Insights Industry News

October 24, 2012

The Ugly Duckling That Was Market Research

The definition of market research is expanding. MR is evolving from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan.

Kevin Lonnie

by Kevin Lonnie

Founder & CEO at KL Communications Inc

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By Kevin Lonnie

I found it fascinating that an October 2012 PricewaterhouseCoopers review on the size of the UK Market Research industry found it to be 50% larger than previously estimated!

Holy smokes, what’s going on here?  According to the latest Honomichl Report, our industry is only growing by low single digits.

The answer is in how you define Market Research.  According to the report “The Business of Evidence” the traditional definition of MR no longer applies.  Apparently, there are a lot more firms and organizations undertaking research activities than had been previously thought.

Is this all nothing but good news?  Well, if you’re clinging to a comeback for traditional MR data collection, you’re out of luck.  That part of our industry is dying a slow death.  Traditional MR is akin to the local music or book store.   Take a look at all those empty Borders & Tower Records stores.

The newer, broader interpretation of MR appears to encroach on the realm of Business Intelligence and Competitive Intelligence.  (see Wikipedia Definitions below).  If Social Media Research and Big Data are placed under the header of MR, then we have significantly grown our industry at the expense of other forms of market intelligence.

What I’m suggesting is that all the narrow definitions we have held ourselves to are moot.  With new tools in consumer ideation and co-creation combined with lightning fast big data analytics, MR is evolving from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan.

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Business intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) is defined as the ability for an organization to take all its capabilities and convert them into knowledge. This produces large amounts of information that can lead to the development of new opportunities. Identifying these opportunities, and implementing an effective strategy, can provide a competitive market advantage and long-term stability within the organization’s industry.

 

Competitive intelligence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.

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analyticsbig databusiness intelligencecompetitive intelligencemarket research firmssocial media state of the industry

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