Trend market research data

Trend market research data looks at responses over time, usually at regular intervals (e.g. monthly, quarterly or yearly), rather than at a singular point. Trending data over time means that we can observe not only one off perception and opinions, but how these change or remain the same over time.

Trend market research data also helps companies observe how particular internal or external influences affect people’s view of them. For example, a telecoms company might run a brand tracker that asks opinions of both customers and non-customers each month. If there is a signal outage in October, you might expect to see October/November scores to dip for customers’ satisfaction with signal, but if their customer care teams handled any complaints well you might also see satisfaction with customer services peak. An external influence, such as a competitor launching a new advertisement campaign could also affect scores – for example, non-customers might be less likely to consider a particular telecoms company if a competitor has just launched an advert for a new lower tariff package, and therefore a dip would be seen in that specific trended data.

Trend market research data is often used as brand and customer satisfaction measurement. For brand measurements it can be used to track how marketing activity can impact people’s brand perceptions along with knowledge about, warmth towards and affiliation to a brand. Satisfaction measurements help companies to track key areas of the business year round, and make any necessary improvements to those areas that score low or dip below satisfactory levels.

Trend market research data can be used to look at not only the views of all the respondents interviewed or surveyed, but also key segments or groups within the data can be observed over time too. For example, you may see recommendation scores drop one quarter in your brand tracker. If you dig into this further by looking at some of your key customer segments, you may find that direct debit customers are the ones who have driven this score down, this will then allow you to explore more accurately into what happened to induce this dip.