Literally turning Marketing Research on its head:

Marketers and Market Researchers are conditioned to expecting answers from consumers of products and services from surveys and questionnaires. They are not as equally predisposed to expecting questions from consumers.

It is very likely that for market research to continue to be viable, especially in the online / Internet environment that the modus-operandi of consumer and market research be turned on its head to analyse the questions consumers have rather than the answers they give.

Example; to ask a consumer how many cigarettes he/she smokes a day, may solicit an answer but the answer may not be true, much less accurate. However, to have a consumer ask “what are the safe raw materials used in the production of a cigarette, reveals far more information about the interests of the consumer and provides more information to marketers about what they have to with their products or services and what innovations they need to bring about, in the eyes of the consumer to meet current consumer needs and satisfaction – to stay ahead of the competition.

Current trends are indicating that consumer online research and online panels may not be sustainable in a WEB2.0 environment – ESOMAR Panel Research 2007 – where consumers seek engagements more than they want to respond to surveys.

Giving consumers the ability to ask questions about products and services (then analyse the questions for creative ideas to improve product or service offerings) makes sense and would create the kind of engagement model of an “online panel community”, based on WEB2.0 technologies. It also ensures consumer and market research is relevant in the changing landscape of the Internet.

Hello Nick,

Thank you for comments above and I do agree with you that the research community has lots to do to catch up. One thing that baffles me is why isn’t there a market research community panel already to pull together all marketing researchers – if indeed market research is to go down that seeming inevitable path. This would give researchers a first hand feeling of what such a community is about and perhaps a understanding of the power of community panels to marketers and marketing research.

To answer your I think it is inevitable that it will become something that we don’t really have much of choice about. In fact, I envisage a time will come when the meaning of “community panels” on the internet will extend beyond convergence and engagement to the point where users can actually manipulate the foundations of the panel because of improved and friendly programming capabilities in the same way we currently manipulate the landscapes around ourselves or the renovate the home in which we reside. This has profound issues for marketing and marketing researchers. In the end, who is researching and who is researched becomes very blurred indeed.

Is this a wake up call to the researching community? I definitely think so – if they can envision such a future.