In the 21st Century retail environment, where consumer confidence and spending patterns can shift with the speed of a Tweet or Facebook post, for good or ill, traditional market research just isn’t enough anymore.
While market research can add rich and robust insight, it still doesn’t address the immediate needs of location managers or the individual consumer. To put it simply, current methods of market research take too long and cost too much. It can take weeks or even months to complete the research, evaluate it, and then disseminate policy changes back down to the front line. Furthermore, traditional market research generally relies on large sample sizes in order to determine trends. These methods have changed little since the foundational market research techniques emerged early in the last century.
The customer has power today like never before. In the old days, one customer who had a bad experience might share his negative opinion with a friend or two, but it would take hundreds if not thousands of similar bad outcomes to affect a product or company. Now, using social media applications, that same customer can speak to an immediate audience that could fill an arena.
But, for all the “negative noise” that can be so quickly generated through social media, there is potential just as great to use these same tools to proactively promote the positive experiences that are going on, too. To do that, companies must embrace new ways of thinking about market research, along with the tools and strategies needed to compete for customers, and keep them.