Consumer behaviour

Customer chatting over laptop in store

Understanding Customer Experience

Leave a Comment / Consumer behaviour, Customer Satisfaction, Market Research, Opinion, Research / By

Customer experience surveys are widely used in business today.  They are widely regarded as a great way to get invaluable feedback from customers.

But whether you’ve been running a customer survey for years, or whether you’ve never run one, it’s worth reflecting on the benefits they can offer.  And it’s also worth considering how to go about getting the most from them.

Why run a customer experience survey?

Quite simply happy customers are loyal customers and loyal customers deliver more recommendations and more repeat business.

A well-designed customer satisfaction survey will deliver several important business benefits:

  1. By monitoring customer opinion, you’ll have early warning of any potential problems that might cause you to lose revenue further down the line.
  2. It will tell you which improvements will do the most to boost customer loyalty and sales.
  3. It can also tell you what improvements/changes are unlikely to deliver much value.
  4. In short, it prioritises what you need to do to nurture a loyal customer base.

So, when a customer survey is well designed and used effectively, it serves as a positive vehicle for tangible business improvements.

However, it is possible to get it wrong.  And if this happens you might end up with something that delivers limited actionable insight.

So, how do you ensure your customer survey falls into the former category rather than the latter? Here’s a list of pointers I’ve pulled together, based on over 30 years’ experience of designing and running such programs:

Make sure you set the right objectives to start with

Let’s start at the very beginning by looking at the overall business objectives for a customer survey.  Get that wrong and you’ll be lucky to get any real value from the exercise.

The most common reason why such surveys can fail is when they’ve been designed as a box ticking exercise from the very start. If a survey is just used to provide internal reassurance that all is well, it isn’t ever going to serve as an effective agent for change.

Fortunately, this kind of problem is rare.  A more common issue is that sometimes these surveys can be used exclusively in a limited, tactical, way. Here performance scores for each area of the business might be used to directly inform such things as bonuses and performance reviews.  That’s all fine but if this is the only tangible way in which the survey is used, it’s a missed opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a value in using surveys to tactically monitor business performance.  But their true value lies in using them to guide business improvement at a strategic level.  If we lose sight of this goal, we won’t ever get the most out of such surveys.

Takeaway:  The primary goal of a customer experience survey should move beyond monitoring performance to providing direction for business improvement.

Using standard templates is just a starting point

Moving on to how we go about designing a survey, the next trap people can fall into is taking the easy option.  By that, I mean running a generic customer survey based on standard templates.

It is easy enough to find standard templates for customer experience surveys online.  Most DIY survey tools will provide them as part of the service.  Standard questions for such things as NPS and generic performance scoring are readily available.

But standard templates are, as the name implies, standard.  They are designed to serve as a handy starting point – not an end in themselves.

There is nothing in any of them that will be unique or specific to any business.  As a result, if you rely purely on a standard template, you’ll only get generic feedback.

That might be helpful up to a point, but to receive specific, actionable, insight from a survey you need to tailor it to collect specific, actionable, feedback from your customers.  And that means you need to ask questions about issues that are specific to your business, not any business.

Takeaway:  Only ever use standard templates as a starting point.  Always tailor customer experience surveys to the specific needs of your business.

Avoid vague measures, focus on actionable ones

It may sound obvious, but it’s important to make sure you are measuring aspects of business performance that are clearly defined and meaningful.  That means it needs to be specific, so there is no confusion over what it might or might not mean when you come to look at the results.

Leaving these definitions too broad or too generic can make it very hard to interpret the feedback you get.

Let’s take an example – ‘quality’.  What exactly does that mean?  It might mean slightly different things in different industries.  And it might mean different things to different people, even within the same organisation.

If your product is machinery, product quality could refer to reliability and its ability to run with minimal downtime.  However, it might also relate to the quality of work the machine produces.  Or perhaps, under certain circumstances, it might refer more to accuracy and precision?  When you think about it, ‘quality’ could encompass a range of different things.

To avoid potentially confusing outcomes of this sort you need to use more specific phrasing.  That way, when you identify an area that needs improvement, it’s clear what needs to be done.

Takeaway:  Ensure you’re testing specific measures of business performance. 

Always Provide a mechanism for open feedback

Not everyone will answer open-ended questions by any means.  Indeed, surveys can fall into the trap of asking too many, leading to a poor response.

However, one or two well targeted open questions will provide invaluable feedback.  It is a golden opportunity to pick up on issues and opportunities for improvement that you haven’t thought of, but which your customers have!

Takeaway: Always include one or two well targeted open questions to elicit feedback from customers.  But don’t add too many or response rates will suffer, and the quality of answers will be diluted.

Ensuring insight is actionable

Of course, you might already have a customer experience survey.  Perhaps it has been running for years.  If it is delivering good value then happy days.  However, that’s not always the case.

Sometimes people find that the outputs from an existing customer experience survey are not particularly actionable.  If that is the case, then it’s a clear warning sign you’re doing something wrong.

There are only two reasons why this ever happens:

1st reason:   Senior management in the business are incapable of driving positive change, even if they are provided with clear direction as to what they should be doing.

2nd reason:  The survey was poorly designed in the first place and is unlikely to ever deliver anything actionable.

Unfortunately, the first of these problems can’t be solved by a survey or any other form of market insight come to that!  But it is possible to do something about the latter!

The answer is simple – you need to redesign your customer experience survey.  Don’t keep re-running it and repeating the same old mistakes.

Takeaway: If your customer experience survey is not delivering actionable insight, stop running it.  You need to either re-design it or save your money and not bother!

Legacy questions and survey bloat

Has your customer survey been running for several years now?  Does the following pattern sound familiar?

  • Every year, the previous year’s questionnaire gets circulated to survey stakeholders for feedback.
  • Each stakeholder comes back with feedback that involves adding new questions, but they don’t often suggest taking any of the old questions away.
  • Some of the new questions (perhaps all) relate to some very specific departmental initiatives.
  • The questionnaire gets longer.
  • The response rate goes down as a result.
  • A year goes by and it may not be entirely clear what has been done with the outputs of some of these questions.
  • The process repeats itself….

Of course, there is a benefit in maintaining consistency.  However, there’s little point measuring things that are no longer relevant for the business.

It may well be time for a more fundamental review. 

Maybe even consider going back to square one and running some qualitative research with customers. Could you be missing something vitally important that a few open conversations with customers could reveal?

Alternatively, maybe you need to run some internal workshops.  How well do current priorities really align with legacy questions in the survey?

Takeaway: If you think your customer survey has become overly bloated with legacy questions, don’t shy away from carrying out a full review.  

About Us

Synchronix Research offers a full range of market research services, polling services and market research training.  We can also provide technical content writing services & content writing services in relation to survey reporting and thought leadership.

For any questions or enquiries, please email us: info@synchronixresearch.com

You can read more about us on our website.  

You can catch up with our past blog articles here.

Inputting credit card data onto a laptop

Working with Digital Data Part 2 – Observational data

Leave a Comment / Consumer behaviour, Market Research, Opinion, Research / By

One of the most important changes brought about by the digital age is the availability of observational data.  By this I mean data that relates to an observation of actual online consumer behaviour.  A good example would be in tracing the journey a customer takes when buying a product.

Of course, we can also find a lot of online data relating to attitudes and opinions but that is less revolutionary.  Market Research has been able to provide a wealth of that kind of data, more reliably, for decades.

Observational data is different – it tells us about what people actually do, not what they think (or what they think they do).  This kind of behavioural information was historically very difficult to get at any kind of scale without spending a fortune.  Not so now.

In my earlier piece I had a look at attitudinal and sentiment related digital data.  In this piece I want to focus on observational behavioural data, exploring its power and its limitations.

Memory vs reality

I remember, back in the 90s and early 2000s, it was not uncommon to be asked to design market research surveys aimed at measuring actual behaviour (as opposed to attitudes and opinions). 

Such surveys might aim to establish things like how much people were spending on clothes in a week, or how many times they visited a particular type of retail outlet in a month, etc.  This kind of research was problematic.  The problem lay with people’s memories.  Some people can recall their past behaviour with exceptional accuracy.  However, others literally can’t remember what they did yesterday, let alone recall their shopping habits over the past week.

The resulting data only ever gave an approximate view of what was happening BUT it was certainly better than nothing.  And, for a long time, ‘nothing’ was usually the only alternative.

But now observational data, collected in our brave new digital world, goes some way to solving this old problem (at least in relation to the online world).  We can now know for sure the data we’re looking at reflects actual real-world consumer behaviour, uncorrupted by poor memory.

Silver Bullets

Alas, we humans are indeed a predictable lot.  New technology often comes to be regarded as a silver bullet.  Having access to a wealth of digital data is great – but we still should not automatically expect it to provide us with all the answers.

Observational data represents real behaviour, so that’s a good starting point.  However, even this can be misinterpreted.  It can also be flawed, incomplete or even misleading.

There are several pitfalls we ought to be mindful of when using observational data.  If we keep these in mind, we can avoid jumping to incorrect conclusions.  And, of course, if we avoid drawing incorrect conclusions, we avoid making poor decisions.

Correlation in data is not causation

It may be an old adage in statistics, but it is even more relevant today, than ever before.  For my money, Nate Silver hit the nail on the head:

“Ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don’t light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Haagan-Dazs.”

[Nate Silver]

Finding a relationship in data is exciting.  It promises insight.  But, before jumping to conclusions, it is worth taking a step back and asking if the relationship we found could be explained by other factors.  Perhaps something we have not measured may turn out to be the key driver.

