Abstract

 The market research industry is built upon consumer insights. Companies are
looking for consumer insights that they can use for any purpose, i.e. marketing
campaign, new product development, product design, rebranding, etc. As of
today, many methodologies exist to obtain and generate these consumer insights,
both online (eye tracking, online communities, social media listening, etc.) and
offline (focus groups, in-store observation, etc.). This study has shown that AI
shouldn't be viewed anymore as hype, but that it can be actually being seen as
reality. We've proven that AI can be used to take on critical challenges using two
case studies. To finalize, we would like to stress the important common
denominator in the case studies and that will also be important for future AI
projects. We believe that the future of AI involves heavy human-machine
collaboration. We need to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of both
humans and machines to allocate those tasks to the actor that is the best suited
to execute it. Only by embracing AI can we as humans go to the next level of
augmented human intelligence..
 With increasing numbers of people accessing the internet on mobile devices,
communicating through instant messaging apps and answering surveys from their
mobile devices, there is a need to adapt surveys for mobile devices.
 Leveraging the data-rich environment of the community, technological
innovations can support the moderator in managing the community more
effectively, while machine-learning techniques can identify patterns and predict
future behaviors
 Visual data and voice data are not easy types of data to process and analyze using
traditional approaches, so the proposal is to use AI tools such as the Google Vision
Application Programming Interface (API) for images and the Google Cloud Speech
API for voice.
 Practical recommendations are presented, based on the data and expertise
gathered from these experiments, for those who want to implement new
response formats (e.g. voice input options and images) combined with AI
techniques.
Introduction
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence displayed by machines, often characterized
by learning and the ability to adapt. It is not the same as automation.

Market research industry

“AI is making people better at their jobs in three ways: automation of tasks that
can help a person perform their job more effectively; the ability to generate
insights from large amounts of data; and ability to enable interactions with
technology via natural-language conversations,”

Automation, insight generation and natural-language processing enable

businesses to survey the market continually, rather than dedicating specific time,
labor and money to the process.

Examples of AI in Use Today

Already, there are a number of ways in which artificial intelligence can empower
researchers with insights and analysis that would not have been previously
possible. Most notably is the ability to process large, unstructured datasets.
Processing Open-Ended Data
Dubbed Big Qual, the process of applying statistical analysis techniques to huge
volumes of written data aims to distill quantitative results.
The Google Cloud Natural Language API provides a demonstration of this in
action program recognizes “AI” as the most salient entity. It is also able to
recognize the category of text, syntactic structure and offer insights on sentiment.
In this case, the first and third sentence had a negative sentiment, while the second
was overall more positive.
Proactive Community Management
A second way in which artificial intelligence is being used today can be observed
in community management. As any community manager will testify, one of the
largest threats to a long-term community is member disengagement. This can result
in a high churn rate, increased management effort and lower quality results.
Fortunately, behavioral predictions, driven by AI, reduce the risk of
disengagement. Behavioral predictions involve analyzing a vast array of data
points about community members such as number of logins, pages visited, time
between logins etc. to build individual engagement profiles. Once built and
compared against disengaged members, the AI is able to identify which members
are at risk of becoming disengaged. This allows community managers to provide
additional support and encouragement to these individuals, reducing that risk.
Over time, this means that a community managed with the assistance of an AI will,
on average, lose fewer members to disengagement than a community without AI
support.

Machines Making Decisions

Give a machine enough information and it will be able to make a decision. And
that’s exactly what Kia did over 2 years ago when the brand employed IBM’s
Watson to help decide which social media influencers would best support its Super
Bowl advert.
Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), Watson parsed the vocabulary of
social media influencers to pinpoint which exhibited the traits Kia were looking for
– openness to change, artistic interest and striving for achievement. What is
perhaps most interesting about this example is that the decisions Watson made are
ones that would be difficult for a human to make, demonstrating the possibility that
perhaps AI can understand us better than we can ourselves.

