Hot or Not? Unmasking the Trendiest Insights Methods

The 2024 GRIT Insights Practice Report offers an interesting take on “Insights Hottest Methods.”   A few things caught my eye as someone who works in this field -

The report shows a 64% of full-service research suppliers use of online communities for qualitative data collection, indicating a change in gathering customer insights. While online research methods with AI are becoming more valuable, the report also highlights the continued importance of traditional approaches. Over 90% of researchers still trust traditional surveys, over 65% trust in-person qual, and over 60% of buyer-side insights professionals use face-to-face interviewing. 

80% of buyer-side data and analytics professionals now use innovative Big Data analytics to analyze their findings better, and all types of analytics have been growing overall. This includes big data analysis and text analytics, allowing researchers to move beyond numbers and understand patterns in customer behavior. Over the years, asynchronous & synchronous qualitative research has grown, offering flexibility and efficiency for participants and researchers. Combined with LLMs and GPTs, this approach innovates online qualitative research, showing a more significant movement towards unstructured data.

Mixing traditional & new methods is the most exciting part, as it helps researchers gather valuable insights.

Based on my chats with Entropik’s prospects and customers, a lot of researchers are interested in using Emotion AI (facial coding & voice tonality), Behavior AI (eye and click-tracking), and Generative AI to get clear and unbiased information at scale for their research studies. You could understand a customer's true sentiment through facial expressions, even if their words portray something else. Voice AI can track speech metrics, showing hidden emotions in interviews. Click tracking tracks a participant's online behavior, providing context for surveys and usability testing. Generative AI helps researchers gather insights using prompts, which decreases the time to insights by 6x.

Hot insight methods, however, are not meant to replace human interaction. Instead, they enable researchers to gather richer, pin-pointed data without the potential bias as seen in traditional methods. For example, a participant might purposely downplay a negative experience during an interview, but facial coding could reveal the sarcasm unnoticed by a human.

Interestingly, the report shows a drop in ethnography, social media recruiting, and shopping observations. This could be because researchers are finding simulation-included research tools to gather similar data, or it might reflect challenges in conducting effective research through these channels.

The GRIT report portrays an industry accepting new technologies and methodologies while valuing traditional approaches. It's time for change, and I’m very interested in closely monitoring how these trends shape up in the near future.