Are you facing growing pressure to provide immediate answers, to do more with less, and to uncover insights at a much faster pace? You’re not alone.
We recently conducted self-funded research to gain a deeper understanding of the pain points our clients are experiencing. They told us that smart technologies, automated learning, and artificial intelligence are transforming the way research is done. They also see that evolving methods, tools, and data overload are changing the dynamics of research, and they are feeling the strain.
We looked at the top five pressure insights from our client survey and used them to develop our Fast-Moving Insights suite, a set of human-centered solutions that bring speed, clarity, and empathy to the research process. It combines our Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) sprints, real-time insights work, and Empathy Excursions to deliver actionable intelligence quickly and effectively.
Top 5 Pressures
1. The Need for Speed and Agility
Transformative times require faster, actionable intelligence that complements the data. Executives demand immediate answers, research cycles that used to take months are now often required in weeks, and the sprint is quickly becoming the norm over historically longer, more in-depth innovation and research processes.
The need for speed makes it challenging for market researchers to uncover and translate insights into business strategies that their organizations can implement with speed.
Approaches like JTBD sprints get teams focused quickly on what consumers are trying to achieve so teams can successfully move forward with activation, even on a compressed timeline.
Explore our Fast-Moving Insights suite to learn more about ways you can quickly gain clear thinking during these transformative times.
2. Resourcing and Organizational Strain
Insights professionals across categories face growing pressure to do more with less. Research budgets are flat or declining. Insights teams are leaner, and often with fewer senior voices, or they face integration into functional teams or agency partners. Responsibilities beyond research are added, including IT/technology, method development, and business development. These changes make it difficult to onboard new hires or gain alignment about consumer needs from leadership or cross-functional teams…and, this constant change creates burnout.
For a quick way to help executives get to know actual consumers and to onboard new or shuffled teams quickly, Radius offers Immersion and Empathy Excursions.
These aren’t just “feel good events” for teams, they provide training on empathy, connections with consumers at home or in the community for real-life conversations and/or shop-along experiences, and a strategic debrief to quickly align teams on insights based on shared experiences.
During these transformative times when technological advances often get priority, Empathy Excursions ensure the human perspective is understood, and provide clear thinking and focus in strategic planning sessions.
3. Evolving Methods and Tools
Technology is advancing insights, tools and techniques rapidly. Uncertainty around new methods combined with the need to validate and prove ROI for them is an increasing pressure. Declining confidence in respondent quality, bots, and non-validated survey tools undermine quality survey research (read more about our approach to survey quality). Yet, in these ‘early’ days of the AI transformation, there is a lack of best practices for balancing AI with human expertise and human strategic thinking.
Clarity comes when human-centered insights and artificial intelligence combine synergistically. Tools and techniques that integrate human thinking with advanced technologies ensure strategy is sound and rooted in human insight.
Our Fast-Moving Insights suite includes tools like Real-Time Concept Optimization along with the ability to combine the best of artificial and human intelligence. We are now offering several ways to help your team get immediate answers, to do more with less, and to uncover insights that enable faster action.
Gain insights overnight or within a few weeks. We will curate a mix of tools and techniques that deliver:
- Quick reactions to concepts, packages, or advertising ideas
- Hypothesis gut checks
- Validation for concepts coming out of ideation
- Real-time shopper experiences
- Crowdsourced ideas
- Video stories for customer sell-in of new products, services, or campaigns
4. Data Overload
AI and smart technology advances may help, but all too often they generate disparate data streams and projects to manage. There is limited capacity to synthesize and apply existing data, and there’s already a wealth of that!
Radius has new, secure ways to ask fresh questions of your own existing data. Great for new or shuffled teams, as well as for multi-brand, multi-region, or global companies who want to look across years of research, different brands or regions to leverage what they already know to make their future spending more efficient and targeted.
What questions would you ask your data if you could?
5. Shifting Stakeholder Dynamics
Stakeholder realities have also shifted in recent years. Historically, insights teams and departments held budgets and leadership seats at the strategic level. In recent times, other stakeholders outside of research often hold more influence over funding and priorities. Researchers find themselves doing more tactical grunt work and less strategic leadership. The effect can cause an organization to move away from customer-centricity in decision-making.
Even with these shifting stakeholder dynamics, market researchers are in a powerful position to transform insights into business strategy, deliver data-driven stories and drive ROI faster than ever before. But they need trusted partners who are actively advancing research tools and techniques to do it in collaboration with them.
Join Radius at TMRE 2025 to be at the forefront of the next evolution in insights, skillsets, research methods, and consumer trends.
Contact us to learn more about our Fast-Moving Insights suite.
