While businesses find themselves adapting to changes brought on by COVID-19, the insights industry is speedily adjusting to virtual solutions. Listen below for what these adaptions mean for market researchers.
To listen to the recording of this discussion, please visit the Greenbook Blog.
In the second edition of our COVID-19 Insights Leaders Roundtable, a decided shift in tone and focus is underway. We see the benefits of having a diverse and changing group of leaders joining us weekly by bringing a broad range of perspectives to the questions we are attempting to answer.
As a reminder, the discussion each week focuses on the same four topics:
What is changing in the industry as a result of COVID-19 (business levels, shifts in methodologies, new client priorities, etc…)
How are you as leaders adapting personally (tips, ideas, best practices)?
How are your businesses adapting?
What comes next? What are the opportunities for the future when things calm down?
For this second session, the panelists were:
Elizabeth Morgan, CMO – Market Logic Software
Michael Winnick, CEO – dscout
B.V. Pradeep, Global Vice President – Consumer & Market Insight – Market Clusters – Unilever
Hunter Thurman, President – Thriveplan
Some of the high-level learnings that came out of this session include:
Current State:
Clients and Suppliers are almost through the adaptation phase and are now beginning to move forward under the “new normal”.
If it isn’t digital, it isn’t happening, including virtually all qualitative work.
Research is being re-prioritized to understand consumer needs and market conditions over the short, mid, and long term.
Respondent engagement is extraordinarily high vs. historical norms: people want to engage, connect, share and be rewarded.
This includes both online and telephone-based research and is across qual and quant as well as B2B and Consumer research.
Clients are doing more with less, including leveraging historical data in new .ways to help answer questions and to develop comparative benchmarks to measure changes.
Future State:
The context for research questions are what changes will stick and what is still to come, and the opportunities inherent in each.
Brands are aligning to the twin drivers of pragmatic behaviors and emotional behaviors (what makes sense vs. what makes people feel safe and secure).
e-commerce continues to be hugely important; what is the new path-to-purchase and consumer journey?
Larger issues such as changes to supply chains, distribution, logistics, economic and legal frameworks, and business operations are also important areas of research.
Data synthesis and curation is only going to grow in importance, especially for distributed workforces.
As we found last week, there is much more nuance here, and a veritable goldmine of useful and compelling insights so dive into the full recording and transcript below.
