When ChatGPT was launched at the end of 2022, I was working as a market researcher, and the AI chatbox instantly caused a sensation. As more and more applications began to be developed, my colleagues and I started thinking about the impact of this innovation on the market research industry. Indeed, it posed many challenges, which we will not discuss in this article. From my experience, ChatGPT actually presented a lot of opportunities for market research. It has multiple potential applications and advantages that could revolutionize traditional methods.
- Improve the efficiency of Secondary Research
The advantage of ChatGPT lies in its powerful information processing capabilities. Although we must pay attention to the authenticity of the data, it can collect a large amount of data and quickly organize and summarize the key points, thereby providing researchers with the most important and valuable information (Shah, 2023). Now that ChatGPT has such powerful sorting and summarizing capabilities, if it can be combined with other tools for collecting primary information, such as website cookie tracking or some AI customer service, I believe this will change the way consumer research is done.
- Process Automation
Although each project has different requirements and research objectives, the overall process is fixed, so the research process can be split into SOPs and then completed with ChatGPT. Taking the qualitative research of focus group discussion as an example, it will need a screener to filter the interviewees and a discussion guide for the interview. Compared with designing them all by myself, when I inform ChatGPT of the entire research design with appropriate prompts, it will design a nice document for me. Using it as a draft will save a lot of time. Moreover, sometimes the provided answers will contain some points that I did not think of before, which really inspires me.
The above two applications are only described based on my own experience. I believe that AI has broader potential in market research, and I look forward to its application in more places in the future to optimize the industry.
Reference
Sagar Shah. (2023, January 29). Using ChatGPT for Secondary Research: Pros and Cons. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/using-chatgpt-secondary-research-pros-cons-sagar-shah
Your experience and insights are valuable, especially in saving a significant amount of time in future work. But, I have a question. ChatGPT is strong at sorting and summarizing data, which is incredibly useful. But if there are new patterns or changes in the data that emerge, ones that were not present during the training of the ChatGPT model, can ChatGPT still summarize these new developments? Particularly in fast-changing industries like the internet, is there a risk that ChatGPT might not be able to recognize and summarize new trends? Thank you!