Does Unstructured Data Make More Sense for Market Research than it Seems?

Business Market Research

Business Market Research

Consumer insight is the buzzword for the researching industry. It is considered as the intersection between customers and brands. It connects brand features with customer interests. Customer insight helps understanding what motivates, deters and attracts their interest and actions towards a particular brand. Attending to the underlying interests of both your existing and potential customers is vital for the success of any organization. Market research is an interesting process that helps figuring out these facts with help of widely available and essentially generated data, which is generated with help of different tools and techniques.

Structured and Unstructured Data

Vast amount of unstructured data is always in the news, especially, when it comes to collecting information to create well formed marketing research reports. As the organizations grow, they create and come across variety of data, which is usually categorized into two basic types – structured and unstructured data. The basic difference between the two is way both the types are organized. While structured data can readily be utilized in any type of database, including business research reports, unstructured data is unorganized and unprocessed. When it comes to collecting secondary data, most market research companies from different parts of the world prefer resorting with structured for a number of reasons. Structured information is sorted and is available in different suitable formats for easy integration with the insights.

Manage Unstructured Data for Business Profits

Different big data tools are often used to sort and manage unstructured data. Tools like Hadoop, along with other conventional business intelligence methods are also used for data warehousing. All these technologies need to be utilized for running large-scale knowledge management systems for your organization. According to the experts, unstructured data is extremely useful for gathering vital clues about customer insights. Different types of unstructured data available in the forms of videos, diagrams, photos, documents and PDFs can be used in collaboration and converted into potential source of knowledge for industry research. However, there are a few risks in doing so, especially for the organizations that are new to the entire concept of data warehousing.

The biggest risk comes forward in the form or reliability, quality, depth and categorization of the information. In order to overcome this problem, experts suggest to use a mix of both the worlds, which means intelligent blend of structured and unstructured information for creating business intelligence and customer insights. This way, organizations can benefit from the source of knowledge from both the sources and come up with accurate and insightful details about what and how customers behave towards different brands.