Scott McDonald
How Economic, Social, and Technological Forces are Reshaping Market Research and the Applied Social Sciences
Presentation Summary
In this presentation, delivered on January 29, 2015, Scott McDonald, Adjunct Professor, Marketing at Columbia Business School and Former Senior Vice President, Research for Condé Nast Publications, spoke on the converging forces that are transforming market research and the social sciences.
In particular, he discusses how the growing availability of “digital footprints”—and computational power to analyze them—are transforming the practice of market research, as today's firms are shifting from asking their customers direct questions to analyzing behavioral data that is collected passively. This transformation has profound implications for the kinds of skills required to conduct market research, for how research is organized, and for the shape of future jobs in these fields.
He also examined what these changes mean for the labor market in diverse industries, as well as for other branches of the social sciences, as social interactions can now be observed directly at scale, instead of being inferred from path analyses of individual-level survey data. Today's social scientists can measure and track many behaviors directly, without resort to surveys asking (however imperfectly) for people to recount their prior behavior. Digital technologies also enable a wider deployment of field experiments at lower cost and greater scale than heretofore was possible.
Mr. McDonald explored how these changes demand a shift in the kinds of skills to be taught in graduate programs.