1st July 2019

Extending Our Offer - Data Science: going beyond the traditional

At 56 Degree Insight we firmly believe in reaching out to those who have expertise in complementary areas to ourselves. Prerit Souda is one of the UK’s foremost exponents of bringing ‘big data’ and other non-survey data into the world of research and insights – to add considerable value to research beyond the traditional survey approaches. At 56DI, we are delighted to partner with his company – PSA Consultants – on anything that goes that little bit beyond the traditional survey. Here, Prerit illustrates the types of analysis he can undertake – and how it could help your business…

Whenever we think of market research, we think of surveys or focus groups followed by some statistical reports. Businesses have used such techniques (‘traditional research’) for the last 70 years with some minor incremental changes. But with the growing amount of human activities online, decreasing human attention span (impacting survey responses) and shrinking market research budgets, the challenges facing these traditional methods are increasing. So, what’s the alternative?

Some of the alternatives often considered are social media data, behavioural data, geospatial data, CRM data, IOT (Internet of Things) data and the list goes on and on. The problem with these different datasets is that while these are massive new datasets in their own right, often they don’t give the full picture or don’t always answer strategic questions around branding, product opinions, consumer trends, sector strength, etc. With this problem in mind, for the last 5 years, we have been working on creating a new method of doing market research. The core idea is using social and digital data (e.g., twitter, facebook, youtube, etc. along with data scraped from public websites, blogs, forums, review sites, etc.)  in the centre and all its data and metadata linked up with other digital datasets and traditional research; we call it a brocade method.

So what does this all mean? It’s not only about creating frameworks but also about generating useful strategic insights. And that’s what is shown below for two sectors of interest:

TOURISM: We used a combination of social & search data, tourism forums & reviews data, immigration data, geofenced locational data along with traditional survey metrics to understand the likes & dislikes of tourists coming to a city, the pattern of movement inside the city, the influence of weather on their choices while helping the tourist board uncover previously unknown problems faced by tourists.

RESTAURANT: Working with a small independent restaurant brand we used a combination of reviews data, experience data (collected via surveys), geo-locational data, demographic information along with POS sales data to understand patterns in sales, changes in choice with menu alterations, relation between location & ease to travel & others. Our research helped the client modify its menu items & create a real time promotional strategy.

Find out more

Preriit Souda has a wealth of experience in this area and we are delighted to partner with him.  Please get in touch with him either directly or via your 56DI team