Ken Donaven on Innovation, Ethics & Disruption in Market Research

1. What are the biggest challenges in market research today, and how are you adapting to them?

The challenges depend on whether you're looking at survey research or qualitative research. For surveys, the big one is data integrity. Artificial intelligence and bots have introduced ways for respondents to cheat, so quality control has become more important than ever. We’ve implemented very rigorous quality control protocols, including safeguards like disabling copy/paste functions in our surveys and flagging suspicious behavior. Even if someone uses AI to generate responses, we make it harder for them to directly plug that into the survey.

On the qualitative side, recruiting knowledgeable respondents is getting tougher. There are so many third-party recruiters out there now that the audiences we used to rely on are fatigued they’ve become somewhat blind to outreach and more difficult to recruit. Cold calling is nearly obsolete. Nobody answers a call from a phone number they don’t recognize anymore.

To adapt, we’ve embraced smarter targeting and leaned into select third-party recruiting platforms. We’re also meeting a new challenge: client expectations have become more sophisticated. That’s a good challenge—it forces us to get sharper and deliver more precise insights.

Of course, incentives are more important than they were a decade or so ago. In the past, we conducted thousands of interviews with no incentives—just cold calls and a clear explanation of what we were doing. That doesn’t work anymore. Time is our most valuable commodity, and we now compensate nearly every type of participant, whether it’s a survey respondent or an interviewee. But incentives come with their own challenges. When money is involved, there’s a stronger motivation to game the system. That’s why we’ve evolved not only how we recruit but also how we verify participants and their responses. Data quality and incentive strategy are now tightly intertwined.

2. What role does innovation play in market intelligence, and how do you plan to stay ahead?

Innovation is everything. We’re using methods today that perhaps didn’t exist even five years ago. Take willingness to pay research—it’s becoming more common, and we’re also seeing a resurgence in conjoint analysis, which had gone quiet for a while.

Sometimes we have to invent new methodologies altogether. One example is our “Benefit-Value Analysis” methodology, which we created to help a client to get information about a proposed product iteration without revealing what the product actually was. We essentially devised a way to survey the market to determine the value customers placed on various product benefits, honing in on an actionable calculation of market value and, therefore, pricing strategy. It worked incredibly well, and now it’s part of our toolkit to apply to other research projects..

We’re also investing in an area we pioneered known as “Emotional iIntelligence”—understanding how emotions drive buying decisions, both for consumers and B2B audiences. Our linguistic-based emotion analysis can be applied to any survey or even retroactively to existing research. Proprietary to our firm, we developed this methodology in partnership with Dr. Tom Snyder, a noted psychiatrist with a PhD in neuroscience, who had become fascinated with the human expression of experienced emotions. The tool is AI-assisted, but always human-guided—we never rely on AI alone to interpret emotions. Context is everything. We are fond of saying, Artificial Intelligence + Human Intelligence = Augmented Intelligence.

3. What industries are seeing the most disruption in consumer behavior, and how does research help brands stay agile?

Honestly, it’s easier to ask which industries aren’t seeing disruption. That said, automotive is a great example of an industry in which consumer preferences and market adoption has undergone significant disruption in recent years. Specifically, the EV surge hit hard initially and then eventually pulled back. As a result, many of our clients in that supplier space—especially those tied to battery production—are over-capacitized. That’s created a lot of uncertainty. As consumer demand has shifted, so too have their manufacturing and supply chain strategies. Understanding how disruption is moving markets is key to innovation and planning.

Inflation has also had a major effect across industries. Food service, consumer electronics—pretty much any industry that touches consumers—are seeing shifts. Political and global economic factors add even more variability.

This is where market sizing research plays a huge role. We help clients see where their markets are going, not just where they’ve been. For one industrial manufacturer, we’ve done global market sizing to understand how their opportunities have shifted due to macro changes. Businesses need to know “where the hockey puck is going” (not just where it is today)—and we help them see that so they can make informed decisions about where, when and how to pivot, if appropriate.

4. In the era of privacy, how can companies ensure ethical data collection while still gaining valuable insights?

Ethical data collection is a huge priority, especially with privacy concerns growing. We use multiple layers of quality control—some are traditional, like attention checks within surveys, but we also use tools to detect bots and AI-generated responses. We track time-on-task and look for patterns in the data to make sure it's human and thoughtful.

Because we use third-party panel providers, there’s a built-in layer of anonymity. We don’t know who the respondent is, and neither does our client. That’s why our QC has to be rock-solid—we can’t go back and ask someone to clarify. It also means our respondents participate voluntarily and with full awareness. Multiple levels of isolation between client and respondent and researcher and respondent help to ensure that responses are authentic and complete, with no influence by those conducting the survey or commissioning the project.

5. What new trends in market research are emerging, and how should businesses prepare for them?

Of course, AI is the obvious trend, but it’s not the silver bullet people might think. We use it cautiously and mostly for support, not for decision-making itself. Privacy issues prevent us from using generative AI tools like ChatGPT for client-specific questions—those can’t become part of the public domain, which would happen if we entered them into publicly accessible large language models.

The less obvious but equally important trend is the rise of strategic pricing research. Since COVID, we've done more pricing work than we did in the previous 20 years combined. Businesses are trying to figure out not just what the market will bear, but what’s a fair price based on the value they provide.

There’s been so much uncertainty—pandemic, supply chain chaos, inflation, tariffs—and now many organizations are creating new roles internally just to address pricing strategy. They want to know how they stack up against competitors and whether their value proposition matches the price. That’s where we come in with tools that go well beyond guesswork.

Final thought: As market research continues to shift in response to new technologies, economic forces, and evolving consumer behaviors, staying ahead requires a mix of innovation, adaptability, and rigor. Whether it’s navigating evolving technologies, tightening privacy regulations, or responding to the ripple effects of global economic shifts, market research today is as much about adaptation as it is about insight. Success will come in constantly refining the tools, asking smarter questions, and never settling for surface-level answers.