The Repercussions of Covid-19

How Market Research will Save Your Business

During any major market disruption, industry scrambles to pick up the pieces of yesterday’s broken plans and desperately searches for any way forward. As Royal Bank of Canada CEO Gordan Nixon said about moving forward during the financial collapse in 2008 “There was no light at the end of the tunnel”. In attempting to bring any sense of control to the situation, collecting and analyzing data is put to the forefront of strategic planning since all common market assumptions could be temporarily, or even permanently, made obsolete. One advantage we have today as compared to the financial crisis in 2008, is the ever-growing torrent of data surrounding everything we do. Yet, the question remains the same. How do we translate consumer data into real, statistically backed strategic decisions to maintain or regain the health of our business?

Market Research is the primary method businesses can use in the pursuit of attracting consumers by gaining critical insights into what is driving their changing behaviours.  Unlike database analytics that only take the past actions of the consumer into account and are devoid of any psychometric variables from which to draw its conclusions, research surveys can quickly and accurately gauge these intricacies in the context of unprecedented change. Questions that can be answered through surveys include: how/why consumers expect their behaviours to change, how these changes effect real purchasing actions, and what can be done by businesses to sway these actions in a way that favours their bottom line.

This is crucial, as one emerging trend that many have noticed during the crisis is the inability for people to make sense of the large amount of information being presented to them. Disagreements over fact and opinion have left us all with competing notions of what this pandemic means in terms of where we find reliable news, how we handle conflicting sources of information, and to what extent we incorporate this information into our daily lives. The ability to understand not only general market trends, but also those competing viewpoints is essential if any sense is to be made of the more chaotic elements emerging from these observed behaviours. In this case, the multivariate analysis and modelling that market researchers can provide their clients is extremely useful as it can incorporate valuable psychometric information garnered from surveys.

When the dust settles, few predict that things will immediately return to normal. Without a thorough examination of the attitudes and behaviours informing consumer decision making during the height of the pandemic itself, it will become much more difficult to understand how we will eventually return to a perceived normality. Which behaviours will revert to something approximating our current perception of past normality? In what way will this pandemic permanently alter our common assumptions? To accurately gauge these questions, it is crucial we use the full spectrum of statistically derived modelling techniques to garner a closer approximation to the collective forces pushing us forward.