What do the Financial Times (FT), Togather and ITV have in common? Well, they’re all using generative AI to assist in the market research process and are experiencing the bountiful results as a consequence.
The use of generative AI tools can help remove the often laborious market research methodology, as the FT found during their own experiments. As Tia McPhee, the FT’s global director explains. “All of our staff are licensed to use Google AI tools and are being encouraged to explore ChatGPT, and we’ve found a lot of uses for AI. It helps you get through large amounts of data quickly, allowing you to do reporting on stats and figures with less effort ensuring that you can therefore pick up on trends and anomalies much quicker.”
“Furthermore, we can then combine this with AI’s ability to examine what question would be a good question to ask of an interviewee, helping you shape what you’re going out to ask the market.”
Ross Spencer, CMO for events supplier marketplace Togather has found that generative AI has completely changed his approach to market research, removing his fears of scaling up the amount of ‘verbatim comments and qualitative data’ he gathers. For as he explains. “Verbatim comments are where the real meaty sentiment analysis comes from, but 400 written answers to five different questions would’ve been terrifying before. Now with AI I can further interrogate these answers and the analysis it produces.” It can be like using AI as an expert on the data that has been collected.
All of this means that AI can bring market research within the budgets of smaller brands, ensuring that they too are able to better understand their customers and the current trends within the market, thus enabling them to deliver more effective campaigns.
However, as with anything there are limitations to what generative AI can do. If the users of the AI do not have a clear definition of what outcomes they’re looking for or a clear brief to present to the tool, it can result in some very odd results, such as that experienced by Togather. Togather found that when conducting analysis using Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, the system started including random festivals such as Glastonbury into the analysis that didn’t make sense.
Ultimately though it does appear that generative AI has far more benefits than negatives especially as it pertains to market research. Companies will need to ensure that they are attuned to the developments within the sector and are aware of what their end objectives are in order to fully benefit from its use.
Vivek Rajkhowa 
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