[GRIT COMMENTARY] Why Size Doesn’t Matter

Clients often lament that they don’t have the budget or the time required to gather consumer feedback. In the most recent GRIT survey, budget and speed were brought forth as two of the most mentioned challenges facing the market research industry in 2015. Evidence of this limitation is abundant. As an example, Harvard Business Review reported that consumer feedback is used in just 11% of consumer-based decisions in the F2000. Certainly, then, the barriers to gathering consumer feedback 89% of the time must be rooted in high costs and long timelines, right?

Time is money

Wrong. The cost of research is declining and will continue to drop as technology-driven automation continues to be applied to the research process. And with automation on the rise, the cycle times required to conduct research will continue to be compressed. For example, GutCheck has created a technology that automates the recruitment process for both quantitative and qualitative studies, reducing the time required to recruit respondents for studies to a matter of minutes versus the days or weeks associated with more traditional methods of recruiting. As a result of this automation, costs also decrease. There are numerous other firms such as Google Consumer Surveys and Survey Monkey, who are providing emerging methodologies fulfilling on this economic inevitability. And there will certainly be more following in their footsteps. 

Sail away from the safe harbor

So why are budget and speed still considered barriers with all of this innovation occurring? As Gladwell points out, you can be too big and too successful. Historical success can lead to inflexibility and hold companies back, while power can manifest itself as something much less gigantic and much more nimble. Ongoing success comes from thoughtfully breaking the rules around the traditional way of doing things. In this case, it’s leaving behind size and habit and substituting them with speed and flexibility. While it is easy to get complacent with how things are working today, if we challenge ourselves to adopt new and more innovative ways of tackling the way we conduct research, the possibilities are limitless. 

Stop playing defense 

While changing for the sake of change isn’t all that compelling, changing because of more nimble and more aggressive competition should certainly stir the David in any Goliath. Jeanine Bassett, VP Global Consumer Insights at General Mills, Inc., told a compelling story at a recent conference of how smaller firms (<$2B in revenue) have out-innovated larger firms (>$2B in revenue) by an order of magnitude over the last four decades. Why? They aren’t in a defensive crouch trying to preserve what they have. They are on their toes and adopting new thinking and new methods to out-innovate their larger competitors. 

Think of Fairlife who has rethought milk and built a category around nutrient-rich, ultra-filtered milk products. How many large dairy companies saw that coming? And it isn’t always the upstart company who has the audacity to shake things up. For example, Safeway has changed the game with their private label business. By leveraging design-thinking and adopting innovative new tools in their innovation process, they’ve been able to create a significant pipeline of new products for their private label business. 

Challenges and opportunities— one in the same

Ironically, the biggest challenges for the market research industry mentioned in this year’s GRIT report are perhaps its biggest opportunity. Technology is changing the economics of the research industry as it relates to time and cost, just as it has in so many other industries. This structural change in the supply curve of consumer feedback will allow market research to be leveraged more often, and in non-traditional ways. Those that reap the rewards won’t necessarily be today’s Goliaths. Firms that rise to the top will bring forth their most innovative, flexible David.