Continuous Innovation: Proof That Technology Is Changing #MRX at Every Level

Advertorial by Michelle Andre 

Technology impacts every single day of our lives, personal and business. Advances in technology have revolutionized nearly every industry, including market research. Keeping a close eye on this phenomenon is vital to keep ahead of business insight demands. But how do researchers know where to focus their efforts? With such a barrage of information and advances coming from all sectors of the marketplace, it’s difficult to decide which technologies and innovations should be pursued.

As a market research technology company, offering end-to-end solutions for both qualitative and quantitative research, FocusVision thought these were questions well worth answering. The drive to innovate and provide meaningful solutions for clients led the company to take a title partnership role in the Annual Market Research Technology Report, released earlier this year.

“Technology is the life-blood of market research, and if this survey is its annual health check, it shows an industry that is getting fitter in some areas – such as how it reports results – while ailing in others, such as in how it responds to mobile,” said Tim Macer, managing director of meaning ltd and lead researcher on the survey. “Partnering with FocusVision for the first time has greatly benefited this annual study, from the shared interest in innovation and good practice we both have, through to being able to utilize their flexible, mobile-friendly Decipher survey platform to collect the data for this complex, multinational study.”

FocusVision’s survey software platform, Decipher, was utilized to field the survey, conduct email outreach to respondents and provide comprehensive reporting and data visualization of the findings. The survey outreach explored topics of growing interest to the market research community, such as data visualization, cross platform research and emerging technology usage.

This newest report shows trends from 11 years’ worth of results from annual technology market research survey (including the recently released 2014 results) which encompasses data collected from respondents who are technology decision makers at global market research companies. The sample was managed to ensure representation of three global regions: North America, Europe and Asia Pacific according to the relative amount of research in each region as measured by ESOMAR.

Results from the survey provide valuable insights into the software, technology and methodology trends within the industry, giving researchers touch points on trends that will help focus technology efforts in the future. Some key findings from the report included:

• Mobile participation in surveys is growing rapidly yet many companies are taking a passive and unsustainable approach towards mobile participation
• Mobile and CAPI research are growing in importance while CATI continues to slide, and paper has finally been overtaken by CAPI
• Most market research companies now work using software controlled by their research suppliers
• Access panels are favoured over in-house panels for sample sources
• Proportion of quantitative research revenues to qualitative have remained stable over the years: quantitative represents around 70 percent and qualitative between 20-24 percent
• There is a high demand among larger companies for new research software
• Companies are using more dashboards and interactive analysis and moving away from ‘low tech’ methods

These findings are interesting, yes. But what do they mean for market research technology companies? Several conclusions and recommendations for a variety of specific technologies are made throughout the report (which can be found in its entirety here). For technology providers and technology-led services companies, there are many points to consider as we move forward. Just a few of these include tracking growth of different research channels, such as SMS and mobile, while anticipating changes in respondent behavior as technology outside of the research sector drives massive change. By studying these shifts and trends over time, market research technology companies are better able to plan for the future of the industry.

This fall, the newest study will be in the field, collecting important technology data for the 12^th annual FocusVision Market Research Technology report. Results from the study will publish in early 2016, addressing the latest trends and topics for market researchers around the world.

Michelle Andre is VP of Marketing for FocusVision 

FocusVision is a single source technology company for both quantitative and qualitative market research.