Isaac Rogers Answers Your Questions on the State of the MR Industry

Sago President Isaac Rogers hosted an “Ask Me Anything” webinar that was all about unraveling the mind-blowing changes happening in the industry. We dove deep into the juicy details, discussing burning questions like where businesses should put their money during these unpredictable times. Read on as we unravel more of Isaac’s enlightening answers to your pressing queries.

Will in-person facilities be utilized the same as pre-Covid?

So far, we are seeing that there is a shift in the way that people are using facilities post-Covid. There are three main trends we have observed. First, we’re seeing a lot more usability studies and things that require touch, taste, and smell. In many ways, our facilities look much more like “labs “than ever before Covid.

The second trend is that we aren’t seeing as many stereotypical groups on common research topics like concept and advertising testing. For the most part, those have really stayed online. You get to address a nationwide audience, and I think clients have realized they can execute those effectively online with today’s modern tools.

The final trend is that we aren’t seeing as many client observers as before. Our back rooms just aren’t as full for the same type of study as we would’ve done many years ago. There’s something about sitting six feet from your consumer and seeing how they unbox your product or how they talk about your service. I’d love to see those back. Rooms fill up more than they are today because I think we’re missing that empathetic aspect you get from sitting so close to your customers.

What is the next wave in terms of earning engagement from the right respondents for qualitative work?

I think we need to take a good, hard look at what we put our respondents through to even get into research in the first place. One of my favorite soapboxes is to talk about screeners. I mentioned that a little bit in the webinar. Screeners have gotten ridiculously long and terribly complicated. I can’t tell you that all this complexity is giving us better audiences in our research. In fact, they might do the opposite. We all need to realize that we are competing these days with other ways people can fill their time or get rewarded for their opinions. We need to realize that the process of recruiting respondents needs to be modernized if we’re going to continue to bring in populations we want to talk to.

What’s your advice on how to combat ChatGPT responses on qualitative research?

We have detected the use of ChatGPT in many forms of research—even the screening process. It’s definitely something we all need to be aware of. We’ve been able to build in some detection tools and even some simple things like the ability to tell if somebody pasted an answer from somewhere else versus typing it in manually. So, there are some things we can certainly do. Honestly, one of the more effective things we can do is to notify respondents that we’re aware that ChatGPT exists, and that if they use ChatGPT in any way, they will be excluded from the study and any future studies. Just making people aware that we are watching for it is a big step in the right direction.

We have seen a deferral of all market research into 2024 (we hope) among our medical device/diagnostic clients during the last few months. Have you seen this pause across other healthcare markets, or is this unique to our specialization?

There have been pockets that we hear this more often. Medical device research isn’t one that, frankly, I’ve come across as a distinct area of concern, but you could be right. There have definitely been some areas that have pushed their research into the new year to see how this year settles economically. On the other hand, we’ve seen absolute explosions in a couple of our product lines in the last couple of months that seemed like they came out of nowhere. In-home use testing and digital qual are both growing faster than we forecasted. Right now, it seems like for every group that says they are seeing delays, another group is actually accelerating their spending.

In your opinion, what’s the future of working with multicultural audiences given AI?

That’s a great question. Many of the large learning models are built around the English language, and, even more to the point, the US cultural lens. We recently had a client that was using some training data, and they got some really bizarre results. They realized while they assumed they were talking to British customers, a few Australians had snuck into the mix, and it was throwing off the AI interpretation of the results because they used different words to describe things. It’s my hope that, as these models begin to expand, we will be able to develop the same outputs from all cultures in the future. But it will take some time for the day to catch up and be part of the training models.