Explore the Challenges of Data Collection

Consumer and market data provides valuable insights to decide the strategic direction of your business. However, innovation in the tech industry has resulted in most data being collected online, calling into question its authenticity and validity. As a marketer, you need to find new ways to validate secondary data to ensure it can inform high-level decision-making.

Learn how businesses can ensure the integrity of their data with Nick Coates, guest lecturer on the Market Research, Consumer Insights, and Competitor Analysis online short course from the University of Cape Town.

Transcript

I think some of the challenges we have are trying to keep ahead of the industry or at the same speed. And when I talk about the industry, I mean the tech industry and the way that people communicate. So we need to intersect those conversations. We need to be using platforms that consumers more readily use.

Some of the challenges around innovation, and this always comes up as you’re starting to move quite aggressively forward from a data collection perspective, is issues about reliability – issues about validity of the data that you’re collecting – because you’re now doing it through, in a lot of cases, in an online way – you don’t necessarily see the consumer in-person. So it’s about making sure that the integrity of what you’re doing remains true. We all know about issues around fake news, fake accounts… you need to be certain as to who you are actually talking to and finding a way to actually validate the data that you’re truly collecting.

In a lot of ways, the technology leads our innovation, and the way that people now engage with technology and the way that they consume technology as well as products, and the way that they interact is now forcing us as an industry to move forwards. So we’re kind of almost following, not necessarily innovating as much, purely from a data collection perspective. But it’s really about how can we make sure that the tools we have, the information that we’re collecting remains relevant, remains valid, and remains truthful to what we’re trying to understand.

The traditional model of market research was: the value lay in the data. Just the ability to be able to connect information had value, had intrinsic value, because no one knew anything. The cost of data and collecting that data was your primary driver in the industry. Now, with the advent of technology and the way that we’re moving with technology, we are now able to get it in far more cheaper ways through online platforms. You can do research in Zambia from an apartment in Moscow, for example, you don’t have to physically be there. This is fundamentally changing the nature of our business. We’re overwhelmed by the volume of data, because we have so many platforms and so many sources for us to be able to get data.

We can get primary data from the actual collection of the information from an individual. And we have huge volumes of secondary data, be it either social data or be it consumer data that our clients readily collect. The market research industry has had to reinvent itself in a lot of ways. Its value is not in its ability to be able to collect data, its value is what it does with that data. And the impact that that data has on its client’s business.