Spring Studies 2017
Spring Studies At the very most, we will note the arrival of virtual reality headsets on several stands, but we will no doubt have to wait until consumers have really adopted them in everyday life before we can include them in our methodologies without any risk of bias.
Perhaps the date - three days before the 1er round of the presidential elections - was not one to be over-optimistic, with everyone commenting on the latest polls and waiting for the results on the following Sunday to confirm the quality of the work of the French pollsters.
If we take a longer view of the research market, we have to recognise the impact of the Internet on our practices, in terms of both quantity and quality.
In the field of quantitative fieldwork, the switch from the telephone to the web has been rapid for obvious reasons of cost, but not only that: not only is the reliability of the approach beyond doubt, but it also allows the injection of visual or audio stimuli.
There remains one uncertainty for the years to come: will the development of bots and AI mark the return of the telephone - at ultra-competitive prices, of course? Watch closely.
But it is in the field of qualitative methodologies that the most progress has been made by far, because they enable new types of relationship to be established with consumers.
1era non-intrusive listening, also known as Web listening: the social Web allows access to all kinds of conversations - with strict respect for privacy: there is no question of 'spying' on private exchanges.
2th In this approach, the use of collective intelligence - crowdsourcing - from bulletin boards limited in time to wider communities of customers, experts, etc., the advantage being that they are located in the physical and temporal space of the consumer.
Web listening and crowdsourcing obviously change the position of the consumer in relation to the institute, but they also change the position of the researcher in relation to the institute: they allow iterative approaches and force us to place the citizen in a wider context.
This certainly explains the rise of other approaches that are not digital, but which are based on similar foundations: design thinking, which is essentially based on iteration, and ethnology, which looks at individuals from a 360° perspective.
All these approaches require very close relations between advertisers and institutes, both in terms of defining objectives and monitoring work: this is why we have created Build & Share to facilitate these exchanges, and which we presented at the last Printemps des Études.
