#5 Major Challenges Faced by Market Researchers Staying relevant with changing technology times is of prime concern now!
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
Market research is any organized activity conducted to gather information about specific target markets or customers. It is a very important component of business strategy & decision making. Market researchers perform both primary and secondary research to obtain the data and process it into relevant information.
Top challenges facing market researchers currently are -,
1. Existing Market Research Methodology
Overwhelming amount of data makes it difficult to separate out from noise. More than 500 websites are being added to the internet space every day. Manually scanning through the data is cumbersome and tough. Many existing techniques to juggle around add to the challenge of getting the right data.
2.Quality
The data being collated manually has a risk of being of poor quality. With volume of data collated increasing manual errors due to human fatigue can seep in. When the collated data is of poor quality, the insights into the mined data stands a high risk of being of bad quality as well.
3.Research Outcomes (For clients)
The expectations of clients are increasing due to the complex business dynamics. Clients expect actionable insights from market research companies, which can help them take quick informed business decisions. Insightful strategic reports delivered within stipulated timelines is becoming an increasing challenge for market research companies globally.
4. Differentiate from your competitors
It's becoming an increasing challenge for a market researcher to demonstrate unique value and novel contribution in Market Research approaches. The standard market research methodologies followed by most of market research companies don't help them stand apart from the crowd. Staying relevant with changing technology times is of prime concern now. With the advent of BIG DATA and analytics, cutting edge techniques should be adopted by the market research companies to stay ahead of the competition. Also, the need of the hour is to avoid commodification of the market research projects (which includes reports, surveys etc.).
5.Clientele Constraint
With ever increasing competition, the clients need the latest up-to-date insightful information delivered super-fast. This would help the clients get an edge over their competition and grow rapidly in the market. The clients often have constraints in terms of the timelines, budget and scope of work involved.
Solution:
Online Research is an integral part of secondary research. Web data extraction is an essential component of online research. Automation of web data extraction is becoming increasingly an inevitable necessity of the near future. Automation of web data extraction can help save time and effort for the researchers. This has direct impact on increasing the productivity of researchers and thereby increasing the overall output. Also, manual errors during extraction can be eliminated largely by automation.
Market researchers can focus more on providing strategic insights from the data extracted, which would help their clients take business decisions in a better way. Market research companies can easily differentiate themselves from the competition by providing faster, accurate and more insightful information to their clients, thereby gaining a major competitive edge in the market research space. Clients can also expect better insightful market research analysis, due to the bandwidth of market researcher freed from conducting repetitive mundane web extraction activities.
To summarize, most of the top challenges faced by market researchers can be addressed and resolved successfully by automation of online web data extraction activities.