The Future of AI in Market Research

Of course, progress never stands still. We are still very much in the absolute infancy of
artificial intelligence, and it is a technology that will have a much wider impact on market
research in the years to come. Although there is little way to predict exactly what this
impact will be, the ideas highlighted here are already in development – and may arrive
sooner than we think.

Virtual Market Research & Forecasting

Recruitment is expensive. In fact, depending on sample size and the length of a task, it
can quickly eat away at a research budget. One proposed idea to reduce this cost and
stretch insights budgets further is to build a virtual panel of respondents based on a
much smaller sample.

The theory is that sample sizes naturally restrict a brand’s ability to understand the
behavior of every potential consumer and customer. Therefore, taking this sample,
representing it as clusters of behavioral traits and building a larger, more representative
pool of virtual respondents from the clusters offers a more accurate prediction of
behavior.

There are abundant limitations to this method, such as the likelihood that virtual
respondents will be limited to binary answers in the first instance. However, there is still
value in this – especially when combined with the ability to run a massive number of
virtual experiments at once. This could be used to find the most appropriate price point
for a product, or understand how reaction to a change in product attribute might impact
sales.

Chatbots & Virtual Moderators

As FlexMR
CEO Paul Hudson highlighted in a paper presented at Qual360 North America, a
question still hangs over whether artificial intelligence could be used to gather
conversational qualitative research at scale. Today’s research chatbots are limited to
pre-programmed questions, presented in a user interface typical of an online
conversation.
However, as advances in AI continue to develop, so too may these online question
delivery formats. The ultimate test will be whether such a tool could interpret answers
from respondents in a way which allowed following questions to be tailored and
interesting points to be probed. This will signal the evolution from question delivery
format to virtual moderator.

Conducting Secondary Research

Not all research is primary research. In fact, for many smaller organisations, secondary
or desk research is the most cost-effective option. But it can also be a valuable tool in
larger insight teams when seeking to enter new markets, develop new products,
analyze competitor performance or review supply chains.

The natural limitation to desk research is resource. Desk research, while valuable, can
be time consuming meaning that insight does not always reach the hands of decision-
makers before a decision is taken. Artificial intelligence is capable of reading, learning
themes and identifying trends much faster than a human, making this a potential
application of the technology. The current barrier to adoption of this is sourcing material
for the AI to process. However, as an increasing amount of content is archived on public
and private networks, this barrier is slowly eroding.

Unfortunately, it seems that - today – despite the broad scope of AI much of the debate
surrounding artificial intelligence in market research today centers around the topic of
coding and how the technology could speed up the analysis of qualitative data. While
this is an important topic, the range of applications AI could have within the insights
industry is much broader.

Literature Review
AI tools currently used in marketing

AI tools currently used in marketing The term artificial intelligence was first
termed by the researcher John McCarthy in 1956 at a workshop called the
“Dartmouth Summer Research Project”. Together with other researchers he
thought about the future of “thinking machines” that can imitate human. (Marr,
2018) Artificial intelligence means that computers think and act like humans and
furthermore augment the capabilities in terms of efficiency. Examples for this are
speech recognition, decision making or visual perception. There are different
types of artificial intelligence. Strong AI technologies directly imitate the human
behavior process while weak AI technologies are specialized on one narrow task
that the computer was taught before (Hammond, 2015). An example for weak AI
would be an online poker game, where the computer has been programmed to
play certain scenarios (Kumar GN, 2018). Strong AI technologies are in the
development and can be differentiated by their functionalities: reactive machines
like basic chess robot that has programmed reactions on the other players moves,
limited memory systems that make use of some past information for future
actions like in chatbots, Theory of Mind AI where the machine can interact socially
and interpret human behavior, and self-awareness AI where the machines is
identical to a human being

