Why Are You Still Risking Millions on Your Intuition?
Market research has changed dramatically and companies CEOs today are extremely fortunate because that change has made market research much more accurate, predictive and affordable than it was in the past. This brand of market research is not done using focus groups or telephone surveys.
Those methods are not only expensive, but it is next to impossible to get the diverse sample that is required to be able to use them to predict future trends. Today’s market researchers have ditched the phone and the focus group rooms for social media sites and replaced the facilitator with sophisticated algorithms that can ensure sampling is done accurately.
Using these techniques, you can find out far in advance when your products and brand are about to soar or take a beating.
You are probably wondering, as many do “but are social media sites really representative of what people are thinking? Not everyone is on social media, isn’t it all young people?” The answer is that there are now enough people on social media that we can get a representative sample of the population.
You know how telephone pollsters always ask about your household income? That’s because they want to make sure that not everyone in their survey makes between $60,000 to 90,000 a year. They need to survey low, middle and high income people according to how they are represented in the population.
Ideally they are also getting a good mix of ethnicities, religions, education levels and other important demographics. The problem, of course, is that when asked how much money we make, most of us lie. In fact, a study by MIT Professor Alex Pentland shows that people lie on surveys about 50 percent of the time. How do you feel about making important strategic decisions with data that is 50 percent false?
Check Tomorrow for Part 2
