Democratization of research: how technology is reshaping access to consumer research

The democratization of research means making consumer research—once the exclusive territory of trained specialists and big-budget agencies—readily available to non-researchers. Technology drove the shift: affordable digital tools now handle participant recruitment, interviews, transcription, analysis, and insight sharing, so a small team can do work that once required an entire agency.

Like free and fair elections are essential to political democracy, that shift is worth celebrating. Not long ago, though, some research professionals viewed it very differently:

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“You don’t give guns to monkeys!”

When I began as a qualitative researcher in late 2005, one of our directors shared a story over a team lunch about her time as a junior researcher. The subject was “the most awkward market research meeting she’d ever attended.”

She’d gone to a debrief with a senior team member and their ad agency client. The presentation of findings—delivered using a new-fangled research tool (I can’t remember exactly which one)—had gone well.

One of the ad agency’s team members, impressed with the tool and its results, casually asked whether they could gain direct access.

The senior researcher unthinkingly retorted: “No, sorry mate, you don’t give guns to monkeys.”

As you might imagine, the meeting concluded awkwardly. Back in the taxi, my future director sat there stunned. The senior researcher eventually reflected: “Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have said that monkey thing.”

Probably not.

A few years later, I moved to the UK and was doing research for Lloyds of London. A colleague mentioned wanting to keep the raw data private from the client due to the risk of misinterpretation. The research manager replied sharply: “Yes, well. It’s our data, so we’ll do what we want with it!”

He sure told him—and again, awkward. (To make matters worse, we also broke this client’s dress code by failing to wear ties during the debrief—not the most successful meeting by any stretch.)

Like many industries, market researchers protected their turf.

These anecdotes illustrate protective—and now dated—attitudes toward market research data and insight: who can access what, and who’s responsible for it.

Every industry wants to safeguard its roles and responsibilities to some degree. Research professionals weren’t unusual in wanting respect for their expertise, or in discouraging non-researchers from conducting shoddy DIY research.

I’ve experienced advertising agencies that didn’t appreciate outsiders contributing creative ideas to ad development—and they let you know about it. As a researcher, your job was to test their ideas, not develop your own. That was strictly agency turf, and they defended it proactively. I can’t imagine a cloud-based collaborative platform like Miro, which lets non-agency members participate in creative work, being received well in the mid-2000s ad agency world.

Technology is changing and democratizing access to research data and valuable insights.

In past articles, I discussed the continuous advancement of AI and how it affects those involved in research. But beyond predictive and generative AI, “research tech”—the technology and systems used to distribute research data and insights—has developed rapidly.

In my experience, this has been a net positive for researchers and non-researchers alike. It lets researchers do more with the data they collect while making insight extraction far more inclusive and collaborative than in the past.

Rather than handing power to those incapable of wielding it responsibly (as that woeful remark about monkeys and guns implied), today’s technology gives non-researchers access to work that was traditionally very difficult, or at least outside their scope of responsibility.

You no longer have to be big to generate research and insights effectively.

Generating, analyzing, and using market research insights used to be labor intensive and generally required engaging human “experts” to support you.

Running a focus group required a whole raft of people, from recruiters to physical session hosts, plus an expensive venue and catering. Then there was the drama and expense of organizing FocusVision—a notoriously fiddly, costly, and now defunct video streaming platform predating Zoom and Teams.

At the back end, you’d need audio transcriptionists before a team of researchers could analyze the findings—usually working on large sheets of A1 paper before typing everything into a PowerPoint report. The process was slow, labor intensive, and expensive.

Digital research tools have changed all of this. You can now DIY participant recruitment with platforms like Askable. Zoom or Teams replaces the venue, and automatic transcription tools, like those offered by Dovetail, mean your transcripts are collected and collated the minute an interview ends.

With this range of digital research tools, a small business or research freelancer can replicate what a multi-person research agency or insight department once did—generating insight in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost.

Digital tools for analyzing and sharing research findings generate better insights faster than ever.

It’s easy to forget how painful sharing research data—especially raw, qualitative data—used to be.

