Marketing Week’s “Virtual worlds” article on the 3rd July still speaks in the tone of “things to come”, but it’s a sure sign that Second Life and other virtual worlds are well positioned to make the cross-over into the mainstream.
David Penn, managing director of Conquest Research, says: “If research were to be invented today, we wouldn’t be doing it the way that we do. We still have a pen and paper mindset that reflects the technologies that were available 50 years ago, when even telephone penetration was low. To this day, a lot of market research is still done according to that paradigm. But, for consumers there’s nothing uplifting about being asked to answer 50 questions.”
So, if the question and answer conventions of market research are mere accidents of history rather than rules governed by human nature, might the capabilities of the latest Web-based technologies provide marketers with better ways of understanding consumers?An eruption of research approaches unique to the internet suggests it may.
Big Button know second life inside-out, from 3D modelling to in-world video streaming - we do it all in-house.
