You may know that one of the hottest topics in the field of market research is incorporating automation into the research process. As a graduate student studying Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, I always have a passion for market research. After learning more about the automation topic in this field, I found the following 2 articles are very useful.
As its title, the first article regards automation as a way to free market researchers from tedious laboring in order to pay more attention to insights generating. Viewing research process as a whole, Amy listed finding sample, data cleaning, data analysis, data visualization and any other repeated research tasks as the steps could be replaced with automation to relieve the burden on market researchers. Automating steps like survey routing (skip logic in a survey) and participant reminders could benefit not only researchers but also respondents by smoothing their experience of participating in research projects.
The second article holds a similar point of view with the first article but emphasizes more on the combination of automation and human input in the research process. Cassandra believes being more automated is the future direction for marketers to become more and more efficient and accurate. Furthermore, employing automation in market research will save labor costs for researchers with a low budget. However, Cassandra also expresses her concern that overusing the automation will cover up the importance of human input in the research process.
Recommendations:
l See the big picture – think of the whole process before incorporating automation into your market research.
l Automate inefficient steps – identify steps that cost the most labor and time in the research process and automate them.
l Generate insights yourself – insights need to be connected back to human root with human brainpower through automation might help during the process.
These articles deepened my understanding of automation in the market research field and inspired me to think more about the future of the industry. Next time when you think of automation in marketing research, I hope the 3 recommendations will help you to structure your thinking.
About the
Author:
Ruihang Shen is currently a graduate student at Integrated Marketing Communication program, Northwestern University and will complete her Master's degree in December 2019. She always has a passion for consumer insights and market research. You are welcomed to follow her on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.
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