Editor’s Note: This commentary is featured in the GRIT Business & Innovation Report. The latest Business & Innovation edition looks at the big picture of the insights industry and how individual organizations fit into this ecosystem. Learn how external changes (like COVID-19) are spurring innovation and how they impact business outcomes, expectations, and strategies. Also featured is the ‘Top 50 Most Innovative Supplier’ list.
How Opportunities and Challenges in Market Research Became Unmet Needs
In past editions of the GRIT Business & Innovation Report, we saw contradictory responses in participants’ views toward the greatest opportunities and challenges of marketing research. What one segment considered to be a market research challenge, the other thought was an opportunity for innovation, and vice versa. There was no clarity on what the Opportunities and Challenges section hoped to achieve.
In this latest edition, we wanted a way to compare gaps between the actual and perceived needs of clients and suppliers. Our questions had to be cleaner if suppliers were to deliver on the needs of buyers. Thus the Opportunities and Challenges section evolved into Unmet Needs.
A Better Way to Ask
For the first time, we asked insights, Buyers, to describe their unmet needs, in particular, needs that could be filled by external Suppliers:
What, if anything, is the biggest need you have that could be filled by an external supplier, but currently is not?
We also asked Suppliers to articulate the needs that they think insights Buyers have that could be filled by external Suppliers:
What, if anything, do you think is the biggest need that insights buyers have that could be filled by an external supplier but currently is not?
If we don’t know there is a market research problem, we can’t fix it. But too often, we forget to ask what we don’t know. Defining unmet needs is the first step in filling them and moving the industry relentlessly forward.
The goals were to identify potential areas for innovation, as well as any areas of disconnect between Buyers and Suppliers. Areas of disconnect could indicate that Suppliers don’t understand what Buyers need, or it could mean that Suppliers have keen insights into the Buyer’s challenges that Buyers cannot see on their own.
Suppliers, for example, may have expertise that is quite different from a Buyer’s. They may have the objectivity of a participant-observer, and, most importantly, they likely have experience with a variety of Buyers and exposure to different ways that Buyers have addressed common insights challenges. Finally, if a Supplier has a different view of a Client’s market research challenges and the potential ways to address it than a client has….isn’t that why Clients hire them in the first place?
These were verbatim questions, and responses were coded and then further aggregated into categories. We have grouped the top ten topics in the accompanying chart for simplicity.
For Buyers, research core skills tied for second while advanced analytics and data synthesis were fifth. Aside from the two that are in the top 3 for both Buyers and Suppliers, creating business impact and research core skills, Buyers placed two other needs ahead of advanced analytics and data synthesis: innovative technology and business consulting skills. Among Suppliers, these ranked 5th and 4th respectively. So, the top needs are pretty well aligned across Buyers and Suppliers, and after creating business impact among Buyers, these needs differ in mentions by 5% or less.
In fact, the entire set of needs is pretty well aligned across Buyers and Suppliers; the largest percentage differences are for creating business impact (Buyers are 7% higher) and innovative technology (Buyers are 5% higher). All other needs are mentioned within 3% of each other, which leaves us with the question of why there is a larger gap for Buyers’ most pressing needs.
Arguably, GRIT Supplier respondents are more diverse than Buyers, at least with respect to insight generation.
Buyers, on the other hand, have the opportunity to “travel the world” by engaging different types of Suppliers and so on, gaining a more holistic, ringside view of the insights and analytics industry. Therefore, Buyers are more likely to be more homogeneous than Suppliers, to agree more, and, as a consequence, stand out more in a column or bar chart.
Suppliers differ with respect to creating business impact and innovative technology, and these differences are related to their areas of focus. If we consider only Strategic Consultancies and Full/ Field Service providers, the gap on creating business impact is only about 3% (28% for Buyers/25% for these Supplier types). If we consider only Technology providers, Buyers are actually 6% less likely to name innovative technology as a need. On the other hand, if we considered only Strategic Consultancies, Full/Field Service, and Data & Analytic providers, Suppliers look completely out of touch on innovative technology.
