How market research and marketing analytics are complementing each other in today's digital world.

2.  Organisations have been leveraging Market research for
decades for formalizing their strategies on key business
questions or finding answers to problems. While
conducting any market research, more often than
not, we know what we want to know and reach out to
our customers to get answers to their questions. It could
be measuring customer loyalty and brand salience,
understanding consumer behaviour, segmentation,
product design/prototype testing, pricing, channel
checks etc.

3.  With the advent of digital and easy, any time access to
information, the entire construct of a typical consumer
journey has undergone a massive change. Not only
organizations are capturing a lot of information about
their consumers’ preferences, behaviour and attitude
through their ‘own channels’ but consumers are also
leaving their footprints at many other touchpoints
which can be leveraged by the firms. And Analytics play
a key role in this entire ecosystem where it looks this
unsolicited consumer data to power businesses with
relevant insights.

4.  Below are few synergies that Market Research and
Marketing Analytics bring together, and can turn out to
be differentiators for any organization.
1. Bringing diverse datasets together – market
research looks at mostly solicited data whereas data
analytics would include a wide array of unsolicited data.
Bring them together not only helps correlate finding
from one with another but also helps uncovering
deeper insights.

5. 2. Knowing what you want to know vs. not knowing
what you want to know – and the latter is where
analytics has huge play. As it looks for patterns in data
and gives ‘newer insights’ than knowing answers to
targeted questions through market research.

6. 3. Serves as feed to research design – a peek into
consumer behaviour through looking either at social
media data or transactional data can help generate
hypothesis that you would like to test through
traditional market research. Social media scans can give
insights to better design the discussion guides, chose
the right sample and research methods.

7. 4. Closing the loop by measuring business impact –
market research will mostly stop a either telling what
the consumers are saying or in some cases making
business recommendations. They never attempt to
measure the business impact created by action on those
recommendations, an area where analytics can support.

8. 5. Leveraging technology: Analytics brings with it a
huge component of technology which can be leveraged
by market research to make the insights generation
process faster and more accurate, and also look at
smarter ways of disseminating insights into the
organisation.

9. 6. Bringing in an element of predictability –
analytics brings in an element of predicting consumer
behaviour and allows you to plan for them proactively.
Market research and marketing analytics bring in their
own business value to any organization and need to be
leveraged together to get the maximum impact.