MRXplorations July 2025

Z was on stage 4 times in July!

Marin and I chatted about buying restech. I promise it was more interesting than that sounds. We walked through how to evaluate tech for your team, tips on how to test (use a prior test so you have a benchmark!), and even considerations when introducing new tech to a team (do they have the bandwidth to actually learn the new tech, or should it wait a bit until their schedule opens up?). Watch the replay here!

Buyers and sellers of market research technology both listened in as I talked about the buyer process, how to improve it, and what sellers can do to improve the buyer experience. Intrigued? Listen to the recording here by registering for free!

Taking a little pivot from talking about buying restech, this talk is about skills qualitative researchers will need to develop as the world continues to spin and technology continues to evolve. Hint: if you’re an analog-first researcher, there are LOTS of resources to learn how to use tech. If you’re a tech-first researcher, there are LOTS of resources to learn how to read human nuance. Register here!

And we’re back to buying market research technology, but this time, with a focus on qualitative tools for researchers in healthcare. This is such a highly regulated industry that it felt like a webinar focused on helping identify how to find tech solutions fit for them was a good idea. Okay, this is actually happening Aug 1, but it’s close enough to July to be included, right? Registration is here.

A quick tip for anyone who is looking for new market research tools. We often get carried away by feature lists. We go shopping for features (think AI analysis or automated reporting), which isn’t bad, but it also isn’t necessarily the right focus.

Instead, shop for solutions to problems.

Yes, that means identifying the problem to be solved with the technology. That can mean having to take an inventory of the technology in the first place so you can have a clear picture of what’s missing or what isn’t working. But once you have that, shopping for a new piece of restech gets so much easier! Looking for a solution (think a tool that can help me consolidate data and run analysis on multiple data sources or a tool that can create dashboards from my data) puts you in a much better position to narrow the hundreds of solutions on the market to find the one you need.

I need a better title for this section.

If you’re going to use Generative AI to help you with market research, there is one thing I strongly recommend you do: put your prompt into more than one tool to cross-check the answers.

Why? Because ChatGPT and the like hallucinate still.

I’ll give you an example. While I was preparing one of my talks, I looked for data about how much restech is growing as part of the global market research industry. I didn’t follow my own advice and put a prompt for the data into a single LLM, asking it to reference known sources like the ESOMAR annual state of the industry report, assuming that would be enough to trust the output. When I went back the next day to continue working on the slides (to enter the references to the reports, ironically), I looked for the LLM where I had entered the prompt - and couldn’t find it anywhere. So, I had to recreate it. I took the data on the slide and entered it into an LLM, the response was, “I can’t find where that data point came from, but here’s something close to it…”

NONE of the data points that I had on that slide were anywhere.

And this time, I checked on ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and Perplexity - because I was so stunned at the fact not a single data point was to be found anywhere in any report. I even entered it into a good old Google search, only to be let down again.

So, if you’re going to use an LLM as an advanced search engine - put that prompt into a second LLM to check the results.

And hey, it’s copy and paste, so have fun and throw it into a few just to be really sure.

It’s summer in the Pacific Northwest of the US, which means the rain has stopped. And that means, if we want flowers, we need to water them ourselves.

Sometimes, life just hums along and your self-care routine hums right along with it. Other times, you need to be more deliberate with your self-care. Check in with yourself - when was the last time you chatted with a friend, spent time doing a hobby, or just relaxed?