Interesting piece in Ad Age called The End of Consumer Surveys? The gist of the article is that large consumer products companies - P&G, Unilever and ESPN are mentioned and quoted - are moving away from traditional surveys and towards monitoring social media to glean consumer insights.
According to the article, the primary drivers of this change are consumer unhappiness with taking surveys coupled with company unhappiness with the results. Key quote from a VP at Unilever:
"We continue to torture consumers with boring and antiquated research methods," she said. "What's holding us back is history and norms. But I work in a business where I think most of the senior leadership is still very frustrated with the tools that we are using."
We've posted in the past on market research moving away from statistically significant research methods. This is another example of this trend.
At Emergent Research we've used social media monitoring as a research tool for years. And although "boring and antiquated", we use and will continue to use statistically significant surveys. In our opinion using a mix of research tools and methods yields the best results.
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