Communications measurement guru Katie Paine asks in a recent post if it’s the end of the world as we know it for market research.

Katie writes:

“Since I started working in measurement and market research, we’ve essentially seen phone surveys come and go as viable sources of information, and my prediction is that we will see the demise of the email survey as an effective measurement tool within the next five years.”

She bases this prediction, in part, on an interesting post by Pat LaPointe at Marketing Measurement Today.

LaPointe’s contention, based on a speech by Ray Kurzweil at the Global Retail Marketing Association’s annual conference, is that:

“…market research may be operating towards the end of its current lifecycle. The tools, methods, and techniques we use today will not persist more than another 10 to 20 years. We will learn to move past recording and clustering rational thought, and past our voyeuristic tendencies to predict future behavior based on past actions…”

My view is that we are in the midst of a very rapid evolutionary change in market research and that this change will be a step change, not incremental. Market research as we know it today may not exist in ten years, but elements of the current era will persist. For example, the days of the long survey are now very short. We know even long surveys among online convenience samples are now tenuous at best. Will surveys cease to exist entirely? I don’t think so, but I do think they will look very different from today. They will be very short and are likely to be heavily open ended and therefore reliant on our ability to analyze text (which is improving very rapidly.). I have also contended that surveys will morph into “survulations” – video game silmulations used like surveys to better understand consumer behavior. This seems to make sense given the facility GenXers and younger have with gaming today. I also believe that the traditional tracking survey will slowly begin to meld with MROCs and that today’s “project director” will be tomorrow’s “community insights manager”. In time, MROCs combined with social media monitoring will yield realtime tracking data that will make the traditional quarterly trackers relatively quaint.

But, if some of the older forms of market research will be in decline, some will endure. I happen to believe that IDIs, ethnographies, shop-alongs and co-creative focus groups will persist and perhaps thrive. We have a basic human need for human contact, and at some level decisionmakers and researchers want to engage consumers at a very granular, eye to eye level.

Speaking of eyes, there are so many exciting technologies and approaches popping up that I believe we are entering a golden age of market research. The problem (if it is a problem) is, we might not call it market research, the people doing it might not think of themselves as market researchers, and the current collection of market researchers will be forced to adjust. So, for example, (and getting back to eyes) my firm has done quite a bit of eye tracking work in order to test static advertising. The insights generated were a giant leap ahead of traditional IDI-driven ad testing. Measuring pupil dilation and emotional response will be the next step for eye tracking.

But the innovation goes much further than eye tracking. As LaPointe notes, there is fMRI, but I believe predictive markets (to take just one example) will enjoy a solid position in the MR industry of the future.

So yes, all those survey design classes and books may become a bit antiquated when no one wants to be run through a 30 minute, grid-heavy, online survey, but elements of the industry will persist while new approaches based on passive listening, behavior modeling, co-creation, and play will bloom.

As with most things in life, the research industry can resist change or it can embrace it. I saw plenty of both at an MR conference in Las Vegas last year, but the good news is that the majority seemed excited about the future. That’s important, because that’s the place where most Americans (their consumers and research participants) live.