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January 28, 2020

Read time: 3min

At your fingertips: re-using and visualizing respondent data

Market Logic Team

Companies spend millions on commissioning primary research but often can’t make the best use out of the data at their fingertips. Marketers and insights professionals need to visualize and engage with respondent data they own, in ways that make sense for the questions and challenges they face on a daily basis. Does this sound familiar? You commission a primary research project with a representative sample of respondents, and key results from the data are visualized in the presentation deck – but the underlying SPSS files are not included in the delivery. Or, the respondent data is somehow separated from the final report in the project handover. Either way, the underlying data is lost or forgotten over time, so it seems like the only results the research delivered were the big picture visualizations that made it to the final report. Weeks or months later, when someone asks a question that might have been addressed by the respondent data (i.e. “did you have that millennial study cut by gender?”), you have to go back to the agency and pay an additional fee for the answer… ranging from $350 – $1000 per question. Market insight platforms resolve these challenges by capturing a complete project record so the final report and the underlying data sets are never separated. Best in breed platforms provide the technology to also understand what survey respondent data is, so you can instantly search the questions and variables inside the research project to slice, dice and visualize the data for more insight. But where does that leave qualitative research specialists, who may not feel comfortable diving into structured data? Easy and intuitive visualization tools take the rocket out of science by cutting through complexity so anyone can be a data scientist. Simply search your topic, select your variables and choose from cross-tab analysis or any other visualization format. The possibilities for continuous inquiry of a rich survey dataset are only limited by your curiosity. Many organizations extend these capabilities to trackers, so any manager can dig deeper into reporting KPIs to uncover insight. Onboarding research data for re-use is not rocket science either. Researchers or agency staff simply upload data files alongside all other documents they captured in a research project – there’s no need for expensive support services. Uploaders also provide a few details about the asset and its variables, but for SPSS files, most details are automatically extracted and presented for review. Just think of the number of inquiries any insights manager or marketer could contemplate about a major U&A study. Market Logic clients tell us that they used to employ one or two data analysts to answer questions from major segmentation databases. Today, that role is completely democratized. Data that used to cost thousands of dollars to analyze and present to the business over time can be easily visualized and applied by anyone for fast, data-driven insight and decisions.