In a recent post on the GreenBook Blog, Tony Cosentino highlights the “quote of the conference” from last week’s TMRTE (The Market Research Technology Event), made by one of the presenters during Google’s demo of its new market research software offering. Cosentino related, “after a few minutes [the presenter] brought up the prompt to write the actual question. He said with all seriousness (and I’m sure without intention), ‘This is where all of your expertise is put to the test. This is where you write the question.’ I couldn’t help but chuckle and think that is how the technology industry perceives the market research industry – a bunch of question writers.”
This perception is probably all too prevalent — yet it’s missing a very important aspect of our expertise: analysis. We can take it a step further, and make the case that market researchers were the original data scientists, practitioners of that discipline blending statistics, applied mathematics, and computer science to solve complex business problems.
