You’ve got a ground-breaking innovation with potential to disrupt the market — but you need the competitive intelligence, market awareness and strategic insights that will help make your innovation thrive. You need an ace up your sleeve: market research. But how do you know which type of research is the most advantageous for your business?
With the shared goal of analyzing market trends and consumer behavior to produce essential industry insights, the two most widely-used forms of market research are syndicated research and custom research — and each has its advantages. Which is best for your company?
Syndication vs. customization: what’s the difference?
Syndicated market studies are created and sold by marketing research firms for widespread use by multiple companies. Many businesses in a similar sector can purchase the same generic study and apply its broad, overarching data points to their business strategy.
Custom market research, however, is created specifically for one company, making the data proprietary and unique to their specific product or service. With this exclusive access, companies gain distinct market insights into their company’s particular innovation — enabling unique brand awareness, personal access to hard-to-reach industry leaders and more accurate decision-making.
The reusability of syndicated research makes it a cheaper alternative to custom research, but its broad, imprecise assessments may not deliver the clarity, competitive exclusivity or timeliness that your innovation requires (read: deserves).
The advantages of investing in custom research are clear. While new and emerging companies used to struggle to afford custom data, especially to reach an international audience, market research is evolving — and researchers are utilizing new, immensely powerful technologies that make custom data faster, cheaper and more accessible for all.
How automation is disrupting custom research: and lowering its cost
In custom market research, there are typically three major cost factors across most types of marketing firms: time, resources utilized and research quality.
The emergence of automation creates the ability to streamline these processes in record time with shocking precision — making custom research both more affordable and insightful than it’s ever been.
Less time not only saves money, but it also offers a more accurate portrayal of your market right now versus how it may look months down the road — allowing vital business decisions to be made in real time.
Does automation kill research quality?
Is automation sacrificing value? Quite the contrary. Robust algorithms can easily target, identify and contact the most relevant and influential leaders in your market — whether they live down the street or across the ocean. The ability to instantly contact large numbers of targeted industry leaders at once, regardless of their geographic location, ensures a higher number of pertinent responses.
In a step ahead of general feedback, custom automation enables comprehensive, qualitative insights to be quickly gathered and presented in a templated report — offering unique perceptions into your specific innovation. This also enables key decision makers to show interest in your specific business, creating valuable opportunities for professional connections and potential leads.
Automation is only successful, however, if coupled with expert human intelligence — at UMI, all automated data is approved by a marketing specialist to ensure accuracy and relevancy.
Is automation the death of syndicated research?
Does the era of custom automation mean it’s time to bury syndicated market research in a grave of market irrelevance? Not necessarily. Like custom research, syndicated research is also adapting and beginning to reap the benefits of digital automation.
Automation enables large firms to create immense volumes of syndicated data for certain industries, making it quicker and easier to observe, create and promote market research and global trends in less time.
Utilizing general feedback from syndicated market research will save your company money, but it omits the reliability, precision and actionable insights offered from custom research. While some businesses may not need such tailored data, those in the field of innovation — an increasingly strategic industry in today’s market — require the speed and precision of custom insights because their success depends on reaching a specific market at the perfect time.
Because of its newfound affordability, custom automated research is becoming a popular option for innovation companies worldwide. Could your brand benefit from its unparalleled insights?
