Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

I got an email today from Peanut Labs about an interesting story in Research Magazine. Forrester recently wrote a report about the panel quality issue and is very optimistic about two products that will machine fingerprint survey takers.

Technically this will eliminate anonymity and it should be possible to know how many times someone takes a survey, how many surveys they take per month, and even how many panels they belong to.

My first question is what took so long. This technology isn’t so new, upon request we’ve been able to capture and even block competitors IP’s for years now in survey research, but its nice to see someone finally leverage this to try to solve the sample quality issue.

Now its all up to the customers/end clients. Will they actually request this new tool to be used? If they do then panel/sample prices should go up tremendously as professional survey takers cease to exist. Will end clients be willing to do this??? My guess is probably not (if their current lack of interest in panel choice is any indicator).

Secondly, with professional respondents gone, who will take the 45 minute surveys some researchers like to field? First of all let me say I think anyone who tries to field a 45 minute survey, only to reduce the data later with factor analysis, should be ashamed to call themselves a researcher. If you know what you are doing you should be able to design a good 15 minute segmentation survey. However, some consultants and end clients seem to think volume of data is more impressive than quality of data. This may be one of the best possible outcomes from this new technology, that no one will ever again be able to field a 45+ minute survey.

Well sounds like it will be in the hands of the clients to decide. It would be nice to know the data is perfectly clean, I’m not holding my breath though.

-Tom

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