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Market Research Pitfalls

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Early in my marketing career, at General Mills, we used to hold focus groups in a Minneapolis suburb called Eden Prairie.

I once overheard a couple of our agency partners jokingly refer to this focus group ritual as going to see the “Oracles of Eden Prairie.” Whether new products, campaign strategy, or ad creative, the Oracles of Eden Prairie had major sway.

Focus groups (and all the rest of our market research tools) were imperfect, mysterious, expensive, and seemingly took forever, but they were the best we had at the time.

Market research is one of the areas of marketing most ripe for change, and where we’re seeing some of the most exciting potential impact from new technology, including AI.

Sorin Patilinet, Senior Director at Mars, describes some of the common frustrations with market research:

“In today’s world, you don’t have the time or the luxury to measure creative and to make decisions in three months, everyone screams that you need decisions today.”

Sorin led a team at Mars that created an analytic tool called ACE (Agile Creative Expertise) that measures audience’s emotional reaction and attention to ads to predict effectiveness in driving sales.

Evidenza, founded by Peter Weinberg, Jon Lombardo, and Brian Watroba, is taking market research even further. They’re pioneering the use of synthetic data to create AI copies of customers. Their platform creates digital personas that marketers can interview about just about any burning question in real-time.

Adweek reported that Toni Clayon-Hine, CMO of EY, ran a fascinating test of Evidenza versus traditional market research. They fielded their annual brand survey — asking executives at large companies to share investment plans and thoughts on EY — both ways.

What typically stretched six to eight weeks took Evidenza a day or two, with the same results. Toni said, “It was astounding that the matches were so similar. I mean, it was 95% correlation.”

Ad agencies like Pereira O’Dell, Supernatural, and Media.Monks have also started to experiment with AI-generated focus groups.

This is a new age for the Oracles of Eden Prairie.

New Cartoon Collaboration

Here's the second cartoon from a new collaboration with Confluence by Atlassian on how their product helps set knowledge free.

We’ve all experienced the hassle of getting locked out of a shared doc when we’re trying to work together as a team.

Over 7 weeks, we’re poking fun at some of the workplace pain points like these that Confluence can help solve.

Two Virtual Events in next two weeks

I wanted to share two free virtual events coming up in the next two weeks. I hope to see some of you there!

• February 20th: MoEngage “State of Cross-Channel Marketing in 2025”: I’m co-hosting a webinar to share the cartoons, trends, and insights distilled from their survey of over 800 B2C marketers.

• February 26th: Keynote at Superside’s virtual summit, “Overcommitted: The Art of Doing Less”: I’m giving a keynote on how creativity, data, and AI are shaping the future of marketing and brand-building.

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a cartoon I drew about focus groups in 2013:

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Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.