What will a marketing research rockstar do in 2018? 3 Predictions

The market research industry is worth $72 billion globally — and constantly evolving everyday. What’s standard practice one week is out with the old the next. At Canvs, we’re always looking ahead and thinking about the latest trends in market research. With that in mind, here’s three predictions for how a marketing researcher can expect their day-to-day to change this year.

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1. You’ll do more of everything
   
   Now that you can get answers better, faster, and cheaper, you can ask more questions, more often, to more audiences. Whether it’s for creative, marketing, or other business purposes, the traditional roadblocks to doing researching have been obliterated. The question is no longer, what can we do with our limited research budget? It’s what should we do first, now that our research capacity just increased 10x? Think of it like the transition from film to digital. Cheaper, faster production lead methods led to an explosion in content production. And it will lead to an explosion in research as well. You don’t have to plan research months in advance, you can ask questions on the spur of the moment. You can even do follow up research.Think about this: Imagine having the time available commit research to a whole new audience segment WHILE in the midst of a study, based off the findings you receive in your latest results. Imagine being able to commit — I mean truly commit the necessary time and resources needed to really drive home that additional, unplanned analysis.
2. You’ll be at the center of today’s action
   
   Old-time market researchers can tell you mainly one thing: what happened last week, last month, last year. Their focus is on the past, because their methods don’t allow them to see what’s going on today in real-time. And because of that, they focus on questions and insights that are continually out of date.The new speed of research changes everything. When you can see what’s going on in real-time, when you can track the emotions of tens of thousands of viewers as they happen – your focus shifts from the past to present. Your insights move from a PPT deck circulated on email once per week to a live dashboard watched by everyone in your company.

   Think about this: Now, marketing and production are making more accurate and more informed decisions rooted in data your team can easily defend. Now, other teams are able to launch content more quickly and respond to trends as they happen.

1. You’ll be targeting with more accuracy than ever
   
   Old-time market researchers identify target audiences through slow and expensive studies that are already getting stale as you read them. Their insights are limited in scope and their studies cannot easily change directions when results point in another direction. At the end of the day, they create personas of viewers, listeners, readers, and fans that are two-dimensional and dated.The next generation of market researcher will have tools that help them to research audiences, analyze their preferences and behaviors, and predict their responses to your content on the fly. This will enable them to deliver real-time targeting insights such as
   • What content will appeal most to a niche audience or complex audience mix? And vice versa: what audiences will respond most to certain content.
   • Where am I gaining or losing audience? Not just over the course of a season, but in the midst of an episode.
   • The Holy Grail for ad sales and agencies: Which brands and content share the most compatible audiences or fan bases? How can I prove that in advance?
   • Getting to the heart of questions like: Does the way an audience feels about the talent or actors on a show impact viewership, live or otherwise?
   • Diving deep into advertising recall to understand buying intent to determine who remembers what advertisement, how they remember it and most importantly, what about that will impact an intent to purchase or click or swipe.