The Causality of Satisfaction

Editor’s Note: This commentary is featured in the GRIT Insights Practice Report. The GRIT Insights Practice Report is your #1 guide to brand success in the insights industry, featuring the GRIT Future List, client perspectives, and emerging methodologies. You’ll learn what’s making strides, what trends are worth following, and where your company fits into it all.

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Until recently, the method of automated causal discovery, rather than traditional regression modeling has been met with wide skepticism due to the combinatorial explosion of potential patterns and the inherent computational challenges to get optimal models.

The recent Buyer Satisfaction study completed as part of this edition of the GRIT Report is a prime example. They identified the best-fit model from an overwhelming number of potential patterns. With this new breakthrough algorithm, researchers and analysts can now test various sets of factors through automation, rather than spending time validating models until finding the correct combinations of factors. From this, the data fit metrics will provide researchers confidence that the output is correct.

If we look at the study, we can see how mapping the key factors between suppliers and buyers can tell the truth and inspire Suppliers for a better understanding of their Buyers and result in an improvement in factors that drive Buyer’s satisfaction.

Additionally, this study highlights the speed and accuracy that automated causal modeling will provide. Given the multiple graphs that this study produced in minutes, researchers and analysts have the ability to visualize multiple graphs with multiple sets of samples and factors. This is evidenced when looking at both Buyer and Supplier characteristics and their causal relationships.

Beyond the study, discovered graphs allow analysts to compare key factors towards different target factors. The following chart shows a comparison of the total causal effect to “Value for Money” in Buyer’s satisfaction between the recognition of Buyer and Supplier.

With this new technique, researchers will drastically improve efficiency and accuracy for the purposes of market research in a fraction of the time as other methods. Most importantly, this breakthrough is far less complicated and can give researchers more time to compare brands, products, and customer segments, or to assess the best decision forward and with an eye toward ROI.