The market research landscape is evolving. Customer needs are changing. As a company, we are constantly working to anticipate these shifts and deliver the right mix of platforms and services to our global customer base.

MarketResearch.com’s leadership team recently wrapped up its annual strategy meeting. Department heads from content, operations, marketing, and sales gathered from across the U.S. and Great Britain to identify key issues affecting our customers. We caught up with CEO and Founder Rob Granader to hear his thoughts on current trends and developments and where the market research industry is headed.

Facial and body language analysis are hot right now. Major companies are offering software that can record and analyze emotional expressions. And they can do it real time. Market researchers now have an incredible amount of data at their fingertips about how people react to stimuli such as advertisements and product ideas.

Many providers of these services are suggesting that emotional expressions and other body language are giving the real picture of what people are actually feeling and that we can uncover more insights when we delve into this reality. But is that true? Are we actually just adding a lot more data to analyze, or are we truly finding something new and different in our research? Using current theories and research on emotions from the field of psychology can help us to make sense of all this information.

What are the key challenges and opportunities for market researchers today? Quirk’s Corporate Researcher Report 2016 offers a wealth of data and analysis on this topic. Based on an online work-life survey conducted in June 2016, this independent study focuses on client-side marketing research and insights professionals. 

The report tackles a variety of important issues including budgets, outsourcing, pain points, effectiveness of new methods, and more. Read on for a quick synopsis of several key findings.

Marketing effectively in a digital world requires innovative solutions and approaches. Today’s marketing professionals grapple with a wide variety of unique challenges, such as:

• Achieving scale in content marketing
• Capturing the interest of image-conscious consumers in the era of the "selfie"
• Marketing to the iGeneration (also known as Gen Z)

Among all of the services and capabilities we offer at Freedonia Custom Research, the most common are market sizing and competitive landscape studies. Important strategic decisions rely on valid data and clear market analysis. Clients come to Freedonia for our reliable and trustworthy market research process and our high level of collaboration. 

These services and capabilities include:

Market researchers are pros at distilling data into conclusions that hopefully better inform their clients’ business decisions. Yet rarely does the industry hold up the same mirror to itself and how its practices are meeting its own changing future.

A new “Market Research Squared” report — market research about market researchers — in a bellwether sector does just that. Its results suggest conventional wisdom about a key market research community — and perhaps, the entire profession — is either wrong, or changing.

Market research clients and suppliers have what seems to be a long-standing relationship where each wishes the other would just be nicer, faster, and more realistic. There often seems to be tension between the two sides when it comes to schedules, deliverables, decisions, and even resource capacity. This tension ends up manifesting itself in internal discussions on the client side, “I have no idea why it’s taking them so long to get me my data,” and on the supplier side, “They’re being so unrealistic with their schedule!”

Over the past few decades, restaurant and retail chains have struggled to easily collect voice of the customer (VOC) data — starting way back with the paper comment cards that customers would fill out, to the automated phone surveys in which customers talk to a boring robot asking questions over a 10-minute stretch.

The media has covered voter perceptions of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s presidential acceptance speeches to great length. Some have suggested that voters perceive the overall tone of the RNC, and specifically Trump’s acceptance speech, to be one of doom and gloom, and the tone of the DNC and Clinton’s speech to be one of hope and forward movement.

But is that true? To understand the nomination speeches, Beall Research analyzed them using a proprietary digital listening tool. We typically use this tool to reveal emotions, psychological processes, and cognitive processes for consumer brands, products, and services. We were curious what our tool would reveal about Trump and Clinton’s acceptance speeches.

In our data-driven age, are you searching for ways to present your story in a concise way? With more quantitative or qualitative data than ever, the ability to visualize your insights effectively is a critical skill.

We’re here to help you summarize and display information in a clear, understandable format. When presenting data analyses, you have the choice of bar and pie charts, line graphs, and frequency distribution tables, just to name a few. The table below explains these three types of data presentation styles and includes some tips to help you make the most of each format.