AI Will Breathe New Life Into Market Research
AI innovation has the potential to revolutionise decision-making processes and enhance ROI, enabling brands to strategically leverage new AI tools at their disposal in market research.
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AI is revolutionising the field of market research by making it easier to make smart decisions faster and increasing the ROI of every effort. Cutting-edge brands bring their data and insights, spanning market, product, and brand research, as well as customer and employee feedback, within a centralised intelligence system. With the power of AI, they can now unlock profound insights that transcend individual data sources.
Imagine you’re a researcher at an athleisure company. Your most popular leggings are losing market share with Gen Z. Thanks to AI, the researcher can instantly access and analyse millions of data points from each program or study conducted by the organisation. It’s like asking ChatGPT a question, but instead of generating generalised responses from internet training data, a market researcher can ask their research repository and generate new insights based on their hyper-relevant data.
Due to the recent advancements in Generative AI, researchers can now automatically generate summaries that provide a deeper understanding of the data and save countless hours of manual analysis.
For instance, suppose the market researcher uses a natural language question against a brand’s research repository to understand why sales have slipped for a previously popular line of leggings. The AI-powered search might uncover a significant insight from an attitude and usage study conducted two years ago. Although this valuable insight might have been noted during the original study, it may not have been relevant then. However, with the aid of Generative AI, the researcher can now revisit this historical data and quickly see where the product-market fit began to deviate from the company’s historical trends.
This ability to unlock and analyse insights through AI-powered technology is a game-changer for market researchers. It eliminates the risk of valuable insights collecting dust on forgotten shelves and enables organisations to evolve and improve their products and strategies in response to market and customer feedback.
AI also superpowers summarisation and topic-plus sentiment detection for qualitative video feedback and interviews. It’s also changing the way researchers can moderate or customise their interviews. Imagine telling an AI platform to stay within a certain discussion guideline but allow the conversation to meander to catch deeper insights. This can reduce weeks or months of work into minutes and uncover insights that would never be captured otherwise.
For market researchers and organisations to harness AI effectively, they need to take a few key steps.
- Embrace a data-centric culture: First and foremost, organisations must cultivate a culture in which business decisions are data-driven. They must see their research and insights as valuable IP that should be leveraged. Departments should be encouraged to share insights where appropriate – from product development to marketing to customer service.
- Invest in data management and integration technologies: To effectively leverage market research IP, organisations need to invest in centralised views of insights across the organisation. Organisations that have tools that scrub data more accurately and faster label and standardise data sets and then summarise insights will be able to move faster in the market, which gives them a competitive advantage.
- Prioritise data privacy and compliance: As AI tools analyse and process large volumes of data, organisations must prioritise data privacy and comply with relevant regulations. Market researchers should work closely with their legal and compliance teams to ensure data collection and usage practices align with privacy laws and regulations. By implementing strong data governance measures, organisations can build customer trust and mitigate risks associated with large language models.
- Foster collaboration between AI and human researchers: While AI tools can provide invaluable insights and generate summaries, human researchers still play a critical role in understanding and interpreting the findings. As research methods become more centralised and shareable across teams and AI helps humans uncover insights faster, cross-team collaboration will reach new heights as key insights are shared instantly with the right people at the right time.
By embracing a data-centric culture, investing in the right technologies, prioritising data privacy, fostering collaboration, and continuing to learn, brands can effectively prepare to capitalise on the new AI tools available in market research.
