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Market research insights from big social data

Award winning social market research company. We work with Fortune 500 companies like Samsung, Nike, Kraft and Pfizer to help them turn consumers into advocates. 

The MotiveQuest Framework software, coupled with our professional strategists, looks beyond what people are saying and explains what their motivation is -- why they are saying it. Understanding why is key to understanding the behaviors that drive sales.

MotiveQuest

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Market research insights from big social data

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Social Listening & Analytics

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Disruption isn’t just reserved for old companies like Studebaker.  Companies and categories continue to disappear everyday.  Goodbye Borders, Goodbye Blockbuster.  Our analysis showed that it takes an average of 16 years from the arrival of a new idea to disruption.  Kodak, for example, went bankrupt 16 years after the arrival of the first affordable digital camera and Borders disappeared 16 years after the arrival of Amazon.  Because of this often the people being disrupted don’t even realize it is happening until it is too late, like the story of the poor frog slowing boiling to death in his pot.
<h2>The exceptions to the rule</h2>
There are some companies that seem to avoid this problem. Take Nike for example. They have managed to grow despite intense competition and the perpetual development of new technology. What did they do differently? Did they make better shoes? Did they hire smarter shoemakers?
We have been researching what causes companies to be disrupted and what survivors do differently. The results have brought us back to the fundamental drivers of humanity.
Nike understood that they wanted to build an emotional experience for their customer. They focused on building a coaching brand that helped people find athletic success. The company embraces new technology, such as the iPhone, as a means of furthering their goal of helping their customers succeed. They put the ‘who’ before the ‘how’.
Kodak, on the other hand, was focused on the product. They advertised a product and brand that focused around innovation and testing new film concepts. The company understood too late the value of helping people create memories.
<h2>What everyone wants</h2>
People generally share simple, universal, common, motivational needs. People want:
<ul>
<li>to feel successful</li>
<li>to feel connected</li>
<li>to feel creative</li>
<li>etc</li>
</ul>
These motivational needs exist because of our DNA. These traits have driven us forward as a human race. They allowed us to fight opponents from the wooly mammoth to modern smog.
Studies have identified 12 fundamental human drivers.
In this new world of research, we can now understand the causes of disruption and how to avoid it. Online consumer conversations can be the key we need to gain a clear window into the lives and unmet needs of our customers.
<h2>Using these needs</h2>
There are many ways to look at these needs. We have developed a software tool called MotiveScape, which scans thousands of conversations and automatically categorizes certain linguistics that related to the 12 fundamental human drivers.
Using this kind of System 1 style of analysis we find that people do not buy the things a company sells; they buy how the brand makes them feel. The company’s core personality, the ‘who’, is what helps consumers work out how they feel.
These major brands that have failed have all made the mistake of focusing too much on what they sold and forgot about their ‘who’. They missed their motivational need and found themselves disrupted.
The companies that succeed are the ones that take the motivational message to heart. These companies have avoided disruption and continue to grow strongly.
New research methods can help us better explore the core motivational drivers, understand them, categorize them, and use them to develop the archetypal story that each brand tells.
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For more on this topic, explore this Ted talk <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuOIYwHv0I8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuOIYwHv0I8</a> by David Rabjohns, Founder of MotiveQuest.

