The Opportunities and Threats Facing Market Research – Sally Joubert

Post by Sally Joubert, founder and CEO of Luma, Australia.

The Biggest Threat

We become irrelevant. If we don’t attract, train and develop the business leaders and thinkers of the future we will become the “typing pool” of 2010s. Businesses have changed and new business models are evolving all the time. We know business decisions are made on the basis of anything from gut feel (or someone else’s “gut feel”) to highly complex models based on more data than some of us could ever dream of getting our hands on in an entire lifetime. To help businesses make these decisions we need to be there at every step of the way. So as researchers/data scientists/marketers/leaders/entrepreneurs/gurus or whatever we want to call ourselves we need to be experts at uncovering, synthesising and most importantly communicating our ideas so that the best decisions can be made. If we continue to focus on teaching traditional narrow vocational skill sets at schools, university and in our companies we just won’t have the thinkers and doers to keep us relevant.

The Biggest Opportunity

To combine traditional MR with everything we can possibly think of to make a much smarter world. The technology we have created or have access to can collect, ask and simulate just about anything we might dream of finding out. It can also automate so much of this that the we can make decisions literally in real time or even better the decisions can be made for us. This headline from the Wall Street Journal sums it up…’Tired of Thinking? Google says we won’t have to’. Is that really true? In the new world someone has to be thinker and be able to hold on to the lateral and creative application of ideas. We can be those thinkers, we are the human element that will design the technology and the information models that will help businesses become smarter.

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