Market research had to change. Here’s how we did it.

Our new platform was just launched into the world. Potentially our best invention yet, it places the power of insights into the hands of anyone who needs it.

And that’s what we’re all about: we believe audience insight is for everyone. But this hasn’t always been the reality.

Uncovering really transformative insight isn’t easy; it’s a huge challenge facing businesses right now. The world’s moving faster, and with a new generation of teams and the sudden rise in remote workforces, everyone wants, needs, and expects deeper knowledge – as fast as possible.

The core of making this a reality is to have a world-class user experience that enables the fastest possible route to inspiring insight. To meet this need, we’ve replaced our already industry-leading platform with an even better one.

Here’s why we’ve done it.

1. Businesses that win move fast.

The process of running market research is too slow for the age we live in; custom projects can take months or even years to run. Syndicated data is often out of date by the time it’s published.

We’re focused on transforming this and giving businesses immediate access to insight they can trust.

There are three key aspects to this:

The constant collection of solid data at scale.
Automation of the data processing from collection, to cleaning, to weighting – essentially getting data from respondent to analyst in the quickest possible time.
The platform.

The platform part is key. It’s critical to supply a world-class user experience where anyone, regardless of experience, can quickly find inspiring insights that can transform their business.

Clearly there’s no point collecting the data if no one can use it, or it goes to die in a complicated tool which requires thousands of hours of experience.

$80bn a year is spent on market research, and I believe the vast majority of this goes to waste, dying from a lack of usage. This platform is a simple commitment to avoid that.

2. Everyone needs insight to do their jobs.

When I started my career in research, analysis was left to the expert. I spent years honing my skills on crosstabs, working to fulfill requests from across my organization. Data was important, but not central.

Today, everyone needs data and insights to do their jobs.

Since I launched GWI, I’ve seen this trend accelerate. The vast majority of our free sign-ups and report downloads come from professionals whose day job is not research, but who need data and insight to inform decisions. Sales people, marketers, CEOs, HR professionals – every role you can think of.

Our platform serves these data storytellers, making the difficult process of insight creation accessible to anyone and enabling data-led decision-making at pace.

This democratization of research is a mega trend that’s being fast tracked by COVID. Remote teams and a new generation of self-serve professionals building their career on a plethora of SAAS products are inherently more hands-on.

A self-service experience that anyone can use is also critical for fast moving organizations that can execute quickly. Gatekeeping data in small teams will do the opposite.

3. Businesses need organizational alignment.

A very real customer challenge is driving alignment around data.

A singular data story in a business creates decision-making that delivers one strategy, immense focus, and operational efficiency.

It’s the key to an effective, fast-moving organization, where everyone can make the right decisions.

Sharing insights is a process that’s currently broken. There are disparate data sources, a lack of knowledge on who has accounts and access, and no tools to control the message or data used. Today, the default solution to this is to share PDFs, or put analysis into PPT and send on emails, Slack or Teams. It’s a messy and untracked process.

Users need to be able to distribute insights to multiple stakeholders across their organization – fast, but with control.

It’s all about putting the right data into the hands of anyone and everyone across a business in a visual, easy-to-parse way, arming them with a consistent, in-depth view of their audience to keep everyone’s story the same.

Our new platform solves these issues by enabling frictionless sharing to anyone in the organization regardless of their account status. Just create the story and share with one click across any platform, email, Slack, or blogs.

The future is platform-led

I passionately believe that for research to stay relevant in the global digital age we’re lucky enough to be living through, the platform is critical. It’s a core part of our vision to deliver on customer needs.

When we launched our first platform, it transformed GWI by delivering our data to an exponentially larger audience. I firmly believe this platform will do the same, and that it’s the key to success for businesses of all shapes and sizes in the ever-changing world we’re in.

Welcome to the future of market research.