Gathering and Leveraging Customer Decision Insights: A Look Into the Brand Impact, Communication and CX Research Future

There are strong currents of change in the worlds of customer, advertising and communication, and brand positioning and behavior impact research. These new dynamics of customer decision-making will impact the levels of innovation, insight and action for everyone applying any form of syndicated or custom research for making experience, brand equity, advertising, and communication plans. We’re not just speaking of the tools for collection – such as the declining use of telephone surveys, except for some targets and regions, in favor of online and other methods. Major sea changes are taking place in research.

In studies among research practitioners, on both the corporate and vendor sides of the desk, there is strong belief that innovative and creative methodological advances – such as fully understanding the level of trust and relationship value that customers want with brands and suppliers – must move to reflect the explosion of online and offline data sources. As well, practitioners understand the need to integrate all of this information, produce more actionable insights, and drive better business decision-making and more positive outcomes.

Perhaps the biggest challenge can be boiled down to one word and concept: DATA. Simply stated, the sheer volume of information which can be generated through online informal brand-related content, as well as customer profile data (from public and corporate databases), and syndicated and custom research must be effectively integrated. Further, there must be requisite methodological and analytic capability exhibited by professionals, and the systems they utilize, to take these integrated data and generate actionable, meaningful insights. In the face of this complexity, customer, advertising, and brand marketing researchers must become consultative and strategic professionals to keep from becoming commoditized and marginalized.

From my perspective, this is a significant opportunity for the marketing research community rather than a threat. Studies have found that some elements of research – brand strategy, customer and shopper behavior, advertising and promotional effectiveness, cultural/multicultural monitoring, media mix planning, etc. – will endure over time. Text analytics (sentiment/semantic analysis), and data generated through digital and mobile marketing, are emerging trends receiving research attention, and new methods must align with what is evolving here. The same is true of touchpoint effectiveness (modes of consumer contact, such as advertising, customer service, public relations, promotion through sponsorship, etc.), social networking, and even the potential of neuroscience, which are all becoming more important and receiving more attention as emerging marketing elements.

For researchers to become strategic consultants in this arena, the name of the game will be adaptation to the growing complexity of marketing in a digital world and the explosion of data streams from it. Another key trend, leveraged by marketing, communication, brand and research budget shrinkage and corporate desire for more integrated insights, is the movement seen in an increasing number of companies: the blending of these functions into a single, overarching discipline, which also drives customer-centric corporate culture. Innovation, whether in syndicated or custom research, or in the application of customer, brand and communication impact data, will help make this happen.