MarketTools Blog

A comic strip I saw recently had a line that went something like “Any time my boss tells me about a trend, it’s probably too late.”  That’s not a putdown of bosses or management, but it does speak to the incredible buzz currently taking place around social media and the research opportunity to listen to “real people”.

We are now seeing all kinds of tools in the marketplace that allow us to make sense out of the gazillion conversations taking place in the social media sphere.  Many of these tools work and are wondrous to behold.

But let’s take a step back and ask ourselves: what can we expect to ascertain about these folks who are sharing their lives with us on a daily/hourly basis?  I go back to something I was taught years ago when I started to think it was possible to understand the collective human experience.  I was taught that there are two kinds of research:

• Divergent research – this is a learning phase where it’s our job to get info / attitudes / behavior / unarticulated needs and help generate hypotheses on how the world works.
• Convergent research – this is an evaluative phase where the hypotheses we generate are tested out to help decisionmakers hone in on real marketplace practice. 

Importantly, the above two phases were both part and parcel of the world of market research, and the practitioner had to decide when and where to use the tools in the toolkit associated with each phase.

In the world of divergent research, we don’t need to be right or accurate.  We can take off on flights of fancy, follow our intuition and take a chance.  But with convergent research, we need to make sure we are accurate and we are recommending optimal decisions to our clients.

In this context, it becomes apparent that the world of social media can be indicative to help us come up with interesting hypotheses when we are in the divergent phase.  But we need to be thoughtful and remember that we are trying to be predictive when we do convergent research.

MarketTools has research tools for both the divergent and convergent research scenarios.  But more importantly, we are there to make sure that these tools are used appropriately based on what the client’s goals and objectives are.  It’s really fashionable to say we are using social media to make important decisions.   But it may not be the right tool – or the only tool – for the job at hand.

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