This Adweek article today talks to how companies should focus MR resources on deep-dive strategic efforts instead of tactical, short-term exercises, to help make better informed decisions at every junction. As Kate Manfred of BCG’s Chicago office goes onto say, “Some organizations spend all of their budget on very tactical bits of data that are very hindsight orientated. So, they spent a lot of time getting syndicated tracker data and spend data for things that happened in the past. Other organizations have some of that, but they also allocate a fair amount of their spend to gathering data and insights that are much more strategic and forward-looking around where the consumer is going to go next.” Part of the challenge is overcoming the perception that qualitative drains too much time, money and energy out of the day-to-day management of the company but given the options available today this paradigm is finally changing. Qualvu’s QuickVu solution is definitely acting as a catalyst for this change by enabling clients to turnaround a Topline and VideoReport within three days from activation (1 day in field, 1 day for analysis and 1 day for clipping and VideoReport). The accessibility that digital methodologies such as these present allow our clients to operate is if they have customers in the room with them for every meeting – and think about how many times you ask yourself “I wonder what the consumers would think about this?” but you overlook it in the interest of deadlines and budget parameters. Many think that the power of social media is the answer, as referenced in Monday’s Wall Street Journal article, “Marketers Find Web Chat Can Be Inspiring“. The biggest challenge is that this is a very unstructured environment and when faced with synthesizing disparate sources of information and explaining what it all means, not only does this process take a long time but can end up being very costly and the reliability of the sources are often questionable. Qualvu, on the other hand, embraces all the benefits of digital in terms of speed and cost at the same time as providing the reliability in its software to process qualified participant responses by organizing and editing them down into video highlight reels (as in this example: Report Example_OTC). As such this provides for a much better solution in ensuring that we’re not looking at Market Research through our rear-view-mirror and, instead, using it to build sustainable competitive advantages through combining better consumer insights at every check point in the business decision-making process.