How To Avoid Disruption In Business And In Life

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By David Rabjohns
Last week Ray Poynter wrote a well-constructed post wrestling with the question “<a href="http://greenbookblog.org/2014/04/25/why-has-social-media-analytics-met-with-limited-success-in-market-research/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Why Has Social Media Analytics Met With Limited Success In Market Research</a><a href="http://greenbookblog.org/2014/04/25/why-has-social-media-analytics-met-with-limited-success-in-market-research/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">?</a>”. I respect Ray a lot; he is one of the smartest and most prolific bloggers in the world of new market research. I also cannot disagree with his central premise that Social Media Analytics [has] met with limited success in market research. However, having spent 11 years analyzing social data for some of the biggest Fortune 500 clients, I wanted to point out (in the friendliest manner) why some of his assumptions are wrong.
In the article Ray claims, “Its weakness is that it can’t answer most of the questions that market researchers’ clients ask”. We have a slightly different perspective, and here it is laid out in a point-by-point response.
• Most people do not comment in social media.
Most people also do not attend focus groups or answer surveys. The question should be: does a representative and relevant sample of people comment? Given that the people commenting tend to be the most passionate in the category (often heavy users) and those asking questions tend to be trying to make buying decisions, you could argue that it is a very relevant sample for many business needs (especially given the flaws and biases apparent in participation in traditional asking research).
• Most of the comments in social media are not about our clients’ brands and services
Exactly! That is the best thing about listening research. It lets you listen to what people actually want to talk about and share. Most comments are about people’s lives. In the food and beverage category for example, only 5% of conversations mention a brand. The opportunity is to understand the other 95% which, in our experience, is where the most powerful communication and innovation insights are found. It’s here that you can best learn what consumers really care about, identify their unmet needs, and attach your brand to those passions.
• The comments do not typically cover the whole range of experiences (they tend to focus on the good and the bad). This leaves great holes in the information gathered.
Actually, we find that the good and bad account for around 35-40% of conversations. People also spend lots of time talking about consumption circumstances, the purchase process, and the research that went into their decisions to buy or pass on a product. By virtue of their broadcast nature, Facebook comments and Twitter activity do skew to pithy statements focusing on the good and the bad. However, adding the unconstrained and anonymous discussions people have with each other on forums, message boards, and blogs paints a much richer picture of the product experience.
• It is very hard to attribute the comments to specific groups, for example to countries, regions, to users versus non-users – not to mention little things like age and gender. You are correct that it is often hard to overlay traditional demographics on the data (it can be done to varying degrees, but it is neither easy nor precise). However there are many other, more practical, ways to segment the data, typically in terms of psychographic characteristics such as motivation. For example, moms cooking dinner for the kids love cheese (it gets them to eat the broccoli), while the same mom trying to lose weight has a very different attitude toward cheese. The beauty of digital/social is that you can understand the same mom in different mindsets. In fact, the motivational and other psychographic segmentation that social media supports may even be more useful than demographics because it exposes a universe of micro segmentation opportunities that demographics do not.
• The dynamic nature of social media means that it is very hard to compare two campaigns or activities, for example this year versus last year.
It is true that recruitment and measurement looks very different when using social media to research consumers, but it is still possible to compare response to campaigns. There is a science to measurement in traditional research which cannot be applied to social media data. However, if measurement is a science, learning is an art that is well-supported by online consumer conversations. I have seen many campaign comparisons &#8211; for example the launch of Halo in 2007 vs the launch in 2012 &#8211; in which it was not only apparent how the new campaign was doing vs the benchmark of the old, but easy to learn from consumer-to-consumer interactions. Consumer conversation analysis may not be the only method brands use to measure campaign results, but it can be a valuable one.
• The number of people using social media is changing, how they are using it is changing, and the phenomenal growth in the use of social media by marketers, PR, sales, etc. is changing the balance of conversations. Without consistency, the accuracy of social media measurements is limited.
OK something we agree on 100%. The quality of the data used for input and how it is organized and cleaned is crucial. Social data sources are as different as mall intercepts (Twitter) and friendship focus groups (online communities such as forums and message boards). The industry needs to analyze the right data in the right way for the job at-hand and ensure that the data is clean and unsullied by marketing messages (just as you always needed good quality respondents to yield good research in the old world).
• Most automated sentiment analysis is considered by insight clients and market researchers to either be poor or useless.
Agreed again. Most (not all) market research companies are not using the right tools or algorithms today, and many of our clients say they have abandoned the sentiment analysis function in their in-house dashboards because it is so inaccurate. Northwestern University did a study in 2006 that found that sentiment bears little relation to sales and share. However there are metrics that do.
• This means good social media usage requires people, which tends to make it more expensive and slower, often prohibitively expensive and often too slow.
All great insights need people. I think the question is: how can technology accelerate the speed to insights, not how can it replace the people. The key is to find tools that can turbo charge great people, not replace them.
• Social media deals with the world as it is, brands can’t use it to test ads, to test new products and services, or almost any future plan.
Social media reflects the interests of the world at scale. If you want to understand what people are sharing with each other in the social age or what new opportunities for innovation and communication exist, listening research is a great complement to asking research. Companies like Procter &amp; Gamble, Samsung and AT&amp;T are thriving because they have worked out how to use it for competitive advantage.
Having spent 15 years living in the world of traditional market research (as a client and an agency planner) and another 11 years in the world of listening analytics, I can say that both have pros and cons. However, the biggest redeeming feature of social data is its ability to reveal important questions that we never thought to ask and the ability to quickly test hypotheses in the data and refine or discard them. Online conversations leave a permanent trail that allows us to explore consumers’ worlds in constantly changing ways without having to take on the expense of re-fielding the study.
My sense is that the real reason that social media has not been more embraced by <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-companies/united-kingdom">market research companies</a> is the same reason that Netflix was not embraced by Blockbuster; it represents a dramatic change in technological and human capabilities that traditional research companies simply do not yet have.
For market research companies to cross the chasm to the “age of the customer” they will need to:
1. Invest more time really understanding and gaining access to different kinds of online data, and the ability to know how best to use them. 
2. Stop relying on dashboards to provide deep insights (this is like doing all your research using SurveyMonkey).
3. Start thinking of “big social data” as “oil” that can expand marketers’ thinking, increase the speed to insights, uncover growth opportunities (like micro-segments and innovation), and improve the overall effectiveness of brand strategy. 
4. Realize that the “age of the customer” is not going away. Tools do exist today to find powerful insights from consumers’ online conversations. However, this technology is too often confused with social activity dashboards, and data decisions are driven by cost, not value.
Some of the most innovative and thoughtful brands’ market researchers derive great value from social media. However, they work with specialists rather than traditional market research companies or in-house dashboards. Eventually, their sophistication will become the norm, but until it does, most attempts to use social media for deep consumer insights will produce disappointing results.

