Will Social Media Replace Surveys as a Research Tool?

The top research executive of likely the world’s biggest research buyer expects surveys to dramatically decline in importance by 2020 and sees the rise of social media as a big reason why.

Joan Lewis, global consumer and market knowledge officer of Procter & Gamble Co., with its $350 million in annual market-research outlays, made the statements during and after a panel discussion on “How Market Research Must Change” at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Re:Think 2011 conference in New York.

The industry should get away from “believing a method, particularly survey research, will be the solution to anything,” she said. “We need to be methodology agnostic.”

Social-media listening isn’t only replacing some survey research but also making it harder to do by changing consumer behavior and expectations, Ms. Lewis said in an interview after the panel.

“The more people see two-way engagement and being able to interact with people all over the world, I think the less they want to be involved in structured research,” she said. “If I have something to say to that company now, there are lots of ways to say it.”

Researchers focus too much on process, details of validation and treating methods “like ideologies,” she said.

“We are all brought into the research industry with the almost dogmatic belief that representation is everything,” Ms. Lewis said, noting that she doesn’t discount the importance of having samples representative of a population for some research.

“But we need to get away from the notion that being representative of something is the only way to learn,” she said. “I still hear people say, ‘That social-media thing, that’s not really going to pan out.’ We will learn enormously whether [social-media samples are] representative or not.”

She said P&G will continue to do survey research for years, even though she expects it to become less important.

“When we’re doing it, we need to do it well,” she said. “It’s really been easy for people to take the idea that the world is changing as an excuse to do really poor work. And there’s no excuse.”

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Source: AdAge