58|Retail News|May 2020|www.retailnews.ie
Market Research
What future for retail market research? What is the future for market research in a post-pandemic world? asks Paul Latimer of market research consultants, Latimer Appleby. MARKET research is a vitally important discipline that is still pivotal to the way retail business is done. But even before Covid-19, the question was what is the future of research and is it heading for an existential crisis? But with Coronavirus still with us, we consider its future now. Everyone knows a bit about marketing; in fact, I’d go so far as to say a lot of us see ourselves as marketing experts, even those of us who don’t work in the industry. The same might be said increasingly for market research. How things have changed over the years! I can recall back in the 1980s, if you went to a restaurant, you might be asked how your meal was at some point, perhaps halfway through your main course, and again when you got the bill. But that was about it. And, it was really more about pleasantries than trying to gain real insights.
But nowadays (i.e. pre Covid-19) few of us will not have come across the ‘tell us what you think’ kind of feedback research. In fact, I’m not sure which shops didn’t already ask for this sort of feedback, so what is driving this? Incidentally, ‘tell us what you think’ surveys are not, in the strictest sense, market research i.e. they don’t hold up scientifically, they can’t be used to provide accurate results as there is no control over who replies. For example, you could for instance finish up with all male respondents between the ages of 26 and 32, which may not be your key
Analysing market research data can be key to maximising profitability and identifying which categories and brands are performing well, and more importantly, which are underperforming.
target market. In addition, the questions are often not formed or written in any scientific way, in that they are usually very simplistic. The evolution of research In the distant past, shopkeepers knew their customers. They knew them by name and they knew their needs, wants and habits. It meant that the smart retailer was able to tailor his or her product or service to each customer. With the growth of the mass market in the 20th century, it became increasingly difficult for brand owners, or service providers, to get the sort of information they wanted back from their customers, so market research came into its own. By the early 21st century, as well as using market research, it was common to use service measurement companies to assess service delivery in places like shops, pubs and restaurants. These used so called ‘mystery shoppers’. But the cost of running these programmes was not cheap, and questions were raised by clients about ‘who’ were these mystery shoppers, i.e. were they real consumers or were they actually professional shoppers? In short, they asked if the results were valid. They wanted feedback from real people, real customers, and so the age of the actual consumer giving feedback took off.
