WARC conference hears how research industry must gain new skill sets to glean insight from online consumers
From WARC - UK– The research industry must learn and incorporate a new set of skills to change the way it gains insight from consumers online, according to the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF) chief research officer Joel Rubinson.
Research attended the World Advertising Research Center’s Online Research Conference 2009, where Rubinson outlined the challenges the industry faces as consumers become more and more immersed in social media.
He said: “There is a shift in how humanity is communicating which produces a continuous stream of data in people’s naturally occurring conversations. Consumers are a genie that won’t go back in its bottle.”
The ARF man said that he was not alone in his concerns, having heard sound bites such as “Research has lost the ability to see the bigger picture” in meetings with industry leaders like Unilever, P&G and Levi Strauss.
He quoted P&G’s Kim Dedeker as saying that the research industry would be “on life support by 2012” unless it turns to methods “more in touch with the lifestyles of the consumers we seek to understand”.
Rubinson said researchers need to “hear the unexpected, observe new vocabulary appearing, listen in both the brand backyard [brand-created situations like communities] and the consumer backyard [forums, etc]”.
The key objective, he said, was to move from “consumer insights” gained from traditional research methods to “integrated insights” gained from blogs, online forums and other forms of social media that can be merged with data collected by more traditional means.
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Thanks Bernice for the heads up on this
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