If I say that in the past 20 years the availability of information has been one of the major game changers, I am sure you will agree. But what information has come available? You will most likely say "about everything". And yes, you are right. Now we all will agree that Google played an important role in that. They made it possible to find it all. I am also sure that Google had no idea on the impact their technology had when they started, nor the users had any idea. But the availability of data only has fueled many businesses over the past 2 decades. You could say you can only start to imagine what you can do with something when you actually can experience it.

So, how about your data?

Now I like to translate this to your business, Market Research. The Market Research Industry is, by nature, one of the biggest data generators around. Yet, there are only a few out there that are able to quickly search across all data they collected in the past 5 years.

Now, why would you want to be able to easily query across all data you have collected in the past? There are a few cases that are obvious, and I am sure you can think a lot more, but let me give a start.

• Benchmark the collected demographic data of a current project with projects of the past.
• Monitor the shift in platform usage of the respondents, so you are always timely in responding to changes in operating system, screen size, etc. (just remember that competitor of you that did not want to give up on flash and in the end made your customer base grow).
• Another very practical example are diaries, querying across the different runs can be just as easy as querying over your questions.
• Or translate it to value for your customer. What if your customer portal just holds all data ever collected for your customer and they can directly query across all their dataset you have collected over the past 2 years.
• Validating newly collected data based on previous studies becomes easy, just like pinpointing differences in trends and going into deeper analysis there.

Your data holds more value

I, and by now you, I am sure, can go on and on with examples why your data should be just as accessible as the data on the internet (respecting all privacy and security requirements, of course).

You see that all the data you collected of the past can still be a revenue generator for now and in the future. Now that is a big opportunity in an industry that is very hard working on finding new methods to add value to their customers.

The base for creating this new source of value is our new Nebu Data Hub. With the Nebu Data Hub you can Google, or Nebu, all your data and create more value.

Photo by NEC Corporation of America with Creative Commons license