2.2. Sociologists as Market Researchers

On the opposite end of the spectrum from academic sociology is the applied work that sociologists do for companies. Many sociologists work in the private sector. Organizational sociology is a huge part of the curriculum taught at business schools, and sociological knowledge about how organizations and networks operate is useful in the specialized fields of human resources and organizational consulting (where sociologists advise companies or nonprofits about how to structure and run their workplaces) as well as in a variety