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In our October blog, we unveiled the power of AI in the world of market research. This November, we continue to explore the transformation AI has brought to the industry, with a particular focus on how it addresses the unique challenges faced by Heads of Insights at large corporations and marketing agencies. Where resource constraints, increased demand for insights, and cost-cutting measures are the norm, AI offers a lifeline, making it more crucial than ever for CEOs, CFOs, and Heads of Insights to understand how it impacts the P&L.
The 2023 Landscape: Changing Financial Dynamics in Market Research
Resource Crunch: Unless the business is a behemoth, like PepsiCo, insights teams are often limited to just a handful members, or sometimes a single person. This scarcity of resources has been a long-standing challenge, hampering the ability to deliver the depth and breadth of consumer insight demanded from across the business.
Insights Pressure: The quest for ever more comprehensive, detailed consumer insights is relentless as internal stakeholders continue to demand insight to achieve tough growth targets. Large corporations and marketing agencies are under constant pressure to deliver deeper market understanding, consumer behaviour analysis, and competitive intelligence to meet this demand.
Cost-Cutting Measures: The ever-increasing cost of living and also rising costs of running businesses compels organisations to cut budgets where they can. Unfortunately, market research budgets often bear the brunt of these cost-cutting initiatives.
The Dilemma: Insights vs. Budgets
One of the critical questions for CEOs and CFOs is, do they truly comprehend the importance of staying on top of changing consumer needs when budgeting for their organisations? It’s an age-old dilemma: to enhance budget efficiency, the straightforward solution is to slash marketing budgets which leads onto market research budgets. After all, it’s merely a line on the Profit and Loss statement. But this is where the challenge lies: you still need consumer insight. In challenging times, understanding your customers’ needs and how they are changing becomes even more critical, and making every marketing, sales, and production decision based on consumer needs is at the core of survival and growth in difficult times.
Reduced marketing budgets and the simultaneous surge in the demand for more consumer insight seem like a contradiction. The question is, how do you strike a balance and achieve both?
The Rise of In-Housing and AI: A Win-Win Solution
A promising trend emerging in response to these challenges is the in-housing of market research. Many organisations are increasingly turning to self-serve market research platforms like QuMind. These platforms empower small insights teams to do much more with less, providing the flexibility and control they need to meet their research objectives.
This not only simplifies the research process but also continually leverages AI to enhance its platform, giving insights teams even more power and resources. In addition this has to be coupled with additional resource and expertise as the platform alone is not enough. Heads of Insight need a platform but also an extended team to deliver on this demand. This win-win approach not only improves efficiency but also augments the quality of insights generated. Now AI is adding a third string to this bow in a number of ways:
Automated Data Analysis: AI can swiftly process and analyse vast amounts of data, providing in-depth insights without the need for extensive manual labour. Analysis time is reduced from days to hours significantly increasing the insights team to turn around internal requests
Predictive Analytics: AI can forecast market trends, consumer preferences, and competitive dynamics, enabling organisations to stay ahead of the curve. It de-risks the decision making process.
Auto scripting surveys: Word documents can be uploaded quickly into the platform and programmed automatically saving time to turn surveys around to answer business critical issues.
Cost Savings: By automating labour-intensive tasks, AI reduces the need for large research teams, leading to cost savings in the long run. No need to take on a traditional market research agency for those larger ad-hoc projects. Do more for less.
Auto coding verbatims: AI enables real-time coding of verbatims, allowing organisations to make agile, data-driven decisions based on real customer feedback. It provides organisations with the ability to react faster than ever before, saving precious funds.
Unleashing the Power of AI for Market Research
The combination of platform, expertise, resource and AI stands as a beacon of hope for Heads of Insights at large corporations and marketing agencies. It’s not just about surviving budget cuts but also thriving in the face of adversity and enabling more to be done with less. By embracing this combination, organisations can achieve the twin goals of budget efficiency and deep, actionable insights, securing their position as industry leaders in the years to come. AI added another level to this and has indeed changed the world of market research for the better, and the future looks even more promising.
