Elon Musk is the richest man in the world – at age 49, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is a multi-billionaire many times over. He does what he wants. He says what he thinks. He has disrupted the status quo again and again with his relentless innovation and refusal to follow the tried-and-true path of established U.S. corporations. The guy who quit Stanford after one day is doing things his way – and it’s not about the money. It’s about creating something new; creating real value.

It’s been a challenging few years, to say the least. As we look ahead to the coming years, we wanted to uncover the biggest challenges currently facing market researchers. So we did what we do best: designed and conducted a study of 145 insights pros to learn more about the difficulties they’re facing – and then provide ways to address them. Here’s what we learned.

Market research has changed tremendously over the past few years. Advances in technology are making it faster and easier for research teams to conduct both qualitative and quantitative research in-house. What used to take weeks and a specialized team of experts can now be done with a few clicks of a mouse.

Today’s leading organizations are increasingly employing agile approaches to developing new marketing programs, product or service innovations and customer experiences. By leveraging agile market research methods, your organization is able to simultaneously design, test and build new solutions before going to market. This approach speeds time to market, while still ensuring your go-to-market strategy fits with consumers’ changing lifestyles, situations and needs.

In 2020, the global pandemic upended the way people interacted with each other, whether in business, shopping or day-to-day experiences. Products or services that seemed to be following a clear trajectory found it was no longer the case due to unpredictable consumer behavior. Everything research touched in 2020 changed due to COVID-19.

Our company’s heritage is quick qualitative studies we call Sprints, which let you set up a research community, recruit participants overnight and engage participants over hours or days with instant reporting.