Practical Guide: Successful Use of AI in Market Research

workshop
Author

Paul Simmering and Oliver Tabino

Published

February 14, 2025

🗓️ Event Succeet 2025
📅 Date 13 February 2025
📍 Location Wiesbaden, Germany
🌐 Language German
📥 Materials Slides (PDF)

Succeet 2025

My colleague Oliver Tabino and I gave this presentation at the Succeet 2025 conference in Wiesbaden, which is the leading trade fair for market research in Germany.

We presented five case studies of using AI in market research. Four successes, one failure. Then we shared our lessons learned and gave some practical advice on management of AI projects.

Case Studies

The case studies presented are, in order of project size:

  1. GenAI-based storytelling: Using AI as a sparring partner for marketing
  2. Labeling tool for open-ended questions in surveys: A tool that forms topics from open-ended questions in surveys and categorizes the responses into those topics
  3. LLM-powered social media data pipeline: Project for a client in the pharmaceutical industry
  4. AI Panel: Virtual respondents for online surveys. This was a research project that ended with the result that current language models are not suitable for this application.
  5. AspectWise: a data pipeline that uses LLMs to analyze customer reviews and create in-depth reports

If any of these topics are of interest to you, please reach out to Q Agentur für Forschung.

Lessons Learned

Our main lessons learned can be summarized as follows:

  • Automate your evaluations, so that you can change your prompt and model without having to manually evaluate everything again
  • Use prompting for as long as possible before you start with fine-tuning
  • View models as exchangeable parts of your pipeline
  • Most companies’ market advantage comes from their data, evals and app/presentation layer, rather than a model
  • Look at the data and try doing the tasks yourself before automating them
  • Projects have a limited innovation budget: innovate on one or two aspects of your project, not all
  • “Real artists ship” (Steve Jobs): Focus on one key use case and launch your project, rather than building a complete solution on day one