A pet-peeve of mine is the market research industry phrase “actionable insights” which is now, in reality, mostly empty and meaningless. We are at the point where every research company, tool, and professional (even beyond those in our industry) has learned to refer to “actionable insights” as the fundamental currency of what research offers. Some…
Two recent events have me thinking about AI and the problem of plausibility in market research. First, a colleague narrated a story about the first market research company he worked for 20 years ago. The owner told him that research is always tentative and uncertain, and that all we really need to achieve in our…
I became curious last week about what happened to those research people charged with fraud last year for selling fake panelists to complete market research surveys. One by one they are pleading guilty. But there was something much more interesting for me than learning about their guilty pleas. It was the “thought experiment” it provoked…
Doing “statistics” strikes fear in the hearts of many, so how about if we talk about “algorithms” instead? It’s a safer word because most people in the worlds of business and market research never have to take (or fail) a course in algorithms. Algorithms are central to the work that we do in business and market…
At a moment when our industry is scandalized by a panel provider having been indicted for selling fraudulent survey respondents, in comes another provider that is doing nearly the same thing with absolutely full disclosure. The catch? They are using AI to do it, and dressing it up with phrases like “contextually relevant” and “statistically…
In this article we revisit a 15-year old article in the Harvard Business Review (“Rethinking Marketing”) about the transformation of marketing. It relates directly to an important theme of Versta Research’s recent talk at the AMA in Chicago—namely, dissipation of the research function. The article argued that marketing was shifting from being product-centric to being…
Election season polling always highlights the danger of bad pollsters giving the market research and polling industry a bad name. While there are lots of reasons that polls might predict outcomes incorrectly (polling is far more difficult and risky than many people think) there is no excuse for deliberately bad pollsters making up data to…
You might think that a research firm specializing in surveys would be glad to see a world in which customer feedback surveys are everywhere. Not so. I take part in a lot of webinars, and unfortunately I am asked to complete a survey (at least one) every time I attend. Some websites ask me to…
I just read a delightful and thought-provoking snippet in Proust’s Swann’s Way (published in 1913) that, unfortunately, reminded me of artificial intelligence in market research. Here is what Proust originally wrote, which is delightful: But all of the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or the misfortune of a real person are…
One of the weirdest new uses of artificial intelligence in market research is to create “synthetic respondents” for surveys and qualitative interviews. The idea is to use information scraped from the Internet via AI’s large language models, construct a sample of synthetic people that matches the demographics of one’s target population, and then ask those…