Putting Market Research Technology in its Place

Tags: Anecdotal, Industry, Mobile

Attending the Market Research in the Mobile World conference in Minneapolis July 16–18 as a civilian—I did not have to log any booth time—I was fully prepared to focus on mobile for mobile’s sake. As the person in charge of developing KL Communications’ new IC2 platform, of which client-branded mobile apps are a major component, I was looking to vet our planned offering against other technologies and hatch ideas for new features.

I’m not ashamed to admit that despite having my fair share of diverse professional experience, I’m still a bit new to the industry—after all, interdisciplinary learning is what market research is all about, right? And I’m constantly impressed at the breadth of ideas the practice of MR incorporates. So what I got was an eye opener, but not quite the one I expected.

Did I expand my understanding of the potential for capturing people “in the moment” via their mobile devices? Yes. Did I see lots of neat mobile add-ons that could theoretically aid in this process? Sure. Do I know how all of these things would effectively serve clients? No, and it’s not for lack of intellectual curiosity.

I should back up, though. KL Communications is in a bit of a unique position, being an insights company rather than a technology company—but still having a proprietary platform. And although I was there as our “technologist,” I also interact with clients and have to answer for it when the rubber doesn’t quite meet the road on a deliverable. We’re constantly innovating on reporting, but adoption of even the most brilliant ideas can be slow. Video is neat, but can still be just a data dump. At the end of the day, we have to connect the shiny new technology with the needs of the client.

This is not to downplay the potential of technology in MR, but rather refocus on it as enabling the work we do and evaluate which technologies can best facilitate this and how. To that end, we also have to be careful not to glom on to any one advance. In particular, frequent warnings from MRMW speakers that we might not even be talking about mobile in 2-3 years really resonated.

I am as excited about the data we can capture from wearables as anyone, and how devices become more integrated with the real world will likely revolutionize how we do our jobs yet again, but we still need to roll up our sleeves and figure out how to craft meaningful stories out of that data—technology is still just a medium, not an endpoint.

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