The Landmark Blog

Party Line Social Media Multi-Modal Co-Creation Market Research

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

 delicious  

  

Market research products and methods of collection fall in and out of favor.  Those of us in the market research industry that are constantly trying to stay ahead of the market research technology curve spend significant amounts of time tracking where the next trend is headed.  As a close "watcher" of these trends, and as a NGMR Top Blog, we feel a moral and ethical responsibility to notify the readers about the next market research trend we see coming.  

We all know that many methods of collecting market research data have renaissances.  Market Research started as a face-to-face or door-to-door interviewing process.  It evolved into mall research and then fell out of favor for a while.  In the last couple of years, in-person market research has seen a staggering resurgence in the form of ethnography and online interviews completed on mobile devices using in-person interviewing techniques.  Face-to-face operations are really gaining their second wind and seeing great success.

Along those lines, it's important that we announce the next multi-modal research resurgence.  Announcing...Drum Roll Please...The Party Line Telephone Social Media Research Multi-Modal Co-Creation Data Gathering Methodology (PLTSMRMMCCDGM for short).  

Is PLTSMRMMCCDGM a party?  Is PLTSMRMMCCDGM a telephone line?  Is PLTSMRMMCCDGM social media research? Yes & Yes & Yes?  Is PLTSMRMMCCDGM actual research, what about a data gathering technique?  The answer is also a resounding YES!

The old regime of market researchers, the good ol' boy market research network, has decided that enough is enough and have started looking to the future in an attempt to compete.  They've realized that it's time to blend these newfangled market research techniques with an opportunity they missed a long time ago, the telephone party line.  Party lines are "single telephone circuits connecting two or more telephone subscribers with the exchange" and allow for multiple people on one telephone call simultaneously, without the need for a conference call or a bridge line.  They've come to the conclusion that it's time to merge party lines with this new collaborative method of co-creation and social media...and if you're not on board, you'd better watch out.  Here's how it will be executed:

• A telephone interviewer will call a household and recruit a respondent to participate in an equipment installation and a longitudinal study used to measure products and services, television viewing, customer satisfaction, advertising awareness, brand messaging and recognition, legal matters, CPG, online newspapers, regular ol' newspapers, usability testing, healthcare experiences, healthcare product development, whether your doctor is a jerk, whether your neighbor is a jerk, whether the garbage collector is timely on your garbage pickup, whether you are a democrat, whether you recycle and are "green enough", whether you believe your local political candidate is a pot smoking junky, etc.
• Once recruited, the participant will be asked to then recruit all of his/her friends and neighbors to eliminate their current landline and replace it with a new and improved party line (it is a party...but will certainly be the death of the landline telephone), thus establishing a MRPLC (Market Research Party Line Community).
• A technician will go to the neighborhood, eliminate all of the fiber telecommunication lines, replace them with party line telephone technology, and while onsite will set each household up with PL Phones (IP is so old-school) .
• On completion, the telephone interviewer will dial the party line and conduct a series of open-ended questions that will be recorded for text analytic purposes.  All participants will speak at once or be encouraged to talk as much and as loud as they can.  They'll feed off each other, be as opinionated as possible, argue, fight, laugh, cry, hurt each other's feelings, forgive, forget, contribute content, and co-create.  The entire recorded conversation will be converted to unstructured written text using the speech-to-text technology promoted and developed specifically for market research purposes by "good ol' boy" market research companies all belonging to CASRO.
• The researcher will use this text analytic software and social media research practices to analyze the PLTSMRMMCCDGM data, report on the sentiment, produce 1400 word clouds, use insights to tell a story that will be converted to a gaming application for mobile devices allowing them to analyze more data through gaming research theory.  And, if possible apply Net Promoter Score, conjoint analysis, and discrete choice modeling along the way.
• At which time, the entire thing will be placed on a dashboard that will be updated real-time, and will also include video streaming capabilities that have been built in to the PL Phones, along with GPS, for ongoing observation of the entire group.  All exportable to Power Point.
• The entire process will be repeated any time a project is sold, and the respondents will be happy to participate because they can talk to each other for free on their PL Phones without charging minutes to their cell phones and without having to pay fees to a local telephone company.

That's the way I see it...now prepare as you will...and by the way...have an awesome April Fool's Day!