Single Task Choice

Big Data isn’t the only offspring of the Digital Age shaping the future of marketing research.  Society’s ever increasing migration to life on the Web has had another important impact: the size of survey samples.  Despite the daily obituaries being written for survey research, surveys continue to play an important role in building the marketing information on which marketing decisions are based.

But surveys are changing.  Back in the mall intercept era (anybody besides me remember back that far?), samples of 400 were considered huge, even luxurious.  Samples in the thousands are commonplace today.  In some categories, such as online games, for example, samples of tens of thousands are often not difficult to achieve.

The Digital Age, however, is not only colonizing cyberspace.  It’s creating a mass exodus from the computer.  Away from the computer and on to mobile devices, eg, smart phones and tablets and wristwatches.  Questionnaire designers will need to rethink their approach to questionnaires for these new platforms.

Mobile devices have smaller screens.  Mobile device users are usually mobile, too.  They’re not at a desk where they can spend 20 minutes of quality time concentrating on your survey.  Surveys will need to adapt visually to the smaller screens but will also need to be quicker to adapt to a different lifestyle and, maybe, a shorter attention span.

Conjoint analysis, the most powerful technique in the researcher’s arsenal, usually requires 10-12 questions to do properly.  But techniques are currently being developed to reduce the number of conjoint questions needed.  I am confident that by leveraging the giant sample sizes becoming available, conjoint analysis will ultimately be reduced to a single conjoint task per person.  A task so simple that it will fit on your watch yet it will yield analysis so powerful that precise and profitable marketing strategies will be based on its results.

To understand in more detail how this is possible, read my article “Single Task Choice: Pipe Dream or Possibility?”