Published: 1/28/2025
Joshua Monroe
SVP, MRA East, Dynata
I don’t want to date myself, but let’s just say I have been in research services field for a LONG time. To put in perspective, when I started in MR, I was managing field sites where I would have my daily counts FAXED to me each morning that I would combine into excel, and if a partner was running late, I had to actually pick up the phone and call them to see when I would get them. This was the early 2000’s where it was more common to do phone or paper/pencil studies than it was to do online. I bring this up, only to show how much change has happened since I joined the industry, and how quickly the change happened.
So if we think a similar amount of change continues at the same pace of the last 20 years, how is the industry going to look in the near future? Sure, there will be more incorporation of AI. Sure, I want to believe that data quality will be better. But what are the ways MR companies are going to use to differentiate themselves? I like to think that with the sheer amount of data that’s out there, that more sources will be tied together, and MR companies can begin to become even more of a consultant to their clients than ever before. A great example is how an MR company with great data can get outside of just “consumer insights” departments of their clients and into the Marketing departments, analytics departments, and others.
Perfect example….the consumer insights department at your client’s works internally with their marketing department to talk about their marketing plans for the year. The insights department understands their objectives and then runs the research to answer the questions the team has. They send off the insights to the team and then that marketing team takes that data and makes the necessary decisions. In this example though, the relationship with between the MR partner and the end client is limited to insights department alone.
But what if as an MR company, you could become stickier with that marketing department which usually has a barrier to entry which is the insights team? What if, as a MR company, you could help guide the advertising spend for the marketing team? What if, as an MR company, the data you provide to your client could also help seed the exact audiences that the advertising team is purchasing on digital advertising platforms, but the audiences you build are more exact to the actual purchasers of your products? For all your MR folks, think Segmentation, that you are then able to monetize for digital advertising purposes. Here is how a traditional MR firm, having those traditional conversations, can get outside of that and get a seat at a table they didn’t historically have.
If you haven’t heard of Audience Activation, well, now you do. The key behind this, is having PII data on your survey respondents. By having that PII, we can match and model their data off massive consumer databases and create audiences based on the self-reported survey responses they provide. So when a marketing team of a paint product company goes to purchase advertising, instead of targeting “DIY painters” for their ads, they can target DIY painters WHO have children, WHO earn on average $84K per year, WHO watch HGTV, WHOSE favorite app is Pinterest, and have a college degree. You can quickly see how much farther and more effective those advertising dollars can go with that additional targeting. And all this was gathered through the typical MR research process, but leveraging the data in a different way that we’re accustomed to. This is an example of how I can see the MR industry changing in the future.
At Dynata, we’re helping MR firms and brands directly with this very topic. If you’re interested in how your MR firm can use this activation technique, or if you’re a brand who wants to more effectively advertise to your customers, we should have chat. Why wouldn’t you want to make things more efficient on your end?