[GRIT COMMENTARY] The Age of Automation

We all know that market research remains the best source of insight to inspire customer-centric business decisions, but too often we find that businesses have made significant decisions without us! The problem is that doing it right and with rigor often translates into a five figure budget and a timeframe of 4-6 weeks. Processes are too manual and add little to no value to the end output other than getting the project done.

The businesses we serve and their marketing teams are now in a position where they are forced to move fast to capture consumer interest and ensure competitive advantage. It was Jack Welch who said: ‘If the rate of change outside is higher than the rate of change inside, the end is near.’ The rate of change at client side is high and they are becoming more agile. The supply side of the industry must keep up.

Fortunately others agree and it is great to see over two thirds of respondents (69% Client / 75% Vendor) in the latest GRIT report view automation as a positive trend or game changer for the market research industry.

Socrates said more than 2000 years ago: the secret of change is to focus all your energy on building the new, not on fighting the old. We believe that the secret is not in trying to fix the manual processes behind market research but build new ones, automated ones.

But as an industry we must ensure that we keep hold of all the great thinking we have developed over the year. There are wonderful models that help explain human behavior and normative scores that help us decide how strong an idea is. The biggest danger we face is that in a rush to speed and lower cost, we loose all of this hard earned expertise.

We believe that automation can help, not just with sampling, survey configuration, data analysis and reporting, but also with bringing this great human expertise into the digital age – human expertise at machine speed.

This enables clients to commission great research in a matter of hours and at a much lower cost. This will help our industry retain our position as the go to place for consumer insight.

For client-side researchers the initial attraction is obvious; cost and time savings. But the benefits don’t stop there, automation of analytics can allow you to do more analysis so much quicker than before – comparing across projects and even insight programs. It empowers clients to re-energize the insight function and let their companies rediscover the true value of research by testing early and often.

Imagine testing each aspect of an ideas development iteratively, from the conceptualization and evaluation of the idea to pack testing or ad testing. Imagine your product designers having an idea in the morning, testing that idea with consumers over lunch and then using the consumer insights gained to improve the product in the afternoon. Such an approach can mitigate a lot of risk and lead to more successful product launches, or campaigns.

A McKinsey study of 28 CPG companies¹ highlighted that businesses with the best product development track record kept in closest contact with customers throughout the development process. Automation allows all companies to take on this consumer closeness.

From a research provider side, the advantages are clear: streamline process, re-focus on adding value and scaling methodologies globally. Researchers are liberated to focus on genuinely adding value, using their expertise to help clients take action!

Over the past couple of years, I have come to witness the strength of this model: a client wants a project, the report comes back in a couple of hours, and the same day, the agency consultant is discussing the insights with the clients and exploring next steps.

I believe 2017 is the year where as an industry we will fully embrace automation and we will find out together what value it can unlock beyond cost & time. Together we can empower research and researchers to take their seat at the top table of decision making!

¹ http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/the-path-to-successful-new-products