We signed off last time discussing how technology has come to the aid of retailers. In certain cases it led to a decrease in cost while in most others it influenced the bottom line directly.

But even after a detailed thought process of building the store (check out our next column for details of the process and innovations in the same), every retailer aims to be top of mind when a customer is thinking of indulgence or retail therapy. In case of a chore like grocery shopping, the retailer wants to become an automatic choice.

This is easier said than done, but this process can be aided by Market Research to a great extent; though considered an investment, retailers know that the right data and its analysis can do wonders to their bottom line.

Even if the façade of market research today appears to be technology centric, it wasn’t true in the times when in it originated in social survey’s in United Kingdom.*

Researchers still, like earlier days, collect data manually. Customer is king and his wishes need to be fulfilled and if that meant going directly and asking about his wishes, they were ready to do so.

Thus was born the questionnaire, which was comparatively primitive to what we see today. These questionnaires were used to collect data and had limited questions and were available to everyone who was ready to answer.

Today, in its evolved form, the questionnaire has a larger number of questions and addresses a specific target audience that the retailers wants to drive to the store. This evolution correlated with the evolution in data analysis techniques and tools such as SAS, SPSS, etc.

But since the advances in areas of digital electronics and reduction in sizes of integrated circuits, researches have stopped depending solely on the lowly questionnaire.

This, though, was long due mainly because of the ‘social desirability effect,’ which states that customers will give socially desirable responses, such as about their current choice of lifestyle or tend to inflate their income and social status, depending on the surrounding. The data collected were always considered to possess a certain amount of inherent error.

The transition from the manual labour and the first apparent use of technology was seen in terms of the counters used to measure ‘footfall’ in a store. These were further improved to calculate movement of merchandize by day of the week or time of day.

This evolved further in the form of loyalty programs. Customers were encouraged to use their cards by luring them with discounts. These cards not only help in data collection regarding buying patterns but also personalizing the shopping experience (explained in the next blog).

Devices such as People meters helped in keeping track of the television viewing habits, which helped in luring customers to the store.

As is a pattern, we end this discussion for today by talking of the recent invention, viz, Neuroscience and its application in this case. But before we do that, it is safe to conclude that market research evolved with changing times and has transcended into neuroscience.

Neuroscience technology helps in getting instant feedback about the emotional association a buyer has with a product. This also helps in drawing parallels between various parameters which were previously considered not affecting buying patterns, such as changing weather.

*Classics in English social survey research , to name a few are Mayhew's London Life and London Poor (1861), Charles Booth’s monumental 17 volume study of Labour and Life of the People of London (1886), Rowntree's Poverty: A study of Town Life (1901), and Arthur Bowley’s Livelihood and Poverty (1912).