By Bill Ives
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-07-07
Forrester's Tamara Barber asked the question: Are You Prepared For The Intelligent Enterprise? She looked at the future of market research and saw a trend and need for increased collaboration between the market insight professionals who go out and proactively collect market research data and those who passively collect transactional and behavioral data. We applaud this. She worked with a colleague, Dave Frankland, to look at how these functions best collaborate. These came up with these findings and suggestions.
First, they found that customer knowledge is an elusive commodity. Often the market insight interviewers and the data analysis teams do not collaborate. As a result, decisions can be based on an incomplete view of the customer. I like to have these two methods work interactively. For example, the data can raise questions to ask customers. The customers can bring up issues to validate with data.Second, the old roles of market research and database marketing actually miss the mark. Tamara and Dave fell that these roles are stuck in their own vicious cycles because they tend to focus on traditional methods and channels, making them less relevant to the business. This is where new approaches can come to play in useful ways.
Third, the greater alignment of these roles can drive business value. While this "alignment" is much easier said than done, when done right a "more adaptive insights function emerges that can drive more efficient marketing and in the end help grow the bottom line." I think this canbest occur through the interactive exchange and validation I mentioned in connection with their first finding. I have seen this first hand in research on internal employee capabilities and interests and I am sure it will work with customers.
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