is here.

The trends indicate that video is going to push the data traffic usage over the next big peak. First text was all the rage, then came the time of pictures and everyone was taking a ‘selfie’ and now we are moving into the next age of content – the video age. With the increased abilities of smartphones, tablets and webcam, video content is exploding around the internet.

For those not aware, video is here.

Social media sites have embraced the use of video as a main activity for their followers. Video is being used to explain (or give instructions), give opinions, share information or give updates. Video may soon become the new ‘texting’.

Mobile industry data sites are expecting the use of video to be the main usage of data over the next few years. It already has seen some growth, but the expectation is that it will soon eclipse anything else that we do on the smartphone.