In fairness, however, these gaps are partially a function of limitations of the methodology. On average, Buyer comments touched 1.4 of these 10 categories while Suppliers averaged 1.3. Realistically, if you were a Strategic Consultancy or a Full/Field Service provider and you had one bullet, would you waste it on innovative technology or would you take a shot at business impact? If you were a Technology provider, would you take aim at creating business impact or innovative technology?
We mentioned that the verbatim comments were coded, then aggregated into 10 categories. If we peel off some of the individual topics, there’s another interesting finding.
Earlier in the report, we discussed how Buyers were more interested than Suppliers in new data sources, multiple data streams and so on. With respect to unmet needs, however,
Further, this proportion holds pretty steady across Supplier types; each is at least 3 times more likely to mention this than Buyers, so this result is not driven by an outlier Supplier type.
There are possible explanations for this apparently counter-intuitive result. We could go back to the “single bullet theory,” but it doesn’t seem to fit this scenario as well as it did for creating business impact and innovative technology. If we flash back to the Organizational Success Factors section, we’d see that analyzing multiple data streams and synthesizing data from multiple sources were in the bottom half of Suppliers’ critical priorities. Fewer than half said synthesizing data was a best-in-class goal for them, and fewer than 40% said analyzing multiple streams was a critical priority. However, if only a third of those who felt these rated best-in-class attention mentioned synthesis of results across multiple sources/types as an unmet need, we’d easily achieve the 13% who mentioned it.
Why are Buyers so much lower than Suppliers? Perhaps synthesis of results across multiple sources/types is a salient issue for them, but they may have too many other priorities to mention before they get to this one. Or, perhaps they consider it to be an unmet need, but not an unmet need that Suppliers can fill. Fewer than half of Suppliers have made this a top priority, and many Buyers may not have met a Supplier that would be credible in filling this need.
It is interesting to note that many of the unmet needs mentioned aligning with priorities and benchmarking measures identified multiple times in earlier in this report. There is a definite theme that has emerged of both Buyers and Suppliers recognizing that consulting skills, analytics, and data synthesis, and more efficient insights generation are critical for the industry.
We also found it interesting to look at the ungrouped coded responses through the filter of Buyer organization positioning, which we identify in our GRITscape as strategically focused, tactically focused, or both.
Across all three groups, the use of technology and/ or innovative products is the most frequently mentioned unmet need.
The Top Unmet Needs
For Strategic & Tactical, the top 5 unmet needs are:
- Use of technology/product innovations
- Data Science / Statistics / Mathematics related
- Better insights
- Better samples/sampling/reach
- Understanding the client’s business/ Faster time to deliverables (tie)
For Tactical, the top 5 unmet needs are:
- Use of technology/product innovations and Better insights (tie)
- Better quality of research or data and Better samples/sampling/reach (tie)
- Understanding the client’s business
- Faster time to deliverables (tie)
Finally, for Strategic, the top 5 unmet needs are:
- Use of technology/product innovations
- Research and data automation
- Cheaper costs / Cost-effectiveness
- Behavioral science and related and Other research methods/approaches (tie)
Solving Market Research Problems Related to the Needs Gap
According to Buyers, Suppliers have roles to play in helping them fill unmet needs. Buyer needs range from business-focused to technology-related to analytics to core research skills; Suppliers happen to have specialties in strategic consulting, technology, analytics, and full-service research. On the surface, there may appear to be disconnects between how Suppliers see Buyer needs and the needs that Buyers actually have. However, if you focus on the perspective of the Supplier whose professional focus is best positioned to meet a particular need, Buyers and Suppliers are very well aligned.
Similar to arguments made elsewhere in this report and in the most recent GRIT editions, the key to closing the gap on unmet Buyer needs might be an “Avengers, assemble!” strategy: calling together the right portfolio of Supplier super-powers necessary to successfully combat specific and unique business challenges. Complex business challenges need to be met with the right set of skills and capabilities, and these are out there, but perhaps not under one roof. Someone must have the vision to diagnose the marketing research challenges, the ingenuity to define a solution, the knowledge to find the right skills and capabilities suited to the challenge, and the temperament to bring it all together.
