How the research industry needs to change
Lyndall Spooner takes a hard look at the research industry and its clients, and finds that many businesses are less interested in “why” and the average consumer just doesn’t exist anymore. That means it’s time to change.
Lyndall Spooner is the founder and CEO of research agency 5D
The research industry is at a turning point. Not because it’s failing, but because the world around it has transformed and what many clients want has shifted, but too many of the industry’s practices haven’t changed.
There is a growing divide between how many research companies operate and how businesses use research. In a world going through significant cultural, technological and psychological change, too many researchers are reluctant to change “their craft”. But businesses want faster and cheaper answers, often without the depth of understanding.
Researchers are obsessed with finding out the “why” that drives behaviour, but many businesses are less interested in understanding the “why” today than in the past. In a lot of cases, insights have been distilled down to performance metrics and dashboards, and companies are only interested in meeting their KPIs, without really understanding what the metrics are actually measuring. At the same time, and despite decades of research practice proving that you can’t always ask people direct questions, a lot of research is being reduced to one question and the answers taken as valid.
Now, for the first time in decades, the research industry has permission to question everything. AI is transforming workflows, cultural shifts are rewriting consumer behaviour, and traditional research models are failing to explain what we’re seeing. Clinging to established practices is, in many cases, riskier than experimenting with new ones.
