Consumer insights in the age of acceleration
Or why we've got to do things faster than we did before.
When I was at college in the 1990s, we would line up to use one of the two payphones if we wanted to call home. Ten years later, the necessity of waiting had disappeared, and everyone had mobile phones.
In the 2020s, if we want to know something, we Google it or ask ChatGPT. If we want to talk to someone, we message them on our preferred platform.
Most workplaces have followed suit: If we want to ask a colleague’s opinion, we drop them a slack. If we want to see the latest sales pipeline, we log into Hubspot. If we want to get lunch in for our team, we go to our favorite delivery app.
We’ve switched from a world that operates on the necessity of waiting to one where patience is a vice, and those who have information at their fingertips move faster and get ahead of their competitors.
We live in the age of acceleration, where everything is happening faster than before. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, but I have noticed that building technology is becoming ten times easier every three years.
The innovations driven by the mass availability of data sets, open-source software, and cloud platforms mean that innovations can be churned out faster than incumbents can keep.
But the research industry is struggling to keep up. Consider the pace of advertising effectiveness and measurement:
Total TV advertising ratings come out over a week after the spot aired
Effectiveness measurement takes weeks or months to produce reports
It takes weeks to get results from a copy test
Brand tracking studies report months after the data was first collected
This damages the efficacy of our data compared to other datasets. Digital impression data is available in real-time. Digital attribution can be used to optimize inventory on a next-day basis.
We might all be convinced that survey data is crucial to understanding consumer attitudes and opinions. Still, if it’s coming in much later than other proxy datasets, we’ll find that marketers will move away from survey data to faster but less complete signals.
In the age of acceleration, speed is always of the essence. If you can optimize your campaign daily, what place does monthly reporting have in your data mix?
As an industry, we must switch from our old-school workflows and adopt approaches that provide insights in hours, not weeks. This will require an overhaul of every part of the process, but we must keep up with the pace that the age of acceleration demands