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The Market Researcher – Annie Pettit
Annie Pettit will argue that the market researcher has not changed one iota. She defines a market researcher as one who strives to understand consumers and markets. There’s nothing to do with a questionnaire, big data, neuroscience or technique; it’s the end purpose.
In that sense, in traditional research, we’ve normally used focus groups and questionnaires. Just because researchers are not using these techniques does not mean they are not market researchers. We’re all in this game together whether we call ourselves market researchers or we don’t quite see ourselves as researchers.
“I am a big fan of letter of the law over the actual law.” Annie Pettit on the new GDPR guidelines
As researchers, we already know the process of working with human data and can utilize the new technology at an advantage to do really great things with the new techniques.
The New Data Sets
Annie sees the biggest chunk of people willing to say they want to use the new data and try new stuff. But those same people are still clinging to tried and true, valid and reliable data. The actual application is much lower than what people say they want to do but gradually the new techniques are being used more.
“It’s sort of on the way to mind-reading…It would be amazing if this was a tool used with consent” – Annie Pettit on new MIT research
Right now it appears to be mostly curiosity from the client side. They want to see what we can do with this stuff.
Social Media Data
Working in the social media industry, put Annie on the cutting edge of many things. Many of the conversations she had in the early days were how social media research is actually market research. She’d explain how it uses sampling and box scores how it’s quantitative and even so far as privacy and ethics related to these types of data.
For people in social media who hadn’t considered sampling or privacy ramifications, all of these conversations were new. They were primarily focused on the technique and not on the people underlying the data.
To hear what Annie Pettit says next about data quality, reading minds, social media and consent, download and listen to the entire episode!
Links from the show and connect with Annie Pettit:
Annie’s Love Stats website
Annie on LinkedIn
Annie on Twitter
The Listen Lady
7 Strategies and 10 Tactics to Become a Thought Leader
People Aren’t Robots: A practical guide to the psychology and technique of questionnaire design
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Annie Pettit Bio:
Annie Pettit, Ph.D., FMRIA is a freelance research methodologist who specializes in survey design and analysis, data quality, and innovative methods. Starting out as a Certified Industrial Organizational Psychologist, her work has included psychometric test development within the Ontario government and bisthe Chief Research Officer of a social media research company. Annie is now an invited speaker at conferences around the world and frequent author of refereed and industry articles. She won a 2015 Ginny Valentine Award, 2014 ESOMAR Excellence Award for the Best Paper, 2014 MRIA Award of Outstanding Merit, 2013 ESOMAR Best Methodological Paper, and the 2011 AMA David K. Hardin Award. Annie blogs at LoveStats, tweets at @LoveStats and is the author of The Listen Lady, a novel about social media research,People Aren’t Robots, a questionnaire design book, and7 Strategies and 10 Tactics to Become a Thought Leader. She can be reached at anniepettit@gmail.com.