Seasonality is a good example.  Did our sales of Christmas decorations go up because of our seasonal ad-campaign or because of the time of year?  If our products are impacted by seasonality, then our sales will go up at peak season but so will those of our competitors.  So perhaps we need to look at how market share has changed, rather than basic sales numbers, to see the real impact of our ad campaign.

Unrepresentative Data

Early work with HRT seemed to suggest that women on HRT were less susceptible to heart disease than other women.  This was based on a large amount of observed data.  Some theorised that HRT treatments might help prevent heart disease. 

The data was real enough.  Women who were on HRT did experience less heart disease than other women.

But the conclusion was utterly wrong.

The problem was that, in the early years of HRT, women who accessed the treatment were not representative of all women. 

As it turned out they were significantly wealthier than average.  Wealthier women tend to have access to better healthcare, eat healthier diets and are less likely to be obese.  Factors such as these explained their reduced levels of heart disease, not the fact that they were on HRT.

Whilst the completeness of digital data sets is improving all the time, we still often find ourselves working with incomplete data.  Then it is always prudent to ask – is there anything we’re missing that might explain the patterns we are seeing?

Online vs Offline

Naturally, digital data is a measure of life in the online world.  For some brands this will give full visibility of their market since all, or mostly all, of their customers primarily engage with them online.

However, some brands have a complex mix of online and offline interactions with customers.  As such it is often the case that far more data exists in relation to online behaviour than to offline.  The danger is that offline behaviour is ignored or misunderstood because too much is being inferred from data collected online.

This carries a real risk of data myopia, leading to us becoming dangerously over-reliant on insights gleaned from an essentially unrepresentative data set. 

Inferring influence from association

Put simply – do our peers influence our behaviour?  Or do we select our peers because their behaviour matches ours?

Anna goes to the gym regularly and so do most of her friends.  Let’s assume both statements are based on valid observation of their behaviour.

Given such a pattern of behaviour it might be tempting to conclude that Anna is being influenced by ‘herd mentality’. 

But is she? 

Perhaps she chose her friends because they shared similar interests in the first place, such as going to the gym? 

Perhaps they are her friends because she met them at the gym?

To identify the actual influence, we need to understand the full context.  Just because we can observe a certain pattern of behaviour does not necessarily tell us why that pattern exists.  And if we don’t understand why a certain pattern of behaviour exists, we cannot accurately predict how it might change.

Learning from past experiences

Observational data measures past behaviour.  This includes very recent past behaviour of course (which is part of what makes it so useful).  Whilst this is a useful predictor of future behaviour, especially in the short term, it is not guaranteed.  Indeed, in some situations, it might be next to useless. 

But why?

The fact is that people (and therefore markets) learn from their past behaviour.  If past behaviour leads to an undesirable outcome they will likely behave differently when confronted with a similar situation in future.  They will only repeat past behaviour if the outcome was perceived to be beneficial.

It is therefore useful to consider the outcomes of past behaviour in this light.  If you can be reasonably sure that you are delivering high customer satisfaction, then it is less likely that behaviour will change in future.  However, if satisfaction is poor, then there is every reason to expect that past behaviour is unlikely to be repeated. 

If I know I’m being watched…

How data is collected can be an important consideration.  People are increasingly aware their data is being collected and used for marketing purposes.  The awareness of ‘being watched’ in this way can influence future behaviour.  Some people will respond differently and take more steps than others to hide their data.

Whose data is being hidden?  Who is modifying their behaviour to mitigate privacy concerns?  Who is using proxy servers?  These questions will become increasingly pressing as the use of data collected digitally continues to evolve.  Will a technically savvy group of consumers emerge who increasingly mask their online behaviour?  And how significant will this group become?  And how different will their behaviour be to that of the wider online community?

This could create issues with representativeness in the data sets we are collecting.  It may even lead to groups of consumers avoiding engagement with brands that they feel are too intrusive.  Could our thirst for data, in and of itself, put some customers off?  In certain circumstances – certainly yes.  This is already happening.  I certainly avoid interacting with websites with too many ads popping up all over the place.  If a large ad pops up at the top of the screen, obscuring nearly half the page, I click away from the site immediately.  Life is way too short to put up with that annoying nonsense.

Understanding why

By observing behaviour, we can see, often very precisely, what is happening.  However, we can only seek to deduce why it is happening from what we can see. 

We might know that person X saw digital advert Y on site Z and clicked through to our website and bought our product.  Those are facts. 

But why did that happen?

Perhaps the advert was directly responsible for the sale.  Or perhaps person B recommended your product to person X in the bar, the night before.  Person X then sees your ad the next day and clicks on it.  However, the truth is that the ad only played a secondary role in selling the product – an offline recommendation was key.  Unfortunately, the key interaction occurred offline, so it remained unobserved.

Sometimes the only way to find out why someone behaved in a certain way is to ask them.

Predicting the future

Forecasting the future for existing products using observational data is a sound approach, especially when looking at the short-term future.

Where it can become more problematic is when looking at the longer term.  Market conditions may change, competitors can launch new offerings, fashions shift etc.  And, if we are looking to launch a new product or introduce a new service, we won’t have any data (in the initial instance) that we can use to make any solid predictions.

The question we are effectively asking is about how people will behave and has little to do with how they are behaving today.  If we are looking at a truly ground-breaking new concept then information on past behaviour, however complete and accurate, might well be of little use.

So, in some circumstances, the most accurate way to discover likely future behaviour is to ask people.  What we are trying to do is to understand attitudes, opinions, and preferences as they pertain to an (as yet) hypothetical future scenario.

False starts in data

One problematic area for digital marketing (or indeed all marketing) campaigns is false starts.  AI tools are improving in their sophistication all the time.  However, they all work in a similar way:

  • The AI is provided with details of the target audience.
  • The AI starts with an initial experiment,
  • It observes the results,
  • Then it modifies the approach based on what it learns. 
  • The learning process is iterative, so the longer a campaign runs, the more the AI learns, the more effective it becomes.

However, how does the AI know what target audience it should aim for in the initial instance?  In many cases the digital marketing agency determines that based on the client brief.  That brief is usually written by a human which should (ideally) provide a clear answer to the question “what is my target market?”

That tells the Agency and, ultimately, the AI, who it should aim for.

However, many people, unfortunately, confuse the question “what is my target market?” with “what would I like my target market to be in an ideal world?”  This is clearly a problem and can lead to a false start.

A false start is where, at the start of a marketing campaign, the agency is effectively told to target the wrong people.  Therefore, the AI starts by targeting the wrong people and has a lot of learning to do!

A solid understanding of the target market in the first instance can make all the difference between success and failure.

Balancing data inputs

The future will, no doubt, provide us with access to an increased volume, variety, and better-quality digital data.   New tools, such as AI, will help make better sense of this data and put it to work more effectively.  The digital revolution is far from over.

But how, when, and why should we rely on such data to guide our decisions?  And what role should market research (based on asking people questions rather than observing behaviour) play?

Horses for courses

The truth is that observed data acquired digitally is clearly better than market research for certain things. 

Most obviously, it is better at measuring actual behaviour and using it for short-term targeting and forecasting. 

It is also, under the right circumstances, possible to acquire it in much greater (and hence statistically reliable) quantity.  Crucially (as a rule) it is possible to acquire a large amount of data relatively inexpensively, compared to a market research study.

However, when we are talking about observed historic data it is better at telling us ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ than it is at telling us ‘why’ or ‘what next’.  We can only look to deduce the ‘whys’ and the ‘what next’ from the data.  In essence it measures behaviour very well, but determines opinion, as well as potential shifts in future intention, poorly. 

The role of market research

Question based market research surveys are (or at least should be) based on structured, representative samples.  It can be used to fill in the gaps we can’t get from digital data – in particular it measures opinion very well and is often better equipped to answer the ‘why’ and ‘what next’ questions than observed data (or attitudinal digital data). 

Where market research surveys will struggle is in measuring detailed past behaviour accurately (due to the limitations of human memory), even if it can measure it approximately. 

The only reason for using market research to measure behaviour now is to provide an approximate measure that can be linked to opinion related questions measured on the same survey.  To be able to tie in the ‘why’ with the ‘what’

Thus, market research can tell us how the opinions of people who regularly buy products in a particular category are different from less frequent buyers.  Digital data can usually tell us, more accurately who has bought what and when – but that data is often not linked to attitudinal data that explains why.

Getting the best of both data worlds

Obviously, it does not need to be an either/or question.  The best insight comes from using digital data in combination with a market research survey.

With a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches it is possible to obtain invaluable insight to support business decisions.

About Us

Synchronix Research offers a full range market research services and market research training.  We can also provide technical content writing services.

You can read more about us on our website.  

You can catch up with our past blog articles here.

If you like to get in touch, please email us.

Sources, references & further reading:

Observational Data Has Problems. Are Researchers Aware of Them? GreenBook Blog, Ray Poynter, October 2020

Hands holding tablet and watching Youtube

The Visual Communications Age

Leave a Comment / Consumer behaviour, Gaming, Market Research / By

The past few years has seen a boom in visual communications across social media.  An estimated 2.3 billion people now use YouTube every month.  Instagram and TikTok have around 1 billion monthly users each.

Visual social media of this kind – be it in the form of still images or video clips – are transforming the way in which we communicate.  Part of this change is simply a function of accessibility.  Technology has made it far easier for people to create visual images and make short video clips and mini films than ever was the case, even ten years ago.  And now there are more social media outlets than ever before where it is possible to publish such material.

It is incredible to think that twenty years ago Facebook, YouTube and Twitter did not even exist.  How much the world has changed!

However, we should not be tempted to think that social media platforms will continue to grow forever.  There is a finite limit to the number of users any platform can attract, after all.  Like in any other market, market growth will inevitably give way to market maturity at some point.