Years ago, I worked for a financial services provider in the UK that wanted to understand its cohort of users with large credit card balances who were only making minimum payments. The research involved filming respondents in their homes and using Skype to conduct online interviews. The logistics of downloading footage, generating transcriptions, and sharing it all at a face-to-face workshop were stressful.

I wasn’t worried about my ability to draw collaborative insight from the team. I was worried about the tech failing and preventing me from sharing raw data with workshop participants.

Now, platforms like Dovetail let you analyze, tag, and share raw data with the wider research team via an insights hub whenever convenient. Shared, cloud-hosted content in consistent formats removes the stress-inducing technical issues, so everyone can get up to speed with relevant insight and data immediately.

The same goes for shared analysis sessions: with content hosted in a single location in a consistent format, you can focus on getting the most out of the data rather than worrying about the tech letting you down. I wish this technology had existed the day our video camera ran out of battery and my junior had left the charging cable in her apartment.

Research tech also means it’s more cost-effective than ever to generate insights.

Traditional market research methods involve significant financial investment—everything that applies to running qualitative focus groups also applies to large-scale quantitative research, from time-consuming setup to data collection and analysis.

Today’s tools provide cost-effective alternatives. You can write a simple survey with basic skips and filtering for free using Google Forms, where previously you might have needed to learn how to program or code a survey.

Free tools like Google Trends can also greatly illuminate a research question. Google Trends shows what people search for globally—and it’s a widely held research truth that what people search for and what they say they search for differ. Having a resource to check respondents’ claims against is incredibly valuable.

Beyond free tools, there are low-cost survey platforms like SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics, social media analytics tools like Sprout Social, and other digital tools that let you gather data, analyze trends, and generate insight to feed into business strategy—without breaking the bank.

Using Qualtrics for the first time to build a relatively complex survey from scratch, without writing a single line of code, was a revelation for me, as I’m sure it is for non-specialists.

This cost efficiency particularly benefits startups and smaller businesses without the resources for a dedicated research team or insight specialists. It also deepens the skill set and the range of questions you can answer as an individual researcher.

Research tools are increasingly user-friendly and accessible to non-experts.

When I first tried SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), I was fumbling through Stats 101 at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand—last millennium, no less. I don’t recall much beyond the baffling complexity of the software and the confusing, non-intuitive methods for importing and analyzing data.

The long-suffering computer lab assistant grudgingly held my hand through the various steps, and I eventually scraped a pass. Little did I know that the much-loathed stats and research methods element of my psychology degree would be the most practical part once I entered the workforce.

Now, the tools to analyze, manipulate, and visualize data are more powerful and far more intuitive than they used to be. You can still export data to tools like SPSS for more detailed analysis, but platforms like Qualtrics have powerful analytics and data visualization dashboards built in—so trends and insight are observable at a glance, whether or not you’re an expert in data analysis.

Tools now allow you to analyze data in real-time, tying it to strategic decisions

A common criticism of market research is that the process simply takes too long. That’s unsurprising given how many specialized people it once involved—getting the brief, designing the methodology, getting sign-off, handing off between roles.

By the time you’d collected your data, cleaned it, analyzed it, turned it into a PowerPoint report, proofed it, and waited two weeks for a window to present it, the findings were a little dated—or the moment they’d have been useful had passed.

The tools now available for real-time reporting and real-time decision-making are unprecedented. One area where this matters is PR research, where up-to-the-minute awareness of brand perception—including what’s being said about your business—can be critical, especially in a crisis.

Tools like Signal AI, which collects media mentions of your brand in real time, can be powerful here. They translate data into dashboards showing your brand’s share of voice and positive or negative sentiment—all immediate, so you can see how unfolding events shape public perception of your business.

Instead of waiting for a researcher to gather brand mentions and turn them into a report, you get answers in days, not weeks—and you can make data-driven decisions about business-critical issues right now. These tools are also low-cost, cloud-based, and intuitive for non-experts, so smaller organizations without dedicated research teams can generate valuable insights in-house.

Much like in politics, democratization in research has been a good thing.

Judging by the explosion of research tech shaking up the status quo and reshaping researcher roles, this shift has been a major positive—democratizing access to research and insight while expanding the toolkit available to specialist researchers. And now that generative AI can help shape creative ideas too, perhaps even that old ad agency turf is finally open to visitors.