- The traditional market research agencies that refuse to change will go out of business
- DIY market research will catch on even more and will democratize our sector
- Social listening analytics will be a must-have for every marketing and market research manager
- Agile research will become mainstream and will be facilitated by online communities
- Micro surveys and intercepts will eventually replace long monthly customer tracking studies
- Processing behavioral data in motion and delivering real-time micro insights will be a core competence of any insights expert agency
- Adjacent marketing services such as customer engagement, enterprise feedback management, customer advocacy, will become solutions offered by the market research companies of the future
- Data scientists will be the new insight experts, utilizing a lot more predictive analytics than rear-view mirror analytics
- The code of conduct of market research associations such as ESOMAR and MRS will be revised as it does not apply to the digital economy. If not, the new breed of MR agencies will refuse to be members of such archaic organizations, and the latter will die out
- Nielsen will no longer be the largest market research company in the world
Update: Michalis Michael has expanded upon this post. You can read the update here.
In the January 2015 edition of Research World – the ESOMAR monthly magazine – there is an article that I co-authored with Dimitris A. Mavros, the Managing Director of MRB Hellas, the third-largest Market Research agency in Greece. The article is about the impact of the digital era on traditional market research agencies; our premise is that if they remain traditional, the impact will not be good!
