These terms of art get thrown around a lot in conversations I am having with customers and partners. But it seems like we are rarely talking about the same thing.
So, I thought I would try to clear up some of the overlap and set a few rules for how to know what you are really ask for from your software or Consumer Insights team.
Let’s start with what each of these things will do for you.
When people talk about market research, they are really talking about the hard data that is collected through surveys (quantitative) or focus groups (qualitative). This could be raw data or some boiled down analysis of the data that may reveal some truth about your customers if you are good at reading spreadsheets and graphs. Think of this as the formula, not the answer.
Many of us will call Market Research “Consumer Insights” because it sounds waaaay more sophisticated. In fact, they are different things all together. Consumer Insights will often use Market Research to extract a story or deeper conclusion about the state of your audience. Think of it as the answer, not the formula.
Of the three, this is my favorite. Content Prediction is all about being able to tell the future about subjective content based on objective data. This could be a single metric, or a metric presented second-by-second for something like video. The reason Content Prediction is so powerful is that it takes the hard data of Market Research and the storytelling of Consumer Insights to create a proven prediction of how the market will respond to the subject of your test.