Platform maturity

Facebook’s owner Meta Platforms recently recorded a record daily loss on the stock market.  This came in the wake of the news that Facebook’s Daily Active Users fell to 1.929bn in the three months to the end of December. This compares to 1.930bn in the previous quarter.

This is the first time Facebook has experienced such a fall; a clear sign that this particular platform is reaching its mature phase.  Of course, it was bound to happen eventually.  After all, there are only so many active daily users you can have from a global population of 7.7 billion (some of whom do not have good internet access).

Rising Platforms

TikTok’s owner ByteDance, by contrast, saw revenues grow by 70% in 2021 (although even this is slower than the spectacular growth seen previously).

Facebook is primarily about written communication, albeit pictures, images and gifs are often shared on the platform.  TikTok is, of course, mainly about the short form video clip.  The BBC recently reported that Facebook’s owner has warned of pressures on revenues precisely because of stiffer competition from TikTok and YouTube.

Are these signs, therefore, of a wider trend?  Are we seeing a real sea-change in the way in which we communicate?  A transition from a culture of communication based on the written word to one where visual images and video become the dominant mode of interaction?

A visual future?

Are these portents of things to come?  Of a world where communication is primary achieved with the video clip and the streamed podcast?  Some would argue it is already happening, after all it is now quite easy for anyone to broadcast their own content on YouTube, TikTok or Twitch and it will only become easier with each passing year.  Now everyone is a content publisher.

There are also signs of generational differences.  Anecdotally we are hearing that younger people are more likely to engage with social media like TikTok and YouTube.  Social media such as Facebook, with its higher reliance on written content, still has an appeal for older generations but is, perhaps, less suited for a generation addicted to the video clip. 

But can we put any hard numbers to these claims?

Generational differences

A Synchronix survey from last year looked at social media use amongst gamers.  We wanted to understand the extent to which people of different ages engaged with social media to discuss or exchange information about gaming.  The results showed some clear generational differences in terms of preference.

Graph of gamer social media preferences by age

Platforms

YouTube: Emerges as the most popular social media platform for gamers under the age of 45.  Older gamers also engage with it extensively but, for the over 45s, is relegated to the number two spot. 

Instagram: is the second most popular media with the under 25s.  It is less popular with the 24-35 age group but still ranks 3rd overall.  Its popularity clearly diminishes with age, especially amongst the over 45s.

TikTok:  If anything, TikTok illustrates the most significant generational differences of all.  It is used by nearly 40% of the under 25s, placing it neck and neck with Instagram within this age group.  This drops to 26% amongst the 25-34’s (still significant).  However, its popularity wanes markedly in older age groups.

All three brands of visual based social media reflect the same overall pattern.  Their popularity is greatest in the youngest age groups and lowest amongst the over 45s.

Facebook:  Despite the recent slight dip in use, Facebook is popular with all ages.  However, it is not even one of the three most popular platforms for the under 25s, although this soon changes when we start to consider older age groups.  It is the second most popular platform for the 25-44 age group and the most popular with the over 45s.  Its higher reliance on written content lends it greater appeal for older audiences.

Twitter: Twitter is fourth most popular in the under 25s but drops in popularity with older age groups (especially the over 45s).  This is interesting as it shows that Twitter, which is primarily text based, demonstrates that written communications retain a certain degree of popularity with the younger generation.  The short form tweet, with its soundbite feel, is still able to resonate with generation Z in a way that other forms of written communication appear to struggle to do.

The future

One thing is now clear. Visual media has become critical for effectively communicating with Gen Z.  However, they are not entirely abandoning the written word.  Their preference for Twitter above Facebook is likely influenced by a texting culture in which short soundbites are strongly preferred to longer written posts.

The recent dip in Facebook usage likely reflects this generational behaviour shift.  However, the downtick in Facebook engagement should not be exaggerated.  The fact is that Facebook remains very popular amongst the over 25s and the most important social media for engaging with the over 45s.

As newer generations of internet users reach adulthood, it is likely that different generational preferences will become increasingly marked.  Marketeers will increasingly need to adapt strategies to employ a different mix of social media channels depending on the generation of customers they are aiming to communicate with.

So, a campaign aimed at the over 45s may need to focus more on Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp.  However, a campaign aimed at a Gen Z audience would need to take very different approach, and would do better to focus mainly on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Given the rapid pace of change we have experienced in the world of social media over the past decade, we can expect further significant changes over the next few years.  The next TikTok is likely to be a platform that facilitates video and/or audio interaction rather than something more reliant on the written word.   

As Gen Z comes of age and as younger generations follow, we will move to a culture highly dependent on streaming, video communication and visual interaction.  Perhaps we will eventually see this evolve into virtual reality driven experiences.  In fact, I’m sure this will happen at some point.  And although I suspect it is still a good way off, I would not be surprised if we found ourselves living in such a world twenty years from now.

About Us

Synchronix Research offers a full range market research services and market research training.  We can also provide technical content writing services.

You can read more about us on our website.  

You can catch up with our past blog articles here.

If you like to get in touch, please email us.

Sources

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60255088#

Playbook – UK Gaming Market Report 2021, Synchronix Research

https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population

https://backlinko.com/instagram-users

https://backlinko.com/tiktok-users

https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statistics/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/funds/exclusive-tiktok-owner-bytedances-revenue-growth-slowed-70-2021-sources-2022-01-20/


A couple gaming

The evolution of gaming – from niche to mainstream

Leave a Comment / Consumer behaviour, Gaming, Market Research, Research / By

There was a time, perhaps not so long ago, when gaming was viewed as a niche hobby, appealing only to young men.  Many people’s idea of a ‘gamer’ was of a teenage boy glued to a computer screen, leading a semi-reclusive and often nocturnal lifestyle.

But this has changed.  Gaming has evolved significantly since those times and now reaches a far more diverse demographic than ever before.

In 2021, the fact is that most people are gamers.  Using the results from our recent gamer survey, we explore just how widespread and diverse gaming has become.

Old stereotypes persist

Surprisingly, some people still regard gaming as a niche interest, apparently clinging to many of the old stereotypes.

Only this year in September an article appeared in the Telegraph under the headline “Grown men shouldn’t be wasting their lives playing video games.”   The story implied firstly that gaming is a bit of a frivolous waste of time for an adult, and secondly that it’s mainly men, rather than women, who tend to ‘waste’ their time doing it.

Of course, it is strange indeed that gaming should be singled out in this manner. Other equally unproductive leisure pastimes like watching movies, attending a gig or being a spectator at a sports event are, for some reason, considered to be less of a waste of time.  But leaving that aside, the idea that gaming is still the exclusive preserve of geeky teenage boys couldn’t be further from the truth.

Most of us are gamers

The reality is that gaming is now a mainstream interest.  Our survey shows that 76% of adults aged 16+ played a game last year. 

Now you might argue that playing Call of Duty for an hour on your old Xbox360 once last year does not a ‘true’ gamer make.  There are of course a few people who only play occasionally like this.  However, perhaps a better way of looking at it is that around 60% of us play games on a regular basis (at least once a week).

So, the truth is that most adults are playing games regularly.

Gaming is no longer an all-male preserve

The idea that gamers are mostly all men is also false.  The reality is that the majority (57%) of adult women play games every week (compared to 64% of men).  So, male gamers still make up the majority – but only just.

Men and women often engage with gaming differently, however.  They have different platform preferences, different genre preferences and even different preferences in where and how they like to buy their games.

Info graphic of UK gaming habits by gender

Men are more likely to play on the more conventional gaming platforms like PCs or games consoles.  40% of male gamers would solely play regularly on such devices, with only 18% being predominantly mobile gamers.  For women, the reverse is true. Nearly half of female gamers play regularly on mobiles but hardly at all on PC or console platforms.  Only a minority of women (15%) would tend to avoid mobiles in favour of playing regularly on a PC or Console.

Men are more likely to opt from games like shooters, sports and fighting games – all classic genres with a long-established history.  However, for women, casual games are by the far the most popular.  Women also like games with a mystery solving theme (rather than fighting and/or shooting themes) and many women like to play what we’ve termed “table games”.  This relates to a mobile, console or PC version of a conventional game that you might expect to physically play at your table (like sudoku, scrabble, jigsaw puzzles or solitaire).

Platform and genre preference also impact on where people like to buy their games.  Women, with a stronger preference for mobile and casual gaming are much more inclined to source their games from places like the App Store and Google Play.  For men, sources like Amazon and PlayStation Store become far more important.

Gaming across the generations

But is it still true to say that gaming is mainly all about teenagers and people in their early twenties?

No.

68% of youngsters aged 16-24 play games every single week.  This is higher than the average for all adults, so gaming certainly appears to be most popular with this age group.

However, a very similar proportion of 25–34-year-olds play just as often. And if we look at the 34-44 age group we see that as many as 64% also play regularly. 

Gaming remains almost as popular with the 45-54 age group; 62% of whom play every week.

For the 55-64 age group, we do see some decline in interest in gaming.  However, significant numbers of people of this age still play and still play regularly.  41% play games every week.  It seems that many of the old Space Invaders generation are still gaming strong.

Gaming is evolving as a key media for the C21st

Gaming is fast becoming as much a part of our daily leisure activities as watching movies or listening to music. 

As a leisure medium, gaming benefits from the potential to offer a high degree of interaction.  The player does not passively experience a game, they actively participate in it.  If a game designer can get it right, they can create a truly absorbing, interactive experience that will attract a highly engaged audience.

