Can Market research Really Rely on Robots in Future?
As the alluring business promises of automation and AI continue unabated, with best practice supposedly built in (as Ray Poynter recently suggested on a LinkdIn discussion on the topic of MR DIY 2.0), it's sobering to experience the reality of digital downsides.
Business narratives often contrast strongly with experiences - and we are all participants, suffering more than occasionally from the ensuing cognitive discomfort.
I have experienced this recently - in marcomms - but the implications for MR are clear, when we think about fully automated questionnaires, reports and more.
Quality counts - my hypothesis: we are witnessing its importance diminish around us with little outcry or attempts at a counter-narrative.
Here's a brief recap:
First Up: I received two e-mail invitations last week to be a speaker at conferences in 2019, Berlin and Frankfurt - cool! Or so I thought.
They were correctly written, no typos, my name correct, seemingly from a real person, with a real address - I read on. There was a snag: neither of them were remotely relevant to my field of activity. Both conferences were specialist IT stuff.
Time wasted - which irritated me. Why invite me, an MR person?
Then the penny dropped - the invitation was likely generated by an algorithm and sent to an AI generated list, tick-box style filtering applied. "Global Marketing" in my job title, then Germany. LinkedIn would reveal that I am a speaker at events, with an English sounding surname, so possibly a native English speaker. Tick tick tick tick. Program written, invitation goes out.
Hardly precision targeting- but if you write to 100.000 people, and end up with 50 speakers, who cares about the 99.950 that were baffled and irritated like me?
DIY 2.0 it isn't but if this is what AI leads towards, I am more than sceptical.
Second example: My in-box is filled with daily email MR updates, most of which I don't have time to read. Bad me. So a few days ago in the spirit of becoming a more educated MR pro, I read one article with a catchy headline, a quant study by a reputable MR company examining how people choose to watch live sport. Topical given the Football worldcup - maybe surprising results.
Sadly not.
The article was big on words, short on insights and came to the less than provocative conclusion: TV is the dominant medium when it comes to watching live sport.That was it. Insights? Drum roll? Hardly.
This is an example of MR being shared with the broader world - descriptive, confirmatory and banal. At the same time we worry about the status of insights.
Just because it's easy for certain companies to access their panels at relatively low cost, and then use results however uninspiring for PR purposes doesn't really help either the publishing company nor the reader.
My readiness to read future MR newsletters in future has not increased.
Third: I notice that a number of major marketing and MR publishing houses are actively looking for contributors to write - thought pieces, emails, case studies etc. Wow! Are they actually lacking contributors in an age where the value of personal branding is being communicated broadly? Apparently yes.
Maybe this is linked to a sense of drift, disengagement - masses of "noise" or "communication" (robots, chat bots, even real people!), audiences with distinctly shorter attention spans, and a sense of quality and originality dropping.
Is anybody listening in an era of content marketing? Are we losing our appetite even to look for "signals"?
We embrace the excitment of digital unwittingly, it's almost impossible not to. But when we see quality falling off the cliff edge, we need to sharpen our brains and push back. The day where go I off the web beckons.
2018 was for me the year of MR quality. Still looking for those MR hashtags.
Curious, as ever, as to others' views.