Is market research still necessary in the age of social media? Part 1

By Gonzalo López Martí / LMMIAMI.COM

• Once upon a time, strategic planners were market research experts with deep knowledge of consumer behavior, motivations and insights.
• No wonder clients loved them.
• They still love’em hard.
• Sometimes more so than they do us creatives.
• Kudos.
• Well deserved.
• Strategic planners managed to add credibility to creativity.
• Of course, an awful lot of strategic planners are just psychobabbling creative wannabes.
• Dilettantes with zero market research knowledge and the curious habit of using social media snippets to back their futile fabrications.
• At least we creatives don’t try to sell our brainfarts with the support of faux science.
• We are candid enough to admit that what we sell is stuff we come up with in the shower.
• Yes, many a garden variety strategic planner will bump into a lame remark from some nobody or other on the twitterwebs and quote it like gospel.
• This is happening now.
• A lot.
• Social media is increasingly replacing market research in our line of business, whether you we like it or not.
• Because?
• The explanation might be that research is simply not necessary anymore.
• Or is it?
• Let’s see.
• A few weeks back, AdAge ran an article titled “Need for Speed Puts Copy Testing to the Test. Brands, Vendors Search for New Ways to Validate Creative Ideas”.
• You can read it here:
• http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/speed-digital-putting-copy-testing-test/300338/
• But let me save you your precious time, here’s the paragraph that pretty much summarizes the gist of the article:
• “Against a steady drumbeat for more and quicker digital content, even some of the most ROI-obsessed marketers have lost a measure of faith in traditional copy testing methods, or simply don’t have time to use them, according to several marketing executives interviewed by Ad Age.”
• According to the premise of the aforementioned piece, marketers these days need to move so fast to go to market with their commercial messages that testing is simply out of the question.
• Especially due to the ultra short shelf life and reactive nature of social media.
• Let’s put it this way: your community manager cannot wait three days to conduct a survey over every post that goes on your brand’s various social feeds, let alone two weeks for the legal department to respond his or her emails.
• The hypothesis of this columnist, yours truly, is on the other hand slightly different than AdAge’s: it might not be the speed required to operate on social media what is rendering market research unnecessary, it is social media itself what’s replacing market research altogether.
• Is this possible?
• Well, strictly speaking, no.
• Social media is NOT accurate from a statistical POV.
• To be continued next week.