Sunday, November 9, 2008

What will 2012 look like for research?

I had the opportunity to participate in a workshop last month in Montreal discussing the future of market and social research. It was expertly facilitated by a team of young researchers but i am not sure it went far enough. The key future trends that I took out included:

1. more passive monitoring of behaviour
2. multiple data sources being brought together to develop the story
3. the importance of India and China
4. more time on analysis less time on data gathering
5. media, research and advertising working more closely together
6. Consumers to become more demanding and choose when and how they want to talk to us
7. random sampling under enormous pressure
8. client databases will be at the centre of everything
9. blurrred qual and quant
10. Greater demand for ROI and accountability, leading to more effective designs

I am not sure we are pushing it far enough with the above. I think i can safely say that the single methodology is almost gone, but what big shifts are others seeing and predicting for 2012?