This isn’t simply an opportunity for gaming brands but, increasingly, a fast-evolving opportunity for brands outside the industry.  The medium of gaming provides such brands with a golden opportunity to connect with a highly engaged audience.

eSports events already attract significant sponsorship from brands like Intel, Coca-Cola, Honda and Red Bull.  For a brand like Intel, the tie-in is an obvious one, with gamers being such important consumers of higher-end PCs.  But what about soft drinks and automotive brands? Well, here the tie-in is also compelling; regular gamers account for as many as 70% of adults who say they enjoy soft fizzy drinks and 61% of car owners.

Gaming offers all these brands a means to reach out to highly engaged audiences; some of which may be hard to connect with via other more traditional media.

One thing is for sure, as gaming continues to evolve, it will reach out to wider and more diverse sections of the community. This will bring with it new challenges as well as new opportunities.

For further information about the UK gaming market & Synchronix

The statistics quoted in this article come from our UK Gaming Market Report of 2021. 

This report provides invaluable insight into current trends in the UK gaming market, covering detailed gamer demographics, genre preferences, device preferences, trends in Cloud, eSports audiences, VR, gamer consumer profiles, aspirations for the future and more. 

You can find out more about this report on our website.  

If you wish to follow our weekly blog you can view all our past articles on our website here.

If you have any specific questions about our services, please contact us.

Sources

Playbook – UK Gaming Market Report 2021, Synchronix Research

Mental Health Foundation

Telegraph, Camilla Tominey, September 2021

Two gamers playing on a phone

The Casual Gaming Boom

Leave a Comment / Consumer behaviour, Gaming / By

Casual gaming has been around in one form or another for years.  You might even argue that some of the earliest games like Pac Man could be classed as casual games.  However, the genre has really taken off over the past decade.  The increased use of social media and the ubiquity of Smartphones has created the perfect environment in which casual gaming has been able to flourish.

App Annie predicts that mobile gaming spending in 2021 is on track to surpass $120 billion.  As a substantial chunk of that spend will be on casual and hyper casual games; the enormous size of the opportunities are self-evident. 

So, are we experiencing a casual gaming boom?

Who is the ‘casual’ gamer?

A decade or so ago, if you asked people to describe a gamer, the image of a teenage boy playing Call of Duty late at night on his games console would likely have sprung to mind.  Or, perhaps, they might be playing World of Warcraft on a desktop PC instead. But things have moved on a lot since then.

People who play casual and hyper casual games now include a great many gamers who never play either on a console or a PC.  A significant number of these gamers have come to gaming more recently and, indeed, might only ever experience gaming on a Smartphone or, perhaps, a tablet. 

This, then, represents a different audience of gamers from the traditional gaming market.  It is a much more female focused audience and has many different likes and dislikes, hobbies and consumer preferences that would distinguish the casual gamer from someone who might prefer to play CoD on an Xbox or Cyberpunk 2077 on a PC.

The gaming market is no longer a single homogenous audience, but rather a collection of different (if sometimes overlapping) audiences.  That means different channels, different media and very different commercial opportunities. Different audiences also provide very different opportunities in terms of the future potential for advertising and sponsorship deals.

But casual gaming is also a market that is still growing.  So, the composition of this audience is changing and evolving each year.

The audience is not only different in terms of its composition. It is also clearly different in terms of what people are looking for from gaming.

The Casual Gaming Experience

Games like Assassin’s Creed and Cyberpunk 2077 are enthralling role-playing experiences.  Many people play these games precisely because they like to get into the characters and absorb themselves in a fantasy world.

It is easy to sit down in front of PC or a console and lose yourself for hours in a highly engrossing escapist experience.  In addition, it’s an experience that can be very intense, requiring sometimes lengthy periods of quite focused concentration.  This can be quite a mentally challenging experience.  It may also be quite difficult to dip in and out of – you often feel obliged to hang on just to get to that next cut-scene or to find a good place to save.

But casual and hyper casual games are far less demanding in terms of concentrated time.  You can potentially play a game in 15 or 20 minutes.  This makes it easy to fit your gaming in around other things.  Play a quick game in your lunch hour, or a quick couple of games on the train on your commute to and from work.  As one casual gamer put it on an online forum:

I play half an hour to an hour on my phone everyday. I don’t really have much to do while I’m on the bus or at lunch, so I’d just use to time to play video games on my phone.

Relax with a casual game

It’s because these game can be less mentally demanding that people are more likely to see them as relaxing.  They deliver a means to wind down after a hard day’s work.  As another gamer put it:

What I loved so much about Animal Crossing was how I could wind down and relax.

As such, these games lend themselves more to humour, light-hearted entertainment, and cartoon characters.

fun and utterly hilarious.

But, whilst it is possible to quickly fit in a game in your coffee break, it is still also possible for gamers to spend hours playing such casual games.  Indeed, gamers can and do become every bit as a engrossed with games like Clash of Clans on their mobile phones as a console gamer might with Red Dead Redemption.

In a way gaming is becoming not that much different from television.  TV producers have, for many years, understood that working within different genres means appealing to different audiences.  The audience you might attract for an enthralling thriller is not the same as you’d get for a light entertainment programme. 

So, as the variety of different gaming genres evolves, so too will the variety of audiences.  And so too will the need to understand them independently from each other.

A Blank Canvas

Many of the new generation of casual gamers have come to gaming via the Smartphone and via casual games specifically.  There are many amongst them who have never played a console game or even a PC game.  Perhaps, they have only started playing games within the past few years.  All this means that they are not constrained by any of the pre-conceptions that PC and console gaming fans might have.  That means they represent much more of a ‘greenfield’ opportunity for the future.

This relative lack of ‘expectations’ is likely to mean these gamers are more open to experimenting with new things.  Perhaps they are more open to in-game advertising, perhaps they offer the best opportunities for cloud.  Indeed, any genuinely new innovation in gaming might find a more fertile ground for uptake amongst these gamers than elsewhere.

On the downside, it should be remembered that many of these newer gamers may well not be so familiar with concepts that gaming publishers and developers might ‘assume’ gamers know about.  That means gaming companies need to be careful in using gaming jargon – these guys just might not understand it (or worse, misunderstand it). 

Assume nothing.

Cloud?

Mobile gaming may well prove to be an area to watch in terms of cloud streaming services such as Google Stadia, Microsoft’s Ultimate Game Pass and Amazon Luna. 

The mobile casual gaming audience includes many gamers who are not wedded to traditional console and PC gaming.  They will also include many people who are comfortable with streaming film or music to their mobiles already, so cloud gaming won’t be an alien concept to them.  But here, the cloud services need to get their content right.  Content, after all, is king – demand will entirely depend on a wide enough choice of content.

However here again, gaming companies need to be careful.  These people are not the enthusiastic, technically literate, hardcore of the gaming world.  They may not even have heard of cloud gaming or even understand what makes it any different from other forms of gaming.  They probably haven’t read any of the articles on the subject that appear in the gaming press.  So, this raises the question – how best to market such services to such people? 

Monetisation

Gaming has historically been financed by gamers paying for their games (either outright or perhaps by subscription).  However, recent years have seen a growing proportion of revenues generated by microtransactions where gamers seek to buy in-game content such as upgrades to the game, additional equipment (some functional, some purely aesthetic) and so on.

There are many games available where you can play a basic version of the game for free and any revenues come purely from upgrades to a more complete version of the game and/or from microtransactions.

The free-to-play model has proven a successful option and in future I can see this approach extended to deliver an even higher proportion of content for free.  Monetisation here will therefore be increasingly driven by the microtransaction approach and even by advertising and sponsorship deals.

TV is significantly financed by private advertising and sponsorship and this is now an increasingly important revenue stream for esports – it is surely only a matter of time before we start to see this proliferate across the gaming industry.  The obvious route in will be through the Smartphone based games – and that means casual gaming is likely to be at the forefront.

However, to capitalise on these opportunities gaming companies will increasingly need to learn from the playbook of other entertainment industries (like TV) who have been playing the advertising and sponsorship game far longer.  That means understanding audiences and knowing what advertisers and/or sponsors would offer a great fit for any given audience.  It also means finding the best way to accommodate this without disrupting game play or without it becoming overly intrusive.

Channels

One potentially dark cloud on the casual gaming horizon relates to channels.  At the end of the day casual gaming on Smartphones depends very heavily on two key channels – App Store and Google Play.  This grants Apple and Google incredible market power.

The current legal dispute between Epic and Apple has highlighted the potential problem here – are these channels becoming so dominant that they can effectively squeeze the margins of gaming companies down to near minimal levels?  This very fear has led Epic to invest heavily in its own store front.  At the time of writing, it is yet to be seen as to whether Epic’s legal action with Apple will change anything.

Nevertheless, Epic’s move to develop its own store may yet prove to be a shrewd one for the longer term.  You only need to look at food retailing in the UK to see that a relatively small number of dominant retail chains can seriously squeeze the margins of the food producers. 

The Future

There is little doubt that we will continue to see continued growth and diversity emerge in the casual gaming market over the next couple of years.  New audiences will continue to emerge and evolve as a result.

The challenge for the gaming companies will be to find ways to best capitalise on these audiences – and that will require a detailed understanding of them, plus, of course, how they continue to evolve.

About Synchronix

Synchronix is a full-service market research agency.  We believe in using market research to help our clients understand how best to prepare for the future.  That means understanding change – whether that be changes in technology, culture, attitudes or behaviour. 

We have considerable experience in the design and execution of market research surveys in the gaming, leisure and consumer tech sector.  We can offer a range of services to help you identify new market opportunities and to understand the current and potential audience for any given game. 

You can find out more about us on our website.  

If you wish to follow our weekly blog you can view all our past articles on our website here.

If you have any specific questions about our services, please contact us.

