A Patch, A Niche, A Disruptor & Something Over The Horizon

By Ray Poynter

I have just posted a white paper and video presentation on the VCU website that looks at key disruptors for the MR industry. However, in this post I wanted to share with you one of each of the patches, niches, disruptors, and over the horizon items covered in the white paper and video.

Patches

Patches are things that I think will help us keep conducting market research in the current way until the next generation of tools are ready. One of my four patches is Gamification. Gamification will enable us to hold people’s attention a bit longer, enable us to reach a slightly wider range of people, and will help extend the life of surveys and traditional research processes. This may not sound exciting, but actually, for the MR industry, it is vital, since the new tools are not yet ready to replace the established ways

Niches

Niches are useful approaches that will never become a major share of market research turnover. In most cases niches are niches because either their role is too narrow, or because they are not scalable. Neuroscience is one of the niches I write about in the white paper. It only tackles a narrow range of problems (mostly the responses to stimuli) and it is not likely to be scalable in the foreseeable future.

Disruptors

Disruptors are things that really change an industry, for example, in the way that steam revolutionized engineering and transport. In the video I talk about four of these, but here I will mention just text analytics. Text analytics is coming of age. In 2014 it will start to change the way MR does business, shifting the focus to qual, shifting it to text, and away from closed questions. It will also facilitate shorter surveys, something we have all been looking for.

Over the Horizon

There are lots of changes and ideas bubbling away over the horizon, and I describe four of these in the white paper and video. One the developments, that I think is five or more years away from being a disruptor, is Big Data. I think there will be some short-term wins, but I think it will be five or more years before Big Data will make its major impact on MR – for a more negative view see http://www.adnews.com.au/adnews/big-data-a-big-gamble-and-mostly-a-waste-of-money

Your thoughts?

What Patch, Niche, Disruptor, or item over the horizon would you suggest?

You can download the white paper or watch the video by visiting http://vcu.visioncritical.com/resources/webinar-disruptive-changes-in-insight-management/