The market research insights industry has long been characterized by a resistance to change. This likely results from the academic nature of what we do. We don’t like to adopt new ways of doing things until they have been proven and studied.

I would posit that the insights industry has not seen much change since the transition from telephone to online research occurred in the early 2000s. And even that transition created discord within the industry, with many traditional firms resistant to moving on from telephone studies because online data collection had not been thoroughly studied and vetted.

In the past few years, the insights industry has seen an influx of capital, mostly from private equity and venture capital firms. The conditions for this cash infusion have been ripe: a strong and growing demand for insights, a conservative industry that is slow to adapt, and new technologies arising that automate many parts of a research project have all come together simultaneously.

Investing organizations see this enormous business opportunity. Research revenues are growing, and new technologies are lowering costs and shortening project timeframes. It is a combustible business situation that needs a capital accelerant.

Old school researchers, such as myself, are becoming nervous. We worry that automation will harm our businesses and that the trend toward DIY projects will result in poor-quality studies. Technology is threatening the business models under which we operate.

The trends toward investment in automation in the insights industry are clear. Insights professionals need to embrace this and not fight it.

However, although the movement toward automation will result in faster and cheaper studies, this investment ignores the threats that declining data quality creates. In the long run, this automation will accelerate the decline in data quality rather than improve it.

It is great that we are finding ways to automate time-consuming research tasks, such as questionnaire authoring, sampling, weighting, and reporting. This frees up researchers to concentrate on drawing insights out of the data. But, we can apply all the automation in the world to the process, yet if we do not do something about data quality, it will not increase the value clients receive.

I argue in POLL-ARIZED that the elephant in the research room is the fact that very few people want to take our surveys anymore. When I began in this industry, I routinely fielded telephone projects with 70-80% response rates. Currently, telephone and online response rates are between 3-4% for most projects.

Response rates are not everything. You can make a compelling argument that they do not matter at all. There is no problem as long as the 3-4% response we get is representative. I would rather have a representative 3% answer a study than a biased 50%.

But, the fundamental problem is that this 3-4% is not representative. Only about 10% of the US population is currently willing to take surveys. What is happening is that this same 10% is being surveyed repeatedly. In the most recent project Crux fielded, respondents had taken an average of 8 surveys in the past two weeks. So, we have about 10% of the population taking surveys every other day, and our challenge is to make them represent the rest of the population.

Automate all you want, but the data that are the backbone of the insights we are producing quickly and cheaply is of historically low quality.

The new investment flooding into research technology will contribute to this problem. More studies will be done that are poorly designed, with long, tortuous questionnaires. Many more surveys will be conducted, fewer people will be willing to take them, and response rates will continue to fall.

There are plenty of methodologists working on these problems. But, for the most part, they are working on new ways to weight the data we can obtain rather than on ways to compel more response. They are improving data quality, but only slightly, and the insights field continues to ignore the most fundamental problem we have: people do not want to take our surveys.

For the long-term health of our field, that is where the investment should go.

In POLL-ARIZED, I list ten potential solutions to this problem. I am not optimistic that any of them will be able to stem the trend toward poor data quality. But, I am continually frustrated that our industry has not come together to work towards expanding respondent trust and the base of people willing to take part in our projects.

The trend towards research technology and automation is inevitable. It will be profitable. But, unless we address data quality issues, it will ultimately hasten the decline of this field.