It’s never a good thing to fall behind, in the short term being 15 minutes behind can make you late for meetings or not complete something the day you had hoped to. In the long term if you never change your product eventually your consumers are going to tire of it. As a company, PortMA strives to make sure our reports are always new and refreshing, whether by looking at new segments of the population or by conducting outside research to compare to with what we have already collected. On the other end of the spectrum though, innovation within surveys themselves can be difficult, questions must be carefully devised so as to not violate best practices, and must remain simple enough that consumers can be assumed to have the same understanding of the question.
In order to address this, I attended a webinar by Research for Good on innovation in research. One aspect of this presentation that particularly intrigued me was a presentation on Bio-metric feedback. The company focused on examining facial expressions in consumers viewing advertising. While this didn’t have an immediate impact for experiential marketing, it got me thinking about how we get consumer feedback in general.
With the way technology is moving right now, particularly the widespread use of smart phones, the potential to get immediate feedback from a multitude of consumers is becoming a real possibility. Imagine tracking how long consumers were at your event and where on the footprint they were via their phones GPS, and then automatically sending them a survey custom tailored based on what they did. While complex, this could offer a whole new level of insight never seen before in marketing research.
Of course, it could be as simple as having the ability for consumers to text feedback for the potential to win a prize. What matters is the speed and volume offered to us by mobile surveys when compared with traditional methods.
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