The digital transformation describes the changing of processes within

organizations through the use of technology. With the introduction of big data
companies are enabled to transform the management and retailing style and
adopt digital business models that allow them to improve the interaction with
other actors like customers, suppliers, partners or employees. Another important
aspect of the digital transformation is the change in the consumer behavior. Due
to the increase in internet access among the customers there has been a shift
towards online retailing. The new mobile technologies replace the need to for
personal contact and allow for quicker, more personalized and better service. For
the Marketing Practices. Because of this shift in focus many more activities take
place online. That means automatic data creation. The data is really valuable for
companies and should be used. Data Mining refers to the process of working
through the big data and analyzing it for patterns and correlations. The big data is
a collection of historical results gathered all over the internet that can be best
described by high volume, velocity, and variety (Perry, 2017) . By working through
and analyzing the data marketers can get useful insights into their, customers the
environment or their competitors. The data collection forms the base for later
processes. In these processes one needs to differ between labeling and deep
learning. Through algorithms the computers autonomously learn and improve
their processes based on the data they have gathered and analyzed in their
continuous experimentation. The algorithms are programmed to recognize
patterns and trends in the data. The computer learns and adopts his practices
accordingly. These technologies can be used to automate processes and
experiment with solutions and to make predictions about outcomes The more the
technology is developing the cheaper it gets to use it, the more it gets adapted
(Agrawal, Gans , & Goldfarb, 2018). The deep learning technology can be used for
AI tools like profiling, automation and augmentation of tasks, customization. The
tools are based on the information and results of the big data analysis and are
offering new opportunities of interaction between the customers and the
marketers. An example for this is the “IBM Watson Customer Experience
Analytics” tool. This program can be connected to your company’s website and
analyzes all the data. It performs behavioral analytics and identifies the patterns.
Based on this the marketers are enabled to understand their customers
interaction with the website and service better and can identify obstacle, drive
conversion and improve the satisfaction. (IBM, 2019)

Profiling customers can be sorted into both areas: promotion and CRM. Profiling
means “describe(s) customers based on their attributes (…) in order to identify
the characteristics of a group of people and describe what they are like.” (Walters
& Bekker , 2017). The big data analysis helps the marketers better understand the
customers and enables them to target them better and customize the marketing
messages. Before the profiling there is the segmentation step, divided in market
and customer segmentation. The market segmentation scans the customers in
the market for similarities and sorting them into homogenous groups. This is very
useful for marketers when working on an overall marketing strategy. The
customer segmentation is more detailed and takes a look at each customer
individually and analyzes their behavior (regency, frequency and monetary value
of purchases for example) and their customer value (lifetime customer value).
This information is useful in specifically targeting customers. Both types of
segmentation aid the profiling by providing sorted information There are different
ways of profiling. The demographic profiling, where the analysis is based on
demographic categories like gender, age, income, education, etc. These profiles
help describing the market and give a direction on how to appeal to Experience
Observation Conceptualization Experimentation the customers better. Another
form of profiling is the behavioral profiling. This approach focuses more on the
attitude, use and response of customers when encountering a product. Examples
are occasion, benefits, user status or usage rate. The analysis is useful when
interacting with existing customers and help with forecasting and predicting user
actions. This can be done on existing customers or to analyses potential
customers. AI is used in segmenting and profiling by accessing and working
through the data. During the segmentation marketers use unsupervised machine
learning. That means that the algorithms scan the data and looks for similarities
and between the entities and groups them based on that. For the profiling they
use the supervised machine learning. Here a supervisor gives an input variable
and the algorithm scans the selected items for the wanted information. In both
cases the AI helps the marketers to learn about their customer. (Walters &
Bekker, 2017) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a very important
aspect in marketing. Like many business processes it can be optimized with the
help of AI tools. One example for this is the improving of managing and
scheduling the staff in retail shops (Daugherty & Wilson, 2018). Based on the
results of the data mining and profiling, deep learning tools can optimize the
scheduling and task assignment of the staff to provide the customers with a
better service. Furthermore, tools like beacons and service bots can augment the
capabilities of the staff and make the stores more customers aware. The stores
shift from being handled by humans only to human-machine collaboration. By
implementing enterprise cognitive computing into their service, companies can
automate the more repetitive and formulaic tasks to reduce time and increase
productivity. (Tarafdar, Beath, & Ross, 2019). These bots provide the advantage
that they are dynamic and can learn from new input and change their responses.
Furthermore, one digital bot can assist millions of customers at the same time
and can evaluate information in seconds. These tools enable the brick and mortar
stores to personalize their services to the customer and improve their experience
but are also transferrable to the online environment. Companies can track their
customer behavior online and can make use of all the data they leave behind.
Their learning algorithms form the base of chatbots that offer their services to
online customers to help in the case of questions. Furthermore, the gathered
information is used for customized recommendation functions and adjustments
to the interface to personalize the service. Companies like amazon have taken this
another step further by creating smart home assistant that assists the customers
at home. The virtual assistant provides help with controlling music or lights within
the house but also offers assistance with actions like searching for information,
performing digital tasks or purchasing items online. AI experimentation within the
MR industry, we have adapted the framework and introduced a fourth step, i.e.
share. As AI has both many advocates and opponents, it is crucial to share tips
and results, both internally within the company and externally to industry peers.
Internal sharing is important to make other employees aware of the project and
allow them to be curious or get involved. Whenever, the AI project is finished,
adoption will be easier as employee buy-in will be higher, as opposed to the case
where AI experimentation was done in secret. External sharing is important to
move the industry forward. Only by staying at the front-end of AI innovation, MR
agencies will be able to offer better services to clients, whereas clients can stay
up-to-date. Furthermore, it's important to mention that one can share the results
of the loop in every iteration of the project. Only then, external knowledge and
feedback can be incorporated in the experimentation loop, increasing chances of
better outcomes.