Sources

ANIMAL CROSSING COMMUNITY

APPANNIE

BBC

COMMONSENSEMEDIA

GAMESKINNY

MARKET WATCH

QUORA

SEATTLE TIMES

Robot image

I Robot

Leave a Comment / Consumer behaviour, Market Research, Technology / By

“In the twenty first century, the robot will take the place which slave labour occupied in ancient civilisations.”

Nicola Tesla

The Robots are coming

The past few decades have seen many significant advances in robotics.  As a result, we now live in a world in which an increasing variety of tasks utilise robots.  Oxford Economics estimated that robots could displace about 20 million manufacturing jobs by 2030 (that’s 8.5% of the current global workforce).

Indeed, the number of robots in the world has doubled over the past decade.  And, whilst they are not expected to revolt against the humans any time soon, they are nevertheless changing the world in which we live.

But what are Robots?

What counts as a robot?  Before we get carried away talking about machine uprisings, let’s start by considering what a robot actually is.

As it turns out, it can be quite difficult to come up with a definition that everyone agrees on.  Most people would agree that a robot is a machine.  But a robot must be more than just a machine to make it a robot. Kate Darling, a roboticist at the MIT Media Lab, defines a robot as:

‘a physical machine that’s usually programmable by a computer that can execute tasks autonomously or automatically by itself’

On this definition a radio-controlled drone is not a robot.  This is because it can only act based on instructions it receives from its controller.  However, it can become a robot if it becomes capable of performing actions independently of its human controller based on some pre-programmed automated logic.  For instance, if it is programmed to detect and avoid obstacles during flight without needing to be instructed to do so.

This fine dividing line between machines that are remotely controlled and machines that have the capability for autonomous action can make it difficult to spot robots.  Just how autonomous does a machine’s actions need to be to count as a robot? 

Simple machines that are not robots can perform tasks such as switching on and off, without human input, but we don’t necessary consider these to be robots.  It needs to be automated; it needs to respond to input from its environment and it needs to act independently of direct human control.  However, it also needs to be reasonably sophisticated in its ability to respond – otherwise a thermostatically controlled switch might potentially be called a robot!

How many Robots are there today?

Most robots are, at present, used in manufacturing and, in particular, for automated assembly processes.  The (International Federation of Robotics) IFR estimated that there were around 2.7 million industrial robots in use around the world in 2019. 

Robots are big business.  2019 saw 373,000 new industrial robots installed at a cost of US$13.8b.  

However, 73% of these robots exist in just five countries – the USA, Japan, Germany, China and South Korea. 

So what are Robots being used for?

Most robots are used in manufacturing and logistics operations.  Typically, that would be for assembly operations or for moving goods/parts around the factory floor or in a warehouse.

28% of all the robots installed in 2019 were in an automotive business.  The image many of us have of robots assembling cars is still a fair representation of the reality of robotics in the workplace today.  And a further 24% are in use in the electrical/electronic manufacturing industries.  That’s just these two industry sectors purchasing over half of the world’s robots.

However, robots are now also being used in a wider variety of other manufacturing sectors such as metal machinery, plastics and food. We can expect to see them used more extensively across manufacturing over the coming decade as technology develops viable applications outside of the automotive space.

Also, whilst most robots are still being installed in factories, we are now starting to see new types of robots emerging in other industry sectors as well.

When drones become Robots

Most drones are not robots.  That is because their radio operators directly control them. And in that respect, they are no different from radio controlled model aircraft.

However, some of the more advanced drones incorporate a degree of AI in the form of Computer Vision which enables them to detect and respond to obstacles whilst flying without the need for operator intervention.  This kind of technology also allows them to record observations about their environment in a more automated way.

The more autonomous a drone becomes, the more robot-like it becomes.  In future robot drones will become a reality.

Robots in logistics

Robotic (driverless) forklift trucks have been around for a while but up until now not in huge numbers.  In 2019, firms bought around 5,000 of these robot trucks – that sounds a lot but it’s still only 0.3% of the global forklift truck market and only about 1% of the size of the global market for industrial robots.

Nevertheless, logistics is becoming more automated, and the competitive demands generated by businesses like Amazon will no doubt act as an accelerator of change.

How fast robots will catch on in logistics remains an open question, but many industry commentators expect to see significant growth in their use over the coming decade.

Robots in healthcare

Robots are now also starting to make an appearance in our hospitals and health clinics.

Here, there are number of different applications.  Covid has seen a particular growth in interest in UV disinfection robots.  These may have had most prominence in the news over the past year, but they are by no means the only application.

Toyota have developed a robot (WelWalk WW-200) to help with the rehabilitation of patients suffering from lower limb paralysis.  And some companies have even developed robot surgeons to assist in simpler or more routine surgical procedures.

It is clearly very early days with a lot of this technology, but many people feel healthcare robotics is an area to watch for some potentially significant growth opportunities in the future.

Driverless vehicles

Driverless vehicles are, of course, a form of robot.  Trials are currently underway with driverless cars and we could well see these vehicles start to make an appearance on our roads before 2021 is out.

These robot drivers can negotiate their way from A to B – responding to traffic conditions and making autonomous decisions about when to speed up and slow down, when to avoid obstacles, and when to stop for traffic lights etc.

Just about any form of vehicle could be driverless.  Indeed, we may even see the day where passenger aircraft essentially become robot-controlled drones.

Robots in agriculture

One sector that is likely to see an increased use of robots is agriculture.  Here we are likely to see more driverless tractors and combines in use in the future. 

There are also robots today that can pick fruit, capable of gauging the ripeness of fruit and deciding for themselves which fruit to pick and which not.

Robot house servants

Simple robots are in use today for such basic tasks as vacuuming and CES 2021 showcased several concept domestic robots designed to help with a variety of common household tasks such as washing the dishes and tidying up.

The day when we are all served by Robot Jeeves is still a long way away, however, although the next decade is likely to see some increasingly sophisticated automation technology move us a lot closer to it.

I Robot

To get to a stage where we come face to face with a fully functioning, intelligent, humanoid, robot is (let’s face it) a long way off.

The key developments that are yet to come, which would make that possible, relate more to AI than to creating an electro-mechanical machine capable of replicating human motion.

How close are we to creating such an robot?

Various experts have different views on this.  Some have suggested some time between 2030 and 2060 is theoretically realistic – so potentially within our lifetimes!

That said, we have an issue in creating that kind of AI.  And that is the age-old AI problem – to design Artificial Intelligence, you really need to be able to define what “human intelligence” actually is.  Philosophers have debated this question for centuries without really arriving at a clear answer!

One thing is for sure though, robotic technology is going to offer some significant growth opportunities across a range of different sectors and applications over the coming decade.  It is just a question of identifying and exploiting the new opportunities that this technology will bring.

About Synchronix

Synchronix is a full-service market research agency.  We believe in using market research to help our clients understand how best to prepare for the future.  That means understanding change – whether that be changes in technology, culture, attitudes or behaviour. 

We have considerable experience in the design and execution of market research surveys in the field of both b2c and b2b science, engineering and tech markets.  We can offer a range of services to help you identify new market opportunities and to understand the position and strength of your brand in the market.  You can read more about this on our website.  

If you wish to follow our weekly blog you can view all out past articles on our website here.

Sources

ARIC Journal

BBC

Builtin

CNET

Heartbeat

IFR

Interesting Engineering

Intuitive

Investopedia

John Deere

MMH

Ohio University

Oxford Economics

Toyota

Wired

Flying Drone

The Drone Revolution

Leave a Comment / Consumer behaviour, Technology / By

Since 2010, the growth in the use of drone technology has been gathering pace at an incredible rate.  When first developed in the mid-1930s drones were highly experimental and expensive.  Today, they are not only used for a wide variety of commercial applications, but have also become a popular and affordable piece of consumer tech. 

So, are we on the verge of a Drone Revolution?

How many people are using Drones?

In the UK, in May 2021, there were nearly 4,500 certified commercial drone operators of small drones and 1,751 operators of larger drones.   These are businesses using drones for serious commercial applications – applications deemed to present an equivalent safety risk to that of manned aviation.

However, these are now dwarfed by the number of hobbyists.  The CAA estimated there were over 130,000 UK drone users at the end of 2019 – the vast majority of which were hobbyists rather than commercial users.

In a larger market like the USA, the numbers are even higher.  The FAA figures show that there were nearly 875,000 registered US drone users in May 2021.

The Hobbyist

Drones are now very affordable, and a hobbyist can buy a decent drone to easily get up and flying for under £1,000 these days.  

Research by Drones Direct shows that hobbyists are mainly using their drones for filming video (77%) or taking photographs (75%).  The typical profile of these people is mostly male (96%) and middle aged (52% are aged over 45).  It is also clear that these are hobbyists using their drones quite frequently (58% fly at least once a week). 

There would appear to be a strong link between drone use and photography, with two thirds of drone users are also keen on photography.  Around one fifth of the adult population list photography as a hobby (that’s potentially millions of people), so the potential for future growth, just based on current use patterns, is clearly significant.

Commercial Users

Drones have been used extensively by the military for decades now and much of the impetus for the development of this technology has come from the development of such applications. 

