5 of the Top Trends in Market Research for 2012

As a market researcher, the pressure is always on to deliver the most insightful and actionable results for your clients. You need to keep your finger on the pulse of what the upcoming trends are, so you can develop research methods that will help you to use these trends to your advantage and keep one step ahead of competitors. You don’t want your clients to be looking elsewhere for suppliers because you are not evolving with the industry.

We came across the GRIT report, which you may have already seen but we’d like to share it with you. It discusses what you can expect to see in the Market Research industry in 2012. To get a full copy of this report visit http://www.greenbookblog.org/grit/.

Years ago we saw research methodology moving from paper to online. Now with the online space evolving at such a rapid rate, if you are not already, you should be investigating how you can use this space to add value to your research projects. The report discusses that the top five trends that are expected to see massive growth in 2012 are:

1. Social Media Analytics – which is when data is gathered from blogs and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The data is then analysed to help inform business decisions
2. MROCs – which is when you use private social networking platforms or websites to conduct qualitative market research
3. Data Mining – extracting information from databases or systems
4. Mobile – for both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies
5. Text Analytics – also sometimes referred to as Text Mining, where text data is analysed looking at things such as word frequency distributions

What do you think of these trends? Have you had an experience you’d like to share?

Image taken from the fantastic Klout dashboard.