For any new venture whether service oriented or software based it has become increasingly more important to differentiate and dictate new meaning to the field you compete in. Within market research that includes new research methods, new sampling methods or a better way to gather the data. Over the past couple of weeks I read up on two separate companies taking interesting means to differentiate their products and service, Tivo and Crowdcast.
Tivo is one of the companies that started the current disruption of how we view TV. Through their intuitive product you could pick and choose your programs to save and watch when you want, on your own schedule, which was revolutionary at the time for watching TV. Now the company is loosing money as more and more competitors enter the market with knockoffs and Hulu further disrupts the industry.
In order to curb the negative growth Tivo is planning on rolling on a new market research stream for advertisers in direct competition with Nielson. Tivo wants to use its subscribers as its market base and analyze their connections with the Tivo service, including programming, ads that are viewed, when ads are skipped and when parts of shows are skipped. The idea is that marketers can use the data and further tailor their advertisements to increase engagement.
While I do commend Tivo on trying to reinvent themselves and establish new revenue models, the main issue of their product has to be remedied. To provide accurate research data the company will have to increase their market share and start spurring some growth which requires extra expenses on their research and development. New innovation on their product side will have to take place to justify the data from their services side.
I am going to keep an eye on the progress just to find out the extent to which new research methods can be established and adopted.
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