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AI-powered qualitative research is rapidly transforming the consumer research landscape. Sean Conley, CEO of Motives explains how, and what marketing leaders need to do to stay ahead.
The marketing research challenge
There’s a classic adage when it comes to running marketing research: “speed, depth, or cost – pick 2”.
Surveys get quick insights to make decisions, but lack depth. Focus groups and qualitative interviews dig deep to find out what consumers really think, but typically mean marketing leaders never can get enough.
Luckily, AI can help with this tradeoff – but it’s advancing so fast that great marketing leaders need to stay on top of how to use it to keep their edge.
What AI Changes
“AI for research” can mean a wide range of things – but AI-led qualitative research is especially impactful for marketing teams. AI researchers can now recruit, moderate, and analyse consumer interviews, running entire studies in just 48 hours.
The best AI moderators run actual video interviews with real people. They ask follow-up questions, dig into interesting responses, and capture authentic reactions – just like human moderators. But they can run dozens of interviews simultaneously, analyze the results instantly, and pull out key themes without the usual bottlenecks.
Human judgment is still paramount – but the right AI tools can get better insights faster so you can make smarter decisions. If you have an insights team, AI multiplies their impact – they can focus on strategy and synthesis instead of logistics and project management.
Why This Matters for Your Team
You can test more ideas. When in-depth research takes days instead of weeks, you can validate concepts while they’re still being developed – with rapid qualitative research telling you why consumers prefer their favorite concepts. No more betting everything on untested ideas.
You stay closer to customers. Running 10x more research on the same budget means you can track shifting attitudes, monitor competitors, and spot emerging trends as they happen.
You get buy-in faster. Video clips of real customers explaining their preferences are way more convincing than slides full of statistics. AI tools can automatically create highlight reels from your research, making it easy to share customer voices across your organisation.
Your 4-Step Plan
1. Start Using AI Moderators
Find AI research platforms that conduct real video interviews. The good ones feel natural to participants while being dramatically faster and cheaper than traditional methods.
Run a pilot comparing AI moderation to your current approach. Track the time saved, costs reduced, and quality of insights. The results will speak for themselves.
2. Build Research into Your Workflow
Stop thinking of in-depth research as a big project that happens once per quarter. With 48-hour turnaround times, you can:
●Test creative concepts before they’re final
●Check campaign messages with real customers
●Validate product concepts before launching them
●Get customer feedback on live campaigns
The teams that win will be the ones that make research a regular input, not an occasional event.
3. Get more strategic insights
When high-quality research becomes affordable, you can finally answer questions like:
●What do customers really think about that competitor’s launch?
●How is our brand perception changing?
●Which trends actually matter to our customers?
●Why did that campaign underperform?
Your insights team becomes more important than ever – now that running in-depth interviews is no longer the bottleneck, the insights team is crucial to set the research strategy and translate the results for the business.
4. Use Video to Tell the Story
Written quotes in PowerPoints don’t change minds the way that videos of real customers do.
AI can automatically find and compile video clips based on any topic from your research. Need to show why customers love your new feature? Get a 3-minute compilation of them explaining it. Want to demonstrate a pain point? Let customers describe it themselves.
What You Need to Do Now
Your competitors are already testing these tools. While you’re waiting weeks or even months for traditional research, they’re getting insights in days and making better decisions.
What’s great is you can try out these tools without a big commitment:
- Pick one upcoming project that needs customer input
- Run it through an AI research platform
- Compare the timeline, quality, and cost to traditional methods
- Share the results with your team
Marketing teams can now get deep insights fast and affordably – the best way to see how it can help your team is to start testing it.
Claim Your Free AI Qual Research Trial Now:
Don’t miss this super-generous exclusive offer from Motives for Little Grey Cells Club members: you can secure a free pilot to test AI-led research for business until August 31 2025 (up to a £7,500 value). Contact [email protected] with subject line “Little Grey Cells” to get started.