Last week Ray Poynter wrote a well-constructed post wrestling with the question “Why Has Social Media Analytics Met With Limited Success In Market Research?”. Having spent 11 years analyzing social data for some of the biggest Fortune 500 clients, I wanted to point out (in the friendliest manner) why some of his assumptions are wrong.

Counterpoint: Data From Social Media Can Turbo Charge Insights Professionals

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By David Rabjohns
Every so often an industry-changing chasm opens up in your path.  Just like an unexpected earthquake, you have to quickly decide if you are going to bravely leap across before it gets too wide or totter and fall.
At <a href="http://www.esomar.org/events-and-awards/events/global-and-regional/congress-2012/23_congress-2012.programme.php">ESOMAR Congress 2012</a>, a global conference of market research buyers and suppliers, I saw one of those chasms appear. The chasm emerged from a discussion of the future of market research and the impact of big data.
<a href="https://wp.greenbook.org/mr/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/rabjohns2.jpg"><img decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-7457" title="rabjohns2" src="https://wp.greenbook.org/mr/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/rabjohns2.jpg" alt="" width="314" height="235" /></a>One of the presenters, Lenny Murphy of the <a href="http://greenbookblog.org/">GreenBook Blog</a>, presented a chart that shows the new competitors to market research. These included companies like IBM, HP, SalesForce, Facebook and Google–companies that would never have been considered competitors to market research before.
What struck me is that the market research category is going through same sort of transformation that many categories have gone through in the past when new technology comes along and massively transforms the world.
When Apple introduced iTunes, it revolutionized the music business to the point where Tower Records was left scratching its head wondering, “What the hell happened?”. Digital cameras transformed the digital imaging business to the point where Kodak went out of business, something that was unimaginable 10 or 15 years ago.
<a href="https://wp.greenbook.org/mr/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/rabjohns3.png"><img decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-7463" title="rabjohns3" src="https://wp.greenbook.org/mr/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/rabjohns3.png" alt="" width="1172" height="839" /></a> The most dangerous factor is that, when these new technologies arrive, it doesn’t immediately impact business. It takes about 16 years from the arrival of a new technology to the complete transformation of the category. Sixteen years after the arrival of Amazon, Borders was gone.
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Sixteen years after the arrival of the digital camera, Kodak was gone.
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My sense is that many people in the market research industry today still feel fairly secure. They&#8217;ve still got customers giving them business; they’ve still got clients asking for help; they’ve still got contracts carrying on.  In that environment, it’s hard to imagine a world that’s going to be transformed in the way that the music, book and film categories were.
But if you’re in the market research industry, the lesson is be careful&#8211;because while you might feel safe and secure at the moment, things can change dramatically. Yes, it takes a little while for people’s habits to change—but once they start to change, your category can transform rapidly.
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If you’re in market research today, don’t carry on and do business as usual. Instead, ask yourself: “If I were Kodak and I saw the digital camera arrive, what are the questions I should have been asking that would have saved my business? If I you were Borders and I saw Amazon launch, how could I have protected my customers better? What are the new ways I should be looking at my category and my business model that will allow me to survive?”
Closely aligned with asking those questions, you need to think about the value of what you provide, as opposed to the product or service you provide. For example, if you’re in the music business, you don’t provide records; you provide musical enjoyment or music management.
If you see yourself as being in the musical-enjoyment business, you might be able to transform and make the leap from one side to the other of the chasm. If you see yourself as being in the record-making business, your vinyl is about to be smashed
The way you frame the business you’re in has huge implications for the way you look at today’s challenges and the way you think about the future of market research.
How are you thinking about your role in the research industry? Will you make the leap—or fall into the chasm to join the folks at Tower Records, Borders and Kodak?
As you ponder the question remember this:
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How Market Researchers Can Avoid The Fate of Tower Records,
Borders and Kodak.

Market research insights from big social data Evanston, Illinois, United States of America.

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