Unlock the future of market research and the innovative strategies being implemented by major brands to deliver impactful insights.
Market research is evolving to meet changing business demands. Companies want faster, deeper consumer insights – despite tighter budgets. Those business needs are pushing research teams to evolve into strategic business advisors. During our TMRE session, research leaders from Citi, Fidelity, Verizon, and CMB shared their ideas on how to make the future of market research a success story.
There certainly have been changes in the industry. And they are moving faster than ever. AI has entered the mainstream while marketing budgets have been reduced 30% since 2020. When we prioritize speed over depth, we may find ourselves awash in data but starved for true insight. The pressure to deliver both efficiency and depth is reshaping how research teams operate.
Three key challenges for the future of market research emerged: First, frequent restructuring can lead to conflicting and overlapping priorities. Second, leadership teams are stretched thin – which can delay decision-making and project progress. Third, different departments often request similar projects without coordination, creating inefficiencies in resource use.
“What we do starts with making sure you’re doing the right work – and the right work is what the business cares about,” explains Amy Hearon, Head of Research and CX Insights, US Consumer Bank at Citi. Having already mapped out their 2025 work, her team has embedded approval processes into their financial systems.
“Before we release any money, we make sure we have a senior leader actually approving every single thing we’re proposing and telling us how they’re going to use that information to drive decision-making,” Amy continues. “When they’re talking about how those key initiatives are going, our work is already kind of baked in there, so we make sure that we’re not working on hobbies, but we’re working on things that are really driving the business.”
LeAnn Helmrich, Associate Dir – B2B Customer Insights at Verizon, reinforces this approach with an additional filter.
“The request maps back to one of the strategic objectives for the year. Otherwise, that’s an easier way for them to say, ‘I’m not spending the money.’”
“Our vision for insights has shifted over the past couple of years,” said Kate James, Vice President, Strategic Research Team Leader at Fidelity. “We want to be more proactive than reactive, and we’re asking ourselves how research teams can have an active voice in setting goals and priorities for the business.”
“We think of an insight as a shift in understanding that catalyzes a new path forward,” she continues. “Every research study delivers findings, but an insight might be more rare. It’s an important new learning that supplies the what and the why to enable confident actions that the business can take to create new value.”
To get to those actionable insights, it’s more important than ever for research teams to embrace multiple ways to uncover customer truths. Embedding customer voices in quantitative research, tracking actual behavior patterns, monitoring social conversations, and combining traditional research with new data sources. This multi-dimensional approach helps reveal deeper insights that single-source studies might miss. And then finding the right mix of artificial and human intelligence is all part of the future of market research.
One innovative approach gaining traction is the “keystone insight page.” As LeAnn describes it: “That page can actually have nothing to do with the actual report or what the objective of the report was. It’s just a new finding or something that we didn’t know before… something that people could take a nugget and take action on.”
Richard Scionti, VP of Product Development and Innovation at CMB, emphasizes our approach to ensuring data quality: “We’ve got this philosophy about AI+HI™ – the combination is really where the magic happens.”
“We’ve made a big investment to address sample,” Richard explains. “We brought in technologies that are helping us identify bots, identify click farm activity, and bad actors. A multi-tiered approach uses technology to raise and identify levels of suspicion. Then people who understand the content make the final decisions.”
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Quality concerns are significant. But, teams are finding new ways to ensure authenticity.
“If respondents opt in to do a voice open end or a video open end,” added Kate. “Then we can be pretty confident that they are who they say they are and that their responses are authentic.”
Teams are also working to integrate multiple data sources better.
“We’ve been doing a lot more marrying up our survey data with data from finance,” Kate shares. “It sharpens our business acumen but also ensures our recommendations are realistic and affordable. Having and developing those partnerships with finance and folks in other functions is just more and more important.”
While technology continues to evolve, the panel emphasized that fundamental research skills remain crucial.
“Skills that were relevant 10 years ago will still be relevant 10 years in the future,” Kate explains. “Understanding our business, understanding human beings, building trust with our partners… joining up our insights with financial data, knowing people to reach out to to help us bring our insights – business acumen just keeps being more and more important.”
Many teams are currently using AI for summary tasks.
“The summary can be really really strong, and they’re very accurate so far when we test them,” said LeAnn. However, “it’s not really solid yet to predict new products, new development. Most of the AI, at least in the tools that I’ve seen, focus on an existing data set.”
The panel emphasized that a successful future of market research requires both efficiency and impact. Teams are actively seeking “new solutions and tools that let us hear what people are talking about in real time, or as close to real time as possible,” as Kate explains. These tools help “surface trends that our stakeholders may not be aware of yet or even talking about yet.”
As LeAnn notes, “conciseness in reports is just so critical now. There’s so much data out there.”
The focus is increasingly on delivering clear, actionable insights that drive confident decision-making, even in resource-constrained environments.