Future trends
Overarching over the new developments, one can say that artificial intelligence is
developing “beyond human” capabilities, that will make human interactions sort
of obsolete since the computers perform better. For the humans it will become
more convenient to adjust to machines and let them take over. (Conick, 2017) The
previously mentioned technologies are constantly growing and developing
further. With the further developments in the technologies some changes will
come along as well. More machine applications in the service area will lead to
fewer human personnel being needed. Furthermore, it will lead to certain
changes in the lifestyle of people since the computers are becoming more and
more involved in their daily life. The people would adjust their day towards the
technology ore and more and this would lead to further changes within the
market and further develop the industry. Based on this new needs and demands
will arise and others will lose their importance. Furthermore, it will come with a
shift in the decision-making process from human employees to machines (Conick,
2017). Along with the changes there will be quiet some problems that come along
with the new technologies. The biggest concerns that come with the further
technological development are about the loss of the human touch. The growing
automation of tasks leads to less human involvement. Even though this might
make the tasks quicker, cheaper and optimizes the outcomes, consumers are
concerned whether they want machines to take over. They do not trust the
machines to make ethical decisions based on the fact that the decisions come
from logical algorithms and not individuals that have a personality and feel
empathy. Furthermore, not all customers feel comfortable missing out on the
human interaction. They are concerned that the missing interpersonal contact will
isolate individuals more and change the society too much. Not only the machines
are lacking the human touch, but a growing concern is the decrease in self-
reflecting and moral behavior. Because the direct human interaction is replaced
more and more by AI powered service tools the customers do not have to control
their responses and act compassioned. The moral checking mechanism that
balances between shaping the world to the personal needs and adjusting one
own behavior to the environment is not trained anymore. (Friedland, 2019) Since
the AI augmented process are about the close interaction of humans and
machines. All the tools are based on analyzing data. This data is being gathered
from direct customer input but also from traces the customers leave when using
technology. Due to the intrusiveness of the information collection a lot of ethical
concerns stand against the use of AI technology.