The meteoric rise of routers, aggregators, and programmatic sampling over the last decade has pushed the boundaries of innovation for delivering online sample. But the same can’t be said for market research panels. Innovation has stalled, boasting minor improvements such as social sign-in, additions of qualitative components to panel infrastructure, and creative incentive solutions. The architecture, however, remains largely in-tact, a near replica of panels past since their advent in the early 2000s. So, the big question for panel is, what’s clogging the innovation pipeline?

1. Specialization Is The Future of Market
Research Panels
The meteoric rise of routers, aggregators, and programmatic sampling over the last
decade has pushed the boundaries of innovation for delivering online sample. But
the same can’t be said for market research panels. Innovation has stalled, boasting
minor improvements such as social sign-in, additions of qualitative components to
panel infrastructure, and creative incentive solutions. The architecture, however,
remains largely in-tact, a near replica of panels past since their advent in the early
2000s. So, the big question for panel is, what’s clogging the innovation pipeline?
What is a market research panel?
But before we even get into what’s depressing panel innovation and where I see the
future of panel going, let’s define what a panel is. Quora came through with perhaps
the most simple, clean definition of a market research panel:
Consumer panels are comprised of pre-recruited groups of people who have agreed
to participate in online research. Members are usually given incentives to reward
them for their time and participation.
What is depressing panel innovation?
Understanding how a panel works eludes to why there has been hardly any
innovations on the panel front in the last two decades – a failure to innovate survey
design. To explain what I mean, one only has to study the evolution of social media
since panels emerged in the early 2000s.
Consider Myspace (yes, it’s still around). Launched in 2003, the landing page, sign
in, friends, no feed, and notifications via email make Myspace a pretty good analog
for panels if you think about it. But since then, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat
has emerged and changed the way we communicate. I’m leaving out dozens of
minor social media players that also sprung up during that time, but my point is this.
Social media networks innovated the delivery mechanism – PC to mobile.
Panel, on the other hand, is trailing in their adoption of mobile centric technology,
resulting in vehicles that ask respondents to engage with an archaic survey design
resulting in vanishing response and completion rates year after year.
Yes, there are mobile panels and mobile survey companies. But they have failed to
convince clients to fully adopt mobile because we have yet to figure out how to get
the same data from mobile surveys that a traditional quantitative survey delivers.
Clients want results.
The future of panel is specialization.

2. So for now, we have to accept that survey design is not going to change drastically
until we exhaust our current panelist pool or figure out how to get better results from
mobile surveys. Which means, we still have a dilemma. How do we innovate panels
without innovating survey design?
The answer lies in specialization. Let’s, again, turn to content to illustrate this point.
We’ve seen some of the greatest T.V. come out in the last decade due to very
specific storytelling. Shows like “Master of None”, “Atlanta”, and “Fresh Off The Boat”
have been extremely successful to a wide audience despite being very specific in the
stories they tell.
Similarly, I believe panels can slow the rapidly increasing attrition rates by providing
tailored online environments around cultural similarities such as ethnicity,
generations, geography, and interests.
A good example of this in our industry are MROCs (market research online
communities). Companies like Vision Critical have thrived in the past decade,
making it to the AMA Gold Report relatively shortly after its founding. MROCs
provide that specific cultural experience, typically around brands or verticals, but they
have done so by going against the grain of what is happening in the panel
environment.
MROCs present a great model for the panel industry to follow if it’s serious about
crafting catered experiences that elicit panel responses and boost completion rates.
The alternative is to continue our blanket approach to panel building, releasing big
panels that serve entire nations and sometimes continents with no sub
specializations.
Use specialization to narrow your focus.
Business trends, in general, are show signs of leaning more into specialization.
Social media, content, retail, and other fields have all experienced growth by
narrowing their focus to specific groups of people. If the panel business takes its
cues from these trends towards specialization, I think we can save our respondents
from eventual extinction and deliver better results to our clients.
Share1
September 5th, 2017|Blog, MROC, Online Communities, Online Market Research, Online Panels, Total Market
Research
About the Author: Roy Eduardo Kokoyachuk
Roy is a Managing Partner at ThinkNow Research. He started his career at Warner
Bros. Media Research. A desire to pursue multicultural market research full-time led
him to join a full service Hispanic & multicultural market research company, in 2003
as Vice President of Advertising Research. He became Executive Vice President in
2006 and opened an operations center in Tijuana, Mexico and directed the

3. company’s entry into online research. In 2009 he initiated the creation of the first
nationally representative opt-in market research panel of U.S. Hispanics -
CadaCabeza. This panel broke new ground in panel building by focusing on the
recruitment of Spanish speaking Hispanics as well as the English speakers typically
found on online panels. He co-founded ThinkNow Research to further pursue his
passion for multicultural consumer insights.