Bracing up for the forthcoming Market Research Trends in 2023

The year 2022 witnessed unprecedented disruptions, with brands prioritising consumer behaviour and sentiment, bringing technology-driven market research, automation, and AI to the forefront. 

The futurists that belong to the realm of research and insights believe that the future is now. There are a plethora of untapped technologies and advancements that once unleashed, will have the potential to bring about competitive breakthroughs in the industry.

Let’s delve deeper into the market research trends that lie ahead on the horizon:

• Agile insights

The market research industry is dynamic owing to the constantly evolving data and insights. With the escalating need to deliver faster, more quality, and more accurate data collection, firms are diving into insights. Agile insights have already brought disruptions to the Market Research industry, and it has the potential to make research faster, seamless, and more efficient in the times to come.  

The consumer landscape is not confined and is rapidly changing. Therefore, to tune in with the dynamic landscape, it is crucial for researchers to follow a nimble and iterative approach like agile insights which involves continuous testing and learning for hastier and actionable data collection. It extracts findings from one piece of research and feeds them directly into another piece of research for a comprehensive understanding of a subject, and guidance and direction for the next steps in understanding the discovered and undiscovered questions.

For an instance, with an agile approach, small-scale surveys can be launched quickly, with minor modifications to past questionnaires and sample groups.

• Hastened Digital Transformation:

The legacy of innovations and developments in transformative technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), Virtual and Augmented reality (VR/AR), cloud computing, blockchain and super-fast protocols like 5G is being carried forward to 2023. These technologies, complement each other, and soon, the boundaries between them will blur, thereby leading to their collaboration.

Fresh solutions for revamped and enhanced working like hybrid and remote working, business decision-making, and automation of hand-operated, routine, and creative workloads integrate these technologies in different ways that facilitate them to intensify one another.

These advancements further bring us closer to creating ‘intelligent enterprises’, wherein structures, processes and systems support each other to fulfil humdrum tasks in the most effective ways. This calls for businesses to incorporate correct technology throughout their process in every domain of their operations. Currently, the world is being taken over by the aforesaid futuristic innovations, and it’s needless to mention the impact they can bring to one’s business and the industry.

• Social Media Listening:

Social media listening has taken the centre stage and it’s not new. With the rise of social media, consumer attitudes are now on display for anyone to see in real-time.

SNS platforms are jammed with interactions, likes, and dislikes that are pertinent to a business’ brand. These interactions are a doorway to the preferences, needs, opinions and attitudes of a company’s target audience. Social media listening provides businesses with access to historical and real-time data from social media which can help make informed decisions and inspire new offerings. It is anticipated that an overwhelming 5.42 billion people globally will be on social media by 2025, and anyway, 80% of what people are posting on such platforms is about themselves. Adding on, this implies that businesses which invest in research methods related to social media can dive into the pool of consumer insights in real-time. These platforms enable the extraction of valuable information like their purchase patterns, how they use certain products, trends they’re interested in, feedback etc and further help businesses to leverage this wealthy data by monitoring and analysing them. Brands can deploy various social media listening tools to monitor activities like brand mentions, category mentions, leading searches, hashtags, and the latest trends.

• Data Democratisation:

The trend of empowering the entire workforce with accessible data is going to continue in 2023. Data democratisation opens the window for new forms of enhanced working, wherein everybody is equipped with intelligent insights to enable them to excel effectively and efficiently in whatever they’re assigned. There’s no surprise that data is the golden key to understanding customers, and businesses are becoming well-informed to fabricate better products and services and streamline their internal operations to reduce costs and waste. And in the present era, most businesses are inundated with an incredible amount of data from all angles.

Until recently, data was owned by IT departments and all other departments had to rush to the former to get hands on the necessary insights. But now, the data landscape is changing.

Adding on, to bear fruitful results from this data, it’s essential to disseminate the power to act on data-driven insights to the frontline, shop floor, non-technical staff, and marketing and finance departments. This further implement uncovering better opportunities and making better decisions.

In dynamic times like today, the perfect fusion of tech innovations and data democratisation has the potential to take the industry by storm. Advancements like data virtualisation software, data federation software, and Self-interpretation BI interpretations are the prominent epitomes of this amalgamation.

Many businesses incorporate data democracy in their practices. Research by McKinsey stated that companies that provide data access to the entire workforce are 40 times more likely to say analytics has a positive impact on revenue. The cherry on the cake is the exclusion of gatekeepers that could create bottlenecks to the gateway of data and that’s going to garner the attention of many brands and businesses to revolutionise.

• Sustainability:

The world is gradually becoming conscious of the escalating global warming and the surfacing concerns about the threats it could pose to us. The Covid19 pandemic has trapped us in blues for a long time, and now the climatic disaster is certain to outshine the jeopardy caused by the pandemic and introduce us to bigger challenges related to nature.

This implies that investors and consumers are becoming more mindful and prefer businesses with appropriate environmental and social credentials. The purchasing behaviour of consumers are varying as many prioritise factors like ecological impact and sustainability when choosing whom to buy from. Businesses are also driven by consciousness when deciding to collaborate with different brands. Companies should resort to cleaner, greener, and more sustainable technology at all levels, especially in areas that include high resource usage like blockchains and data centres.

In 2023, businesses must ensure that their environmental, social and governance (ESG) processes are the focal point of their strategy. Going by the lines government’s National Mission for Green India (GIM), the first step must be to measure the impact any business is imposing on society and the environment, followed by increasing transparency, reporting and accountability.

This intensifies the need for a business to be underpinned by a robust roadmap with clearly defined goals, restrictions, and timeframes to combat the negative impacts. The assessment and plans should also go beyond the entire supply chain and the ESG credentials of suppliers.

Paving the way for a Happy 2023 for Market Research Industry:

As the new year inches closer, the world is welcoming an influx of ground-breaking technologies, automated robust innovations, foresight-based decision-making, and the amelioration of traditional methodologies. There’s no denying that these advancements don’t work in isolation from each other, in fact, it’s better when they commingle and provide businesses with a competitive edge. The extraction of insights from data from different facets of the industry is becoming increasingly accessible. Responsible professionals are shifting to data-driven business models, wherein they must nurture what they have now as they seek to navigate to what’s next; digital transformation sweeping through every industry in 2023 and beyond. The realm of data and insights never stands still, it’s constantly evolving. Therefore, the proactive mindset of, ‘the future is now’, enables one to react with certainty in the phase of uncertainty and stay abreast, especially in troublesome times like wars, pandemics, and global warming that hinder the established order of functioning. New trends consistently emerge that foster new and innovative thinking that benefits all and motivates them to adapt, advance, and thrive in the industry.