We need to connect Market Research to Political and Social outcomes. Today we don’t do it. And it is lame as hell not to.
So what do I mean?
To illustrate let me present a fairly trivial example of the potential of what I am talking about. Imagine a great market research company hired by the government to discern trends in the likely educational attainments of the current 13-17 year-old population. Will these folks go to college? If so, where and what will they study? How much are they willing to pay? How will they pay? Student loans? By Working? From their parents?
Sounds reasonable right?
Now imagine that the market research company decides to take it further. They decide to correlate the trends in desired subjects of study with the trends in corporate and public educational programs to see if they are even somewhat related? They decide, further, to map the professed desires of the soon-to-be-minted college-goers to the likely trends in employment, public debt, and defense spending and find out that, lo and behold, we are soon to have a generation of kids, heavily in debt, who have little chance of jobs outside the military-complex. We find, further, that there is a huge disconnect between the desires of an entitled group (entitled because these folks go into debt and spend time getting educated in hopes that this very education will entitle them to well-paying jobs) with no outlet for their entitlement. Sounds like a recipe for social revolution.
Yada yada. You get the point. Making connections between data sets is crucial to unlocking the real impact of data. Make sense?
So what connections are YOU going to make today?
About Romi Mahajan
