Announcing GRIT 2012: A New Approach To Understanding Research Transformation

It’s time for the next phase of the GreenBook Research Industry Trends Study! If you want to cut to the chase, here is the link:

http://www.globaltestmarket.com/survey/s.phtml?sn=235199&lang=E&secid=ca243f&tid=greenbook

In its 11^th year, GRIT is the leading and most comprehensive survey of our industry. As a sign of just how important this study has become, the Advertising Research Foundation, Qualitative Research Consultants Association, ARIA, BAQMaR, MRIA, IMRS, NewMR, The Research Club, and NGMR have joined GreenBook as industry partners.

We are also thrilled to have a stellar list of research partners including GMI, Google Consumer Surveys, Gen2 Advisors, Q Research Software, Dollywagon, OdinText, Decooda, AYTM, Second Prism, and the Insight Innovation Forum.

All of our partners have contributed significant time, energy, and resources to the GRIT effort and deserve a big THANK YOU for their support.

Click here to participate in the survey – we anticipate it taking about 15 minutes to complete (we’re working on the length issue, but haven’t solved that conundrum yet!).  As a thank you, you will receive a full version of the GRIT report when it is published in November as well as access to the data in multiple forms. You’ll also receive an exclusive invitation to a series of webinars as the analysts talk through the findings and implications.

As always, the GRIT study promises unparalleled insights into how research buyers and providers are adapting to the current economy, to emerging technologies, and to the winds of change buffeting our profession and our industry.

The core focus of the GRIT study is to get a glimpse of  what our industry will look like in the future. Will we even recognize it as market research? Who will be the change agents, and what new players will we be competing against? We can’t fully answer such questions (yet) but we do get tantalizing hints in the results of this ongoing study. GRIT enables an outline and direction of the future to emerge so that we can make some educated projections.

We know that the research professional is under immense pressure to deliver value and measurable business impact. We see new technologies and research models less bound by traditional precepts of best practices gaining traction. We see new models of human capital emerging that have a broad impact on the future of both suppliers and client organizations.

GRIT is the vehicle that we use to quantify these trends and share the information with the research industry so that we can all adapt and thrive.

We promised that we were going to change things up with this wave, and we have.

GRIT-Winter 2012 continues to track trends that it has traditionally focused on, including the adoption of emerging technologies and methods. For the second time, the survey will also try to uncover which industry bodies and media outlets are considered to be “influential”, as well as a map of the global network of influential outlets of thought leadership. As always, this edition of GRIT studies the extent of the belief that the market research industry is changing, the sentiment around that belief, and its impact on your business. For the first time we will be delving specifically into how social media analytics is impacting the industry, with a particular focus on which technologies and providers are driving change.

Overall, the look and feel of the instrument has changed; working with Jon Puleston of GMI Interactive we have built a questionnaire that incorporates highly visually engaging and “gamified” elements into the experience. We are also expanding the scope of the study, and are working with a variety of international organizations to engage the global industry in sharing their views and experience on the current state and future direction of the insights industry. Our hope is that the results will offer the most global view of the industry from the practitioner perspective ever achieved.

We’ll be using a series of micro polls across various web properties to augment the data and dive into topics that we uncover during our analysis, and will be doing in-depth interviews to add nuance, depth, and insight into the data.

We’ll be delivering the results in several formats including print and virtual publications, but will also continue our practice of making all of the data available to anyone interested via an online dashboard and, new for this year, a mobile visualization and social sharing platform.

You’ll notice more verbatims in this iteration; we’ll be doing thematic and emotional analysis via text analytics to deliver even more value than traditional coding.

All in all we’re trying to practice what we preach and are taking a holitic and synthesis-based approach to GRIT to ensure it delivers maximum value and impact to everyone.  Thank you for your contribution to helping us make that a reality!