Over the course of its history, marketing research has been able to face up to the two major challenges of integrating the contributions of university research and technological progress, and to continually enrich itself as a result.
In the early 1970s, under the impetus of Georges Péninou, the first applications of Roland Barthes' work on the semiotics of the image appeared in the field of advertising research; at the same time, the development of micro-computing enabled the widespread use of data processing such as factorial analysis and typology, which had previously been extremely complicated to implement.
At 21th In the 21st century, two new challenges have been added: societal change and the acceleration of time.
With the emergence of Web 2.0 in the early 2000s, followed by the Social Web, a new form of peer-to-peer communication emerged on the web - horizontal communication, in other words, as opposed to the traditional vertical communication of brands or the media, constituting a societal mutation.
Marketing research has drawn inspiration from this to create bulletin boards and other online discussion systems. But studying the spontaneous words of sociionauts, on forums, blogs and then social networks, has proved to be more complicated, as the profession is less at ease with data that is both unprompted and, above all, rather disorganised, and with uncontrolled profiles: Web listening is thus seeing the emergence of new operators.
For their part, new technologies provide marketing research with a range of solutions that allow new types of experimentation: connected objects can be used to supplement declarative data with non-intrusive behavioural monitoring; virtual reality gives access to on-the-spot feedback, while artificial intelligence will make it possible to tackle non-aggregated exogenous data... just as multivariate analysis made it possible 50 years ago to reduce the complexity of increasingly large files.
The real challenge for market research firms - and their institutes - is not so much their ability to integrate AI into their range of resources - both for processing their endogenous data and new exogenous data - as the speed at which this integration will be carried out: this is the very essence of the last challenge identified, that of time acceleration.
In fact, the real challenge for research institutes in the years to come - in the field of artificial intelligence, but not only - will not be to outpace start-ups, but to strike constructive deals with creative start-ups - although not necessarily familiar with marketing issues - in order to offer their clients innovative methodologies.
To the initial question : "Will marketing research be able to rise to the challenge of AI?The answer is: "Yes"... but by forging partnerships with those who know how to implement them.
