Market Research Digitization part 2: information overload

The digitization of market research (and the society) has been a hot topic for a couple of years now: the year of mobile, the year of big data, the year of social ... we have had them all. Most organizations (and research agencies) have a digital department in some way.

All (digital) evolutions of marketing and market research are however triggered by a consumer trend. In this series of 4 posts, I will share my thoughts on the evolutions of the past years and the impact on market research. With this second post, I will focus on the daily information overload consumers experience.

With the world at our hands, media consumption has drastically changed. Twitter is our main source for news items, hearing something hours after it happened is considered ‘very late’. The amount of available information when looking into a potential purchase is almost unlimited: consumers face the challenge of selecting relevant information and messages.

“The increasing amount of (digital) touchpoints causes an information overload for consumers.”

Market research often ask consumers about their “path to purchase” or “media behavior” via established techniques such as CAWI, CAPI, CATI ... to help marketing departments understand advertisement impact. Exposure to digital banners, pre-rolls ... is however not always actively remembered (which online ads did you see today, yesterday, last week?), neither is online media consumption (which websites - ideally which website pages - did you visit when looking up information about your new microwave?).

"Established research techniques don't capture what is not actively remembered"

With our established techniques, we cannot measure the impact of unconscious media exposure. In order to tackle this challenge, we make the shift from claimed to observed behavior. Instead of surveying research participants we leverage today’s technology to actually observe and register their online behavior and ad exposure.

“By leveraging today’s technology, we make the shift from claimed to observed behavior”

One of the advantages of observed behavior is the ability to compare what consumers think they do (claimed behavior) with what they actually do. When researching cross-border purchase behavior, GfK found for example that for only 50% of online purchases, consumers could correctly tell whether it was purchased domestically or abroad.

Source: Obstacles to the Digital Single Market (published)

Market Research Digitization part 1: market research as a gatekepeer

The digitization of market research (and the society) has been a hot topic for a couple of years now: the year of mobile, the year of big data, the year of social ... we have had them all. Most organizations (and research agencies) have a digital department in some way.

All (digital) evolutions of marketing and market research are however triggered by a consumer trend. In this series of 4 posts, I will share my thoughts on the evolutions of the past years and the impact on market research. Today, we start with the changing role of market research as an information gatekeeper.

A gatekeeper is a person who controls access to something, for example via a city gate. In the late 20th century the term came into metaphorical use, referring to individuals or organizations who decide if a certain message will be distributed by a mass medium.

The role of the gatekeeper

Newspapers, TV stations, radio broadcasting ... are traditional examples of gatekeepers, filtering information towards consumers. Today, consumers are being kept up to date via the web, social media, their mobile ... companies as Google and Facebook have become today's gatekeepers, defining what is (not) relevant for even a specific individual.

Market researchers used to be such information gatekeepers as well, defining what part of the consumer voice companies got to hear. We collected (and still do so) data via interviews: face-to-face, via telephone or via an online survey. Being heard was a privilege of 8, 12, 250 or maybe 1000 customers, selected by the researcher for participating in consumer research.

Due to the online and mobile evolution, consumers are now able to shout out to the world whenever, wherever they want. The challenge of market researchers is no longer to collect and hear some of the voices, but to isolate relevant from irrelevant ones.

From hearing one voice to isolating the relevant ones (visual: GfK)

In the following posts, we will dig deeper into the impact of "the age of information overload", "the rise of mobile" and "device-switching behavior".