A university lecture hall — Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

For the last three years I’ve had the incredible opportunity to teach marketing research as adjunct faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

If you‘ve heard the horror stories you might not believe this, but I really enjoy being adjunct faculty. I'm in a department full of supportive individuals who make me feel valued and seen, so I'm sure that has something to do with it.

But the opportunity to reshape the way people think about marketing research has something to do with it, too.

It’s not hyperbole to say I have the opportunity to reshape the way people think about marketing research because textbooks, instructors at other schools, and students all seem to have some really cockeyed ideas about marketing research … or maybe I do.

Here are some of those ideas and why I think they’re misguided. You can decide who’s cockeyed.

It’s surveys.

I hear this mainly from students. “What’s marketing research?” “It’s surveys.”

Yes, surveys are a part of marketing research, but they’re not the only part of marketing research. In fact, every day they become a less significant component of marketing research.

Part of the reason for that is that the definition of marketing research keeps expanding as marketing becomes more data-driven. If you’re segmenting your audience and hitting each segment with an email QR code that directs them to a landing page with a form-fill, there’s three or four types of marketing research driving that activity, and none of them are surveys.

The other contributing factor is that surveys are becoming less effective.

In the last election cycle huge swaths of the population opted out of surveys because they felt surveys were a product of the liberal media, and another big chunk lied on surveys, mainly because they were suburban closet Trump supporters.

Since everything is political now, we’re seeing some of that slop over into product and brand surveys, along with survey overload. As the marketing iconoclast Samuel Scott noted, if even your dentist sends you NPS surveys, are we really getting data of value from any quantitative research?

It’s surveys and focus groups.

This is mostly a textbook thing, and I have this to say to authors of marketing-research textbooks: Marketing research is no longer about the refreshments you serve at focus groups. It’s really not. Opting for the fruit plate over the cheese tray does not change the overall dynamic of qualitative research.

I’ll cut the authors some slack because we’ve yet to see the first wave of pandemic-affected research texts, but I'd argue that the old focus group is a dinosaur. It’s so much more efficient and darn near as effective to do online focus groups that I doubt we’ll ever go back to the land of two-way mirrors and fruit plates.

As someone who got their master’s degree doing qualitative fieldwork, I don’t think qualitative research is going away; I just think collection methods are changing. Furthermore, I don’t think some of the efforts to make qualitative research more quantitative – word clouds, sentiment analysis, and semantic analysis – are all that hot.

But I do think that qualitative research has become an online-first endeavor in the business world, and we need to recognize that.

ss meeting — Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

There’s primary and secondary research, and ne’er the twain shall meet.

I have a good friend in the research business who’s much more skilled than I, and in speaking to my class he came up with the best definition of primary research I’ve ever heard: “It’s research I conduct that no one has conducted before.”

It’s a great definition. I'm more than good with it. What I'm not good with are people who use the term “secondary research” as a pejorative. You know, this whole “quantitative and qualitative are primary and everything else is secondary ho ho ho” kind of talk.

In my opinion, primary research is whatever you go to first, rely on first, and trust first as a source of information, and secondary research is whatever you then add to the mix to bolster your conclusions – and it can vary by project.

In any given situation competitive intelligence or Census Bureau data could be your first go-to, and then once a direction is set it could be backed up with a survey or some in-depth interviews.

It’s still original research. The only difference is your subject is a dataset and not a human. So what’s so “secondary” about that?

I'm afraid that people who insist on adhering to old-school definitions of “primary” research may ride that horse right into obsolescence.

Here’s why: So many questions have been asked and are being asked, so many of the same interviews are being conducted, and so many surveys are benchmarking other surveys that it’s getting harder to justify that “primary” survey project.

Yes, there’s always going to be a need for product-concept research, so the makers of that revolutionary mailbox-post attachment bracket can know that it needs to be turquoise instead of aubergine, but if you’ll look you’ll find that a lot of questions have already been answered.

I mean, if you have 500 qualitative reviews on a product, do you really need to do additional qualitative research? Maybe, if you pick out 10-15 reviews and seek out the writers for some added depth … but that sounds like secondary research to me.

It’s about the parts, not the whole.

I'm really glad that Qualtrics, among others, have come up with what they tout as 360-degree research solutions, because maybe we can shift the conversation away from individual research types toward the desired result of a near-complete, nuanced, research-based picture of people’s attitudes and behaviors toward certain products or situations.

(With that said, I'm concerned that Qualtrics’ “solution,” being a Qualtrics product, will deliver a 270-degree view at a 1,080-degree price. But that’s a topic for another day.)

Most marketing research books and instructors break research into well-defined pieces: quantitative, qualitative, database analysis, statistics, reporting, international research, ethics, and we’re done.

Crazy, but a lot of professional researchers approach their task the same way.

The problem is, life doesn’t break like a Hershey bar, with review questions after each piece. You need to pull in social data, demographics, web analytics, SEO, competitive intelligence, UX and CX stats, and quant and qual to really see where you are and ultimately tell the whole story.

Unfortunately, researchers trained by professors who go by textbooks never have this sort of flexibility ingrained in their thought process, so it takes Qualtrics to engineer a solution to a problem that never should have been a problem in the first place.

Marketing researchers have to be able to pull in data from everywhere, make sense of it, and use it to tell a story. It’s not easy; it’s not conventional. But it’s what needs to be done.

It’s a different skillset from the traditional market-research skillset, which does not mean that current and past market researchers are unskilled. Quite the contrary; they’ve done amazing work and laid a solid foundation for what’s to come.

However, the time has come to train marketing researchers on everything from traditional quant and qual to UX and UI, and to teach them how to synthesize and integrate.

Ultimately, the training probably won’t be done by me, and may not even be done in schools. But it will be done, because that’s what organizations need.

Are these concepts that revolutionary, or is traditional academia that hidebound? I'd like to think neither is the case … but I might be wrong.

'It's Just Surveys': Lessons From 3 Years Of Teaching Marketing Research