The military will no doubt continue to provide an important impetus for innovation in drone technology.  However, these days, a wide variety of other commercial applications are emerging.  These are likely to prove increasingly important markets for drone tech suppliers in the future.  Key commercial areas where drones are now being used would include:

  • Journalism & film making; drones are increasingly providing the primary way for obtaining aerial shots.
  • Disaster management; in gathering information and getting emergency supplies to isolated areas following disasters such as earthquakes.
  • Search and rescue; when fitted with enhanced imaging and thermal cameras, drones can play a critical role in search and rescue operations.
  • Mapping: drones can map terrain features in locations that are difficult to cover by other means.
  • Law enforcement and surveillance; drones provide a relatively unobtrusive means of surveillance and allow observation to be undertaken without the need for a physical human presence.
  • Weather monitoring and storm tracking.
  • Building inspections; drones allow construction workers to view the exterior of large structures and gain detailed photographs of places that are difficult to physically access by other means.
  • Inspections of processing plants (e.g. for the oil and gas industry); any large structure can now be inspected by drones.  Detailed images, including thermal ones, can be taken of inaccessible areas, allowing maintenance engineers to view the state of equipment without being physically present.
  • Shipping and delivery; at present applications are being developed that focus mainly on the distribution of small packages. However, in the future, it may even be possible to transport larger cargos using large drones.

Developments

Virtually any application involving observation, or transport and delivery of small items are potentially suited to drone use.  One thing is for certain.  As the price of the technology reduces and the technology improves, it will become increasingly practical to perform a wider variety of commercially viable applications.

So, what further developments should we look out for in the future?

Logistics – Amazon Prime Air

Amazon have been working to develop a fleet of drones to deliver small packages as part of its logistics network.  One key potential advantage of such an approach comes from the fact that drones can avoid traffic and deliver packages by a more direct route (as the crow flies in some cases). 

The service will be called Prime Air and is currently being tested in several countries.  In the UK Amazon have recently doubled the size of their Prime Air team and we are likely to see the service launch in a matter of months rather than years.

Hydrogen power

Hydrogen is an emission-free fuel and has the advantage of keeping a drone airborne for longer. The technology first appeared in 2016 but we are now starting to see more hydrogen powered drones come onto the market.  The capability to remain airborne for longer makes them particularly suited for applications such as agriculture, mapping and for disaster response in remote locations.  Any application, in fact, where there is a need for a long flight time.

At present the primary barrier to hydrogen power is the cost but as prices come down and technology improves we can expect to see more hydrogen powered drones in the future.

AI and improved navigation

As more drones fill our skies it will become increasingly important for them to navigate their way around avoiding each other and various other safety hazards.

AI drones that use computer vision to detect and navigate their way avoiding other airborne objects and hazards are now starting to appear on the market. High performance on-board image processing coupled with other navigational aids will make this increasingly possible.  At present, of course, such technology is expensive, but we can expect to see it become more commercially available over the next few years.

Perching drones

Drones all have a limited amount of flight time available to them.  However, this can be prolonged significantly if a drone is able to land on a building or other high object and make its observations without needing to expend energy to remain airborne.

Various technologies are being developed to allow drones to do this; perhaps enabling a drone to ‘perch’ on a streetlight or to rest on the corner of a building.  This would have the benefit of making a drone more stable whilst it is making its observations as well as conserving power.

Problems and dangers

Of course, as drones become more ubiquitous, they bring with them their own unique set of problems and challenges.  Not least is the potential for this technology to interfere with existing air traffic or for it to be misused by criminals and even terrorists.

In 2019, the year before Covid cleared our skies of aircraft, UK aircraft pilots reported 91 confirmed incidents involving drones and a further 29 incidents that may well have been drones but were unidentified.  This compares to only 4 confirmed incidents involving drones and 1 unconfirmed incident that were reported in 2010.

This has prompted the UK government to introduce a registration system in 2020 and to require users of certain types of drones to obtain specific certification.  Now even hobbyists must hold a flyer ID and past a test to legally fly their drones in the UK.

Whilst such measures will no doubt serve to help minimise the danger of accidental incidents, the threat of criminal or terrorist misuse is a different matter.  In warzones, drones are already used for surveillance, to disrupt airspace and even to deliver small explosives. 

With new threats comes new technology.  Countermeasures of various kinds are being developed, these include directed energy weapons with the power to disable drones using such techniques as lasers, particle beams or radio frequency waves.  One of the latest uses high-powered microwaves to knock out a drone’s onboard electronics.

If future, we can expect to see measures of this kind deployed to protect airports and other sensitive potential targets.

The Future

It seems clear that the coming decade will see an increasing proliferation of drone technology.  This technology has grown from the highly specialised and niche use of a decade ago to a stage where it is now beginning to experience mass commercial and consumer adoption. 

The coming decade will see this technology becoming more ubiquitous as it develops further and the costs come down.  The challenges faced by drone suppliers will be to keep developing the technology at a rapid pace whilst remaining conscious of the public safety concerns.

However, the future is bright and no doubt there are many potential applications out there that new technological advances will enable drones to exploit.  There is also a potentially significant untapped consumer market.  As the technology reaches out to a mass market, so manufacturers will need to think increasingly about their marketing, and building strong and distinctive brand image and awareness amongst potential customers. 

It would seem that we are indeed on the verge of a drone revolution.

About Synchronix

Synchronix is a full-service market research agency.  We believe in using market research to help our clients understand how best to prepare for the future.  That means understanding change – whether that be changes in technology, culture, attitudes or behaviour. 

We have considerable experience in the design and execution of market research surveys in the field of both b2c and b2b science, engineering and tech markets.  We can offer a range of services to help you identify new market opportunities and to understand the position and strength of your brand in the market.  You can read more about this on our website.  

If you wish to follow our weekly blog you can view all out past articles on our website here.

Sources

Airprox

Amazon

BBC

Business Insider

CAA

Cloudemployee

Dronelife

Dronesdirect

FAA

Interesting Engineering

Pilot web

Reliability web

Sciencefocus

UAV coach

Your Story

UK Elections 2021 – How is the political landscape changing?

Leave a Comment / Consumer behaviour, Politics, Research / By

How is the political landscape changing? As the dust settles on the May 2021 elections, it is worth taking a closer look at the results to see what they might tell us.   

England

The overall results for labour have been bad across the English elections.  Labour has lost seats across many areas and, at the same time, the Tories have picked seats up.

Overall, the Tories have increased their number of councillors in contested areas by + 11%, labour have declined by -20%. 

The LibDems remain the third largest party but have seen little real change.

Other important highlights are that UKIP has now disappeared from the political scene and Reform has failed to hoover up those old seats.  The main beneficiary from the demise of UKIP has clearly been the Tories. 

There has also been a dramatic increase in the amount of Green councillors (more than doubling their number of councillors in contested areas to 151). 

One final important highlight is the fact that there have been gains across the board for a mix of independents (an 18% increase to 255 councillors).

Labour’s highest profile loss was, of course, Hartlepool.  However, here, the story has more to it than meets the eye.

Hartlepool

In Hartlepool the Tories saw their vote increase from 28.9% at the last general election to 51.9% on May 6th.   Much of this gain is likely the result of the disappearance of the Brexit Party as a meaningful political force.  25.8% voted BP in 2019 which, if added to the Tory vote at that time, would total 54.7% – similar to the Tory vote this time around.

Whilst this may explain the Tory win, it does not explain the reduction in the Labour vote (falling from 37.7% in the last general election to 28.7%).  Smaller parties like the Greens may have taken votes from Labour but as the Greens only accounted for 1.2% of the vote, this can hardly explain it.

One point to remember is that the incumbent MP was forced to leave office because of allegations of sexual harassment and victimization.  This may have served to turn some voters away from Labour – but the question remains that whatever their reasons were for not voting Labour, who did those voters turn to?

A big factor appears to have been an independent candidate – Sam Lee, a local businesswoman.   Sam positioned herself as someone who stood up for the local business community and a Westminster outsider.  A vote for her, she claimed, would “show politicians that we are sick of their party games and empty promises”. A vote for her then, was, in many ways, a rejection of the status quo.  Sam polled 9.7% of the vote and, as she didn’t stand in 2019, it looks like she may have taken a fair number of votes away from Labour.

No change..?

So, in 2021, it may be that Hartlepool saw no real significant switch from Labour to Tory at all – that had already happened in 2019, when large numbers of voters changed to the Brexit Party.  And having switched to the BP, the move to voting Tory seems to have been an easy step for many. 

The vote for Sam Lee is significant though.  It shows a considerable number of people prepared to vote for someone outside the political establishment, and a desire amongst many for something quite different from the established parties.

The Red Wall weakens in the North and Midlands

In general, results in the North and Midlands have shown the biggest Tory gains plus the most serious Labour losses.

Again, the explanation seems to lie mainly with picking up former Brexit Party voters rather than outright direct conversion of 2019 Labour voters. 

The biggest Tory gains compared with previous local elections were in Yorkshire and Humberside (+11.2% up), the West Midlands (+9.7%) and the North East (+7.3%).

These marry up with the more significant Labour losses – Yorkshire and Humberside (-4.5%), the West Midlands (-5%) and the North East (-4%).

Labour losses and Tory gains were less significant elsewhere in England.

So, are we witnessing a sea-change in voting patterns in the North driven by regional factors or is it something more complicated than this? 

It is true that the so-called Red-Wall has clearly been seriously eroded in many parts of the North.  However, Labour has performed well in the area in certain large cities.  Could it be that this is more about how voting patterns are changing in metropolitan v non-metropolitan areas, than it is about changing attitudes in the North?

The Metropolitan Effect

Labour has performed well in northern metropolitan areas such as Liverpool and Manchester, showing that it can hold its own there under the right conditions.

In Manchester, Labour even gained ground.  Perhaps this was due in no small part to the charismatic Andy Burnham but the numbers tell a convincing tale.

Labour increased its share of the vote on the first choice for Mayor from 63.4% in 2017 to 67.3% in 2021. The Tories slipped from 22.7% to 19.6%.  Here, the lesser parties were very much out of the picture.

