Intuitive Data or something like it...

Market Research has always been condemned for being a field of Marketing that has dissuaded the marketing managers from making a proper decision. Even while in my MBA the fellow who came to teach us Marketing Research spent a larger part of his time trying to convince the students that ‘proper’ Market Research does give ‘proper’ results.

However, experience shows that in most cases people either don’t know to ask the ‘proper’ questions or they just aren’t able to interpret the same properly. There are more examples of Market Research proving a failure than an astounding success. And perhaps the most popular of the Market Research blunders being the ‘Coca Cola’ research fallout where they decided to change the formulation and all, and then realized that it was utter stupidity and stuff like that.

And today, when Market Research is already been taken as something like a black sheep in the family, the entire field of study is losing out of options. Data through internet surveys was the next in-thing that people thought would probably enable the researchers to get more accurate data; but it still didn’t just deliver as much as it was expected.

However today what’s happening is that people themselves are giving out data on Facebook, Orkut and other sites… Researchers are now plundering data out of these places to get material for their research objectives.

And while whiling away my time in the office I came up with something even more astounding which could probably blow away the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ music listing. The Billboard Hot 100 Music listing generates the top 100 albums based on album sales and airplay (on radio stations). But isn’t it a matter of fact that people are now largely listening to MP3 on their computers and not buying albums? Also the Hot 100 artist listings are generally based on sales in the US and UK. What about the international audience?

Then how come Billboard Hot 100 still remains a benchmark to assess an artist’s success? Also, the BB Hot 100’s longevity is based on weekly sales, and not beyond that. Somehow people just seem to override or rather overlook these shortcomings of the BB Hot 100 Listings.

This is where Google Music Trends come into the picture. Google Talk has the functionality to capture the information related to the music the computer user is playing at that point of time and then upload it to the Google database. This sort of data collection happens on an international level since it captures information about all the users using Google Talk, it happens over a period of more than a year, thus assessing an artist’s longevity too as far as the album’s popularity is concerned, and gives a data that is amazingly different from what the BB Hot 100 has to say…

Check the links of the BB Hot 100 and Google Music Trends and compare the data… there’s a sea change of difference!

Now which one to believe is your choice.