The Market Research Event EXPLOR Awards have come and gone again, leaving a new crop of proud and deserving winners in their wake. One of the highlights of this past year’s awards was the recognition of Quester, a company that has been making waves in the world of market and brand research for years now.
The Quester winners EXPLOR Award, as with previous issues of the honor, focused on performance in a variety of prearranged case study challenges. Many in the industry believe that contests of this sort are the best way of all of bench-marking real-world performance, a fact that has contributed to the prestige that has developed around the EXPLOR Award.
This year’s EXPLOR Award winner, in fact, performed strikingly well through those case study trials. Unlike most competitors, Quester’s services rely to a large extent on advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to refine and deepen the surveys it performs, and this year was the first during which such an approach came out so clearly ahead of the pack.
The judges for the awards, in fact, were especially impressed by the way the company’s entry was able to so consistently elaborate and focus on productive avenues of research, a longstanding goal of AI-based approaches that had previously been mostly unmet, much to the consternation of those who promote the tactic. Quester’s approach, the judges found, resulted in research that picked up on valuable and viable lines of thinking and reasoning that were often totally glossed over by others.
Whether this victory heralds a new era of artificial intelligence in market research remains to be seen, but it is certainly a significant result. Even if the award ends up in the hands of a more traditional market research firm for in the following years, all who pay close attention to the industry will remember this result for some time to come. At the very least, most observers now expect that other companies will be scrambling to develop and deploy their own artificial intelligence-augmented services, so as not to fall behind what could well turn out to be the wave of the future.
EXPLOR Award 