The Labour Mayoral vote also held strong in Liverpool.  No sign of any cracks in the Red Wall in these major northern cities; a quite different story from the story we see in less urban areas. 

So why is the metropolitan vote in the North so different from the trends we see elsewhere?

The Role of ‘Englishness’

Will Jennings, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Southampton University, feels that the migration of voters to the Brexit Party and then to the Tories has much to do with the emergence of a strong English national identity.  This tends to view the Tories as a party that is positive about the English and Labour as essentially mediocre about, or even hostile to, an English cultural identity.

Evidence for this can be found in BSA research that looked at the motives behind voting Leave/Remain in the Brexit vote.  This found that people who identified themselves as ‘British’ and not ‘English’ in England, voted 62% in favour of Remain.  However, 72% of people who identified themselves as ‘English’ and not ‘British’, voted in favour of Leave.

This sentiment, Jennings would argue, has translated into a vote for the Brexit Party in 2019 and has now converted into a Tory vote.  Parts of the North which have switched to Tory are often areas where this sense of ‘Englishness’ is strongest.

However, cities such as Manchester and Liverpool are more cosmopolitan in character and have strong and distinct local identities (as Mancunians or Scouse).  As a result, the tendency to strongly identify with an ‘English’ nationalist identity is less evident.  This in turn translates into a much-reduced willingness to switch away from Labour to the BP or Tories.

Treating the ‘North’ as a single homogenous area would therefore appear to be a gross over-simplification.

A different picture in Southern England

In the South, there was less dramatic change in voting patterns.  Although we saw some shift to the Tories in the council elections, the change was nowhere near as significant or dramatic as that seen in political landscape in the North.

However, there are a couple of interesting results that are worth pulling out – both Labour Mayoral wins.

The first is the result for Cambridge and Peterborough.   On the first choice alone, the Tories would have won (Tory 41%, Labour 33%, LibDems 27%).  However, once the LibDems were knocked out of the picture the second-choice votes for these voters were overwhelmingly Labour.  The result enabled Labour to win (just) by 51%. 

The second result is for the West of England Mayor (which covers Bristol, Bath and North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire).

Here Labour increased its vote from 22.2% to 33.4% in the first round.  The Tories also actually did a little better (increasing from 27.3% to 28.6%).  The LibDems, again, saw limited but negative change (20.2% down to 16.3%) and the Greens again, saw progress (up to 21.7% from 11.2%). 

Again it is worth noting that the presence of a strong independent candidate can affect the results.  In 2017 such a candidate polled 15% of the vote but this time around, no such candidate stood.

This does raise the possibility that a future cooperative arrangement between Labour, Greens and LibDems in the south could potentially cause significant damage to the Tories in some parts of the southern political landscape.  However distant and unlikely such a prospect might seem today.

What about Scotland?

The results in Scotland, of course, have been quite different from anything we see in England.

Here we have seen the SNP make modest progress – increasing their share of the vote from 46.5% of constituency votes at the last parliamentary election in 2016 to 47.7% now.  The Tories saw little change in fortune (21.9% share now vs 22% in 2016).  Labour, too, saw limited change (21.6% down from 22.6%).

The SNP have consolidated and built on their dominant position even if they have not achieved an outright majority.  Some have suggested that they owe their electoral success at least in part to the general perception that Nicola Sturgeon has handled the Covid crisis well. 

One might make a similar observation across the UK.  This is that the light beckoning at the end of the Covid tunnel tends to favour the incumbent administrations – the SNP in Scotland and the Tories in England.  There is no doubt some truth in this and, if so, we can see this pattern repeated in Wales.

What about Wales?

Wales bucked the pro-Tory trend we see in England.  Here comparisons with England are more interesting because Wales, like England, voted Leave (whereas Scotland did not).  However, UKIP and latterly the Brexit Party have never been quite the force in Wales that they were in many parts of England (the Brexit Party registered only 5% of the Welsh vote in the 2019 election). 

Here the Tories have not managed to benefit anywhere near so much from picking up former UKIP or Brexit Party voters.  In 2016 the Tories got 21.1% of the constituency vote, which they have been able to increase to 25.1% this time around.  This no doubt reflects picking up some of the old UKIP votes (which accounted for 12.5% of the votes in the 2016 assembly election).

However, in Wales Labour have increased their share of the vote from 34.7% to 39.9%. Plaid Cymru have remained at pretty much the same level (20.7% vs 20.5% last time).

As with elsewhere, it may well be that the incumbent administration is benefiting from the feeling that we are headed in the right direction Covid-wise. 

The lack of the BP/UKIP factor in Wales in the political landscape meant there were only a limited number of these voters for the Tories to potentially pick up.  This supports Professor Jennings’ view that it is the sense of Englishness that has driven a migration of votes from labour, via UKIP and the Brexit Party, to the Tories.  The absence of the ‘Englishness’ factor in Wales potentially explains why such a pattern has not been repeated here.

In conclusion

It is probably worth concluding by saying that we ought to be very careful in what we read into these results.  The 2021 elections have occurred at a time when so much is in a state of flux.  The Covid crisis makes these times most unusual indeed. 

In a few years’ time when (hopefully) Covid no longer dominates our lives, we will be living in a vastly different world.   Also, we cannot yet say what the longer-term impacts of Brexit may be.  We are also only at the very beginning of the Tory levelling-up agenda.  Much has been promised, but what will be delivered?

This election has highlighted some important emerging trends, but the events of the next few years could yet see things change quite radically.

About Synchronix

Synchronix is a full-service market research agency.  We believe in using market research to help our clients understand how best to prepare for the future.  That means understanding change – whether that be changes in technology, culture, attitudes or behaviour. 

We offer market research services, opinion polling and content creation services.  You can read more about this on our website.  

If you wish to follow our weekly blog you can view all out past articles on our website here.

Sources

Election Results from BBC England

BBC Scottish Election Results

Welsh Election Results from the BBC

Sky News Election Takeaways

BSA

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Marketing Personas – powerful tool or pointless exercise?

Leave a Comment / Consumer behaviour, Market Research, Research / By

What are marketing personas?

You have probably heard of marketing personas (or buyer personas as they are otherwise known).  The purpose of creating marketing personas is to paint a picture of the audience you are trying to reach.  Used well it can be great tool for segmentation marketing.  But used poorly it can, unfortunately, end up being a pointless exercise. 

Where do marketing personas come from?

Whilst many of us may have seen the end result, it is often not entirely clear how these personas were created, or even by whom.

Perhaps a group of sales and marketing people huddle together in a workshop and “brainstorm” a bunch of personas. 

Or perhaps they were created based on some focus groups that some of your marketing team had commissioned. 

Or maybe they were developed from insights generated from a larger scale quantitative market research survey.  Or perhaps all of these. 

How they were created does matter.  They should of course, be based on a broad group of real actual customers – and not just plucked out of the air based on a customer meeting that one person had with a single customer!

How do they help?

They allow us to bring to life different segments of our market and, in doing so, allow us to better target them and serve their needs. Or do they?

“Segments must be Measurable, Substantial, Accessible, Differentiable, and Actionable.”

Philip Kotler

Unfortunately, sometimes, people can go through a lengthy exercise in creating fancy personas only to find that they aren’t of much actual use.  They can look good.  They look as though they make sense.  You can even bring them to life with infographics, videos and swish artwork.  That’s all cool … but what use are they?

When such an exercise goes wrong you can end up with something that looks very impressive but is hard to relate to any of the questions or challenges that your business actually faces. 

But it doesn’t have to be like that.  Done right, marketing personas can be an extremely powerful business tool. 

So how do you get it right?

Make sure you start with some clear business objectives

First things first.  You must always start with a good reason why you want to create marketing personas in the first place.

That of course means you need to start some tangible business questions.

Obvious questions usually include the following:

  • Who is most likely to buy our products?
  • What makes them buy?
  • How do we reach them?
  • What do we need to do to persuade them to buy?

Once you have these questions you then know what you are trying to achieve. Your success criteria for the entire exercise are then clear and simple – can the personas we have created answer our original questions.  Keep these questions clearly in mind throughout the exercise – they are your guiding light and anchor point for the entire project

Do you need them?

An important question to ask before you get too far with generating your personas is:  “Do I even need to generate multiple market personas” ?

Generating multiple market personas implies you are adopting a market segmentation strategy.  That means you want to divide your customers and prospects into different groups and adopt a different marketing approach for each of these groups.

This more targeted approach can bring great rewards. 

But to develop and execute specific campaigns and strategies to address different market segments requires resources.  Not everyone will have the resources or the time to invest in this.

This comes back to our original questions – why are you doing this?

Sometimes, people develop market personas for the wrong reasons.  Sometimes what you really need is something simpler. 

Maybe all you need is a good profile of your target customers and prospects as a single group.  One group of people who you can focus your marketing resources on, directing a specific approach.

In this case you just need a market profile that simply allows you to describe those people who represent good prospects for targeting to your marketing agency in an accurate and meaningful way.

Make sure Personas integrate into your marketing strategy

Although it sounds very obvious, people can sometimes get this wrong and, when they do, generating marketing personas can be a waste of time.

If you decide you need marketing personas then this should form an integral part of your marketing strategy.  The insight you gain from the personas will help you to design a targeted segmentation strategy that will shape and inform your marketing.

You don’t need to generate marketing personas if you have already determined what your strategy will be.  The whole point of creating them is to help formulate your strategy.

Personas are powerful tool for briefing your marketing agency

When you brief a marketing agency, the first thing they will want will be for you to paint a picture of your target audience.  Who are you trying to reach?  What do you need to say to them?

The more they know about the audience the better.  The more specifically they can then target any media campaigns and the more engaging they can make the messaging.

