Busy times at Zebra, so just a snack-sized bite…

Question: What’s the difference between good market research and bad market research?

Answer: Good market research makes you money; bad market research costs you money.

I think a key part of our role, as professional market researchers, is to advise and steer our clients on, and towards, the research methodologies that will effectively and efficiently answer their research questions.

“Yeah, and…?” I hear you mutter. “You’re stating the bleeding obvious”.

If it is the bleeding obvious, then I’m confused.

Because while I busy myself with answering that brief, the passionate embrace of all things 2.0 (for the want of a better descriptor) by some researchers – along with the often alarming and dire warnings for the future of Research 1.0 (for the want of a better descriptor) – suggest that marketers must have suddenly changed their questions.

Have they?

In some cases, yes. The world itself has changed/is changing, and the marketing context is changing too. But it’s not changing entirely, and importantly, it’s not always changing in parallel.

A Research 2.0 solution suggests that marketers’ questions have changed as quickly and as radically as online technologies and forums themselves.

But marketers still want to know how to sell stuff. Does Research 2.0 output help them do that? Does the information gleaned from the ‘new’ listening posts answer their fundamental market research questions?

Or are those at the helm of the Research 2.0 front actually changing the brief itself? Shaping the research questions to fit the new technologies?

Is it research?

Perhaps what we’re defining as Research 2.0 isn’t, in fact, market research at all. Maybe it sits outside the realm of market research; more in the customer relations/customer service domain.

Without doubt, the online environment provides marketers with invaluable feedback – but of a very specific kind. Quite clearly, because of its skews and tip of the tailness, it’s not the kind that’s of much use in making big-marketing-budget-decisions.

Maybe, as market researchers, we are in pole position to harness and distill that specific feedback for what it may be worth. We can certainly lend our experience and caution to the analysis.

But are Research 2.0 methodologies really the silver bullet they’re being sold as? Is it a marriage of the right questions, with the right sample, in the right context?

Or is it a shotgun wedding?