What’s your plan for 2021?
Pick up the pieces and try to somehow recover from 2020? Dive full steam ahead into anything and everything that comes your way in 2021? The best plan of action is probably a bit of both.
Recovering from 2020 will include understanding why some parts of your business were more impacted than others. Was your consumer understanding grounded in outdated data and theory? Was your business overly focused on where consumers and customers were at that moment in time? Were you looking ahead to 2021 instead of 2025?
Diving full steam ahead will include recognizing that the future arrived far quicker than our 2019 plans said they would. We knew e-commerce was going to pick up but maybe we hadn’t invested as much as we should have as soon as we should have. In fact, many trends that picked up last year have been trends for years. We were wise enough to anticipate them but we were planning for them in 2025 not in 2020.
Research is a great leveler. When brand managers have access to insights from questionnaires, individual interviews, focus groups, telephone interviews, intercepts, and shelf-tests to know what their clients, customers, and consumers have been doing and wanting, they’re better prepared to handle a new day. Or a new year.
Similarly, when you as a researcher have a full understanding of research methodologies that give you access to necessary insights, you can make sure your toolbox also includes eye tracking, facial coding, dashboards, heatmaps, and eye-tracking. Diving full steam ahead into 2021 (and 2025) means keeping a toolbox that is forever overflowing with options.
It is time for a new day. And you get to choose what’s in it.
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You might like to read these:
- Conducting research is easy… if you understand hundreds of cognitive biases!
- Create more inclusive data collection tools with these tips!
- How to choose the right degree of external validity for your product shelf-test
- How To Design an Effective Mystery Shopper Process Flow
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