With well crafted and meaningful marketing personas you should be able to provide them with everything they need to create a very targeted and relevant campaign for you.

How do you know your Marketing Personas are any good?

OK, so you have completed the process of pulling together what you need to create your personas.  You believe they will answer the questions you set out at the start of the process.  Now you need to bring them to life and present them to colleagues, to your marketing agency and your partners.

So now you need to create a concise and meaningful guide that explains what these personas are and why they matter.

By this time you may have been working on the project for a few weeks.  So there is a real risk that you, your market research agency and anyone else closely involved might not be able to see the wood for the trees.  So it is worth taking a step back and looking at what you have, to make sure it does indeed give you everything you need.

You can check this by asking a few basic questions:

  • Is the Marketing Persona clearly defined and easy to understand?  How easy is it to explain to a colleague who has had no involvement in the project?
  • Does it tell you how big/small the market segment it represents actually is?  Is this particular Marketing Persona representative of 50% of your potential market or 5%?
  • Does it clearly outline the opportunity that this market segment represents?  Will these people buy from you?  Will it be an easy or a hard sell?  If your salesman is speaking with one of them, what are the chances that you will make a sale?
  • Does it tell you what this Persona likes and dislikes?  What kind of things are likely to interest and engage with them?  And what might leave them cold?
  • How is this particular Persona different from the other ones?  Can you easily explain why this Persona is different?  What do you need to do differently to engage with this group that you do not need to do with any of the other Personas?
  • What media channels should you use to communicate with this Persona and how is this different from the others?
  • What kind of marketing messages do you need to design in order to ensure that people in this segment will listen and engage with you?

If you are able to reach a point where your marketing personas can be used to provide meaningful and actionable answers to each of these questions, then you know you have created something of real value.

About Synchronix

Synchronix is a full-service market research agency.  We believe in using market research to help our clients understand how best to prepare for the future.  That means understanding change – whether that be changes in technology, culture, attitudes or behaviour. 

If you are looking to create market personas, we can provide a market segmentation services that you enable you to generate these in a structured and successful way.  You can read more about how we do this on our website.

Virtual Future – how will virtual reality shape our future world?

Leave a Comment / Consumer behaviour, Market Research, Online learning, Technology, Training and education / By

Part 2:  VR beyond gaming

More than just a game

In our last blog we began our discussion of VR by looking at what the future may hold in store for this technology in the world of computer games.  However, whilst gaming still represents the most widely used application for VR and AR at present, this technology has many other applications.

In this article, we would like to take a closer look the potential for these.

Remote working

One of the huge changes covid has forced on our professional lives is the need for virtual working.  The business world has discovered that it is perfectly possible for most office staff to work effectively from home for long periods of time.  Indeed, tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams have helped to make home working become the new normal.

But a remote working world, for all its video calls, can be an isolating experience.  Yes, we will be returning to the office sometime this year.  But let’s not kid ourselves it will be the same.  Many people will now be working from home as the norm and hot desking in the office when they need to.  The days of the daily commute, five days a week, every week, are gone.

This remote working scenario is ripe for transformation into a virtual world.  Using VR and AR technology can help to humanise the experience, it can make it more real, more interactive and allow work colleagues to participate in a wider range of interactive tasks.

This technology is already here.  One such solution is Spatial; an AR version of Zoom, enabling work colleagues to interact in an AR office space.  You can interact in a more 3D environment rather than just with 2-dimensional video but the technology also offers other tools such as enabling you to share ideas by scribbling on a virtual white board, share content and images in 3D and so on.  No doubt, as time goes by, technology such as this will continue to add features and tools that make the experience even more interactive.

Socialising

In lockdown we have all, to some extent or other, been forced to get used to the idea of remote socialising.  Often armed with a glass of wine and a Zoom call.  Arguably many Gen Zs have been socialising remotely far more than they do in person for most of their lives.  The only thing that’s changed over the past year is that the rest of us have joined them.

Now, I’m not suggesting people are going to abandon the pubs and restaurants any time soon.  In fact, once these places can re-open, I’m sure they can expect a bit of a boom.  Imagine the novelty value of going to the pub with your friends again? 

But that said, I suspect that socialising remotely will remain a much more important part of our lives post-covid than it was before.  For one thing it is a great way to meet up with friends and family who live far away.  No need to travel, just hop on a Zoom call.

Again, as with working, remote socialising tends to lead naturally to virtual socialising.  The ability to interact in 3D in a virtual environment is unlikely to catch on if it is expensive but – as soon as the price is right – this will eventually become a normal way of communicating.  As with virtual reality workspaces, it is more a question of when than if.

Indeed, tools already exist for virtual socialising such as Altspace VR, VR Chat and Rec Room.

Interior Design and Architecture

An obvious application for VR and AR is interior design.  Using this technology a designer can show their clients how they might transform an interior space.  Such a visualisation can make a design look far more real and can be used to show clients what a range of different alternatives might look like. 

Such technology should ultimately make it easy for people to visualise a range of different options and to alter and adjust designs to see how different scenarios might play out.  And what goes for interior design applies equally well to architecture.  Now it is possible to visit an empty plot of land or a building site and use AR to see exactly what a new building might look like.  You can even walk around it to see just what it looks like in its environment from every angle.

Many clients find it hard to visualise what an end design might look like.  VR can show them in a way that is clear, avoids misunderstanding and negates the need for lengthy explanations.

Having a clear virtual view of what the end product will look like before you even need to build, buy or change anything, clearly has the potential to avoid costly mistakes.   Most importantly, it makes it much less likely that designers and builders will hear the dreaded words “Now I see it, I’m not sure I like it like that.”

Engineering and Industrial Design

Technical design work can often involve large teams and often those teams may be working together but are based in different parts of the world.

Here VR/AR has the same potential as in other fields to link remote working colleagues together and enable them to visualise concepts and designs in 3-dimensions.

People can all see how things might fit together and how the finished article might look.  This can be particularly important if the physical styling and appearance of the end product is key.  It is much better to spot potential problems in a virtual world and correct them, rather than having to wait until an expensive prototype has been created.

Like architecture, the key benefits will come from remote teamworking and the ability to visualise the end product fully before you need to start spending serious money on making it real.

As with other fields, the barriers will be all around cost and, given the data hungry nature of engineering design work, the ability of the technology to cope well with that.  The ROI will become simpler and easier to justify, as the technology improves and costs come down.

Some companies have already been using this technology for a while now.  Businesses like Jaguar Land Rover and Arup have been deploying VR in design for over a decade.  In time smaller businesses will inevitably follow.

Healthcare

Another field where we might expect to see VR make increasing inroads is healthcare.  Here the technology can be used for training in various surgical procedures.  It can also be used to help surgeons plan for particularly complex operations.

Students can now study human anatomy extensively with VR, potentially continuing their studies from home if need be.

VR can assist with robotic surgery enhancing the degree of control a remote surgeon has over their instruments during a procedure and providing them with a much clearer visualisation of what is happening than would be possible just by looking at a video screen.

Other Applications

VR’s inherent ability to visualise and simulate makes it ideal for any training application where people need to interact with complex technology or a difficult environment.  It can safely create realistic simulations that help prepare people for working in demanding and potentially dangerous work environments.  It also enables students and tutors who may be scattered in remote locations to come together and interact as a group.

As the technology improves and the costs come down, it is inevitable that we will see VR become increasingly used as a go-to technology for many training applications.

Clearly the primary application for VR in entertainment is gaming.  However, this is not the only one.  VR can be used to enhance rides in theme parks or perhaps even to create an entire VR experience as a theme in itself.

VR can create spectacular interactive 3-dimensional landscapes and environments.  The potential to use this technology to create something of great artistic beauty can deliver entertainment in the form of a sense of wonder.

Could we perhaps be engaging with VR films or other entertainment experiences in the future?  I am sure we will, in time.

The Future

Given the wide range of different potential applications we could be looking at a world dominated by VR technology at some point in the future.

The fact that covid has rapidly accelerated the extent to which the world works and interacts remotely can only serve as an accelerator for the adoption of new VR applications.  The only question is how fast will this happen?

Unfortunately, VR has suffered considerably from over-hype in the past.  I am sure we can all remember the heady prophecies of 800% growth over four years and such like.  In a way, predictions such as that have done more harm than good for the industry and run the risk of creating a sense of the “boy who cried wolf”.

We may not see a sudden, spectacular, VR revolution but I believe we will see a steady evolution and a sustained growth.  One day we will wake up and all of a sudden it will seem as though VR is everywhere.

For the VR industry it is important to remember that VR itself is only a technology.  For a technology to succeed it must have applications.  So the real challenge, beyond improving the technology, is to identify and develop a meaningful range of products for which there is real demand.  And here it helps to start by taking some advice from Steve Jobs:

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” 

In this context that means looking for potential situations that would benefit from the visual power of VR – i.e. where visualisation can add real value.  Its other key benefit is its ability to operate virtually, bring people in different locations together in a single experience.  Those two things in combination represent the key to developing killer applications.

Identifying and refining how these applications work, overcoming customer objections and reservations and then successfully communicating the benefits of the technology all require a good understanding of the potential market.  This would be where market research can help of course.

About Synchronix

Synchronix is a full-service market research agency.  We believe in using market research to help our clients understand how best to prepare for the future.  That means understanding change – whether that be changes in technology, culture, attitudes or behaviour. 

We provide a wide range of market research and data services.  You can learn more about our services on our website.  Also, please check out our collection of free research guides for more information on specific services offers.

Sources & Links:

Spatial

VR Chat 

Altspace VR

Rec Room

British Interior Design Institute

Ingenia

New Medical

VRSYNC

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