By Julie Rose
As someone who has spent over three decades in the market research industry, I’ve seen firsthand how technology reshapes our professional lives. The advent of online surveys, the rise of internet scraping and text analytics, opportunities coming from big data mining, and the now the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) all represent significant milestones in the Digital Age intersecting with the Market Research Industry.
AI isn’t just a new tool; it’s a game-changer. It’s capable of automating repetitive tasks, processing and analyzing vast amounts of data, at speeds previously unimaginable. It is an exciting time to once again, adopt new ways of working that will advance our mission to understand people and deliver insights that drive business growth.
New Heights in Market Research Analysis
In today’s fast-paced world, the volume of data generated daily is staggering. AI excels at sifting through this data, identifying patterns, and providing preliminary insights. This capability is invaluable in market research analytics, where the first step is often labor intensive to comb through a variety of data sources to identify patterns, anomalies, outliers, consistencies and inconsistencies.
Here are a few examples of where AI analyses can advance market research:
- Survey Analysis: AI can process and analyze survey data quickly, identifying key insights and trends. Automated tools can generate reports and visualizations to present findings effectively.
- Visual Content Analysis: AI can analyze images and videos to extract relevant information about consumer preferences and trends. This is useful for understanding visual content’s impact on consumer behavior.
- Customer Segmentation: AI can analyze consumer data to create detailed segments and personas, creating the opportunity for unprecedented personalization on a mass scale and ensuring that marketing efforts are precisely targeted.
- Sentiment Analysis: AI-powered sentiment analysis tools can scan social media, reviews, and forums to gauge public opinion about a brand or product and decipher consumers’ values based on the information.
- Competitive Analysis: You can use AI to monitor competitors’ activities, including pricing, marketing strategies, and product launches. This can provide valuable insights into market positioning and strategy.
- Predictive Analytics: Machine learning models can predict future trends based on historical data, helping businesses make informed decisions about future business endeavors.
Practical Considerations
AI takes data processing and analysis to new levels, providing speed and pattern recognition that was unheard of even a few years ago. That said, the storytelling aspect of market research – translating data into a clear and inspiring story with actionable insights that will unlock new growth opportunities – is where human expertise shines.
- Creative Analysis: AI tools can quickly and easily identify themes and patterns in qualitative transcripts and quantitative data sets. It provides a great first pass, however, interpreting these findings and crafting a compelling narrative requires human intervention, to ensure creativity and business relevance in the final deliverables.
- Ethical Considerations: As we integrate AI into our workflows, maintaining ethical standards in data collection and analysis is crucial. Human oversight ensures that AI applications adhere to ethical guidelines and respect consumer privacy.
- Bias and Synthetic Data: AI models can sometimes perpetuate existing biases present in the training data, leading to skewed results and insights. Additionally, the use of synthetic data to train AI models can introduce its own set of challenges, as it may not fully capture the complexities and nuances of real-world data. Human oversight is essential to identify, mitigate, and correct these biases, ensuring the analyses remain fair, accurate, and representative of the target population.
Embracing the Future of AI in Market Research
As AI technology continues to evolve, so will SIVO’s approaches and techniques. We view AI as a powerful augmentation to our workflows and capabilities and will continue to experiment and adopt new ways of working that drive our effectiveness and efficiency. At the same time, we believe that it is the combination of the AI tools and experienced, empathetic market researchers that skillfully identify the nuances of consumers perceptions and behaviors that leads to actionable, strategic insights. We will continue to invest in both resources – artificial intelligence and human intelligence.
Join us on this exciting journey
At SIVO, we are committed to blending the best of human expertise and AI innovation to deliver insights that drive your business forward. Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or visit SIVOInsights.com to schedule a discovery call and explore how we can help you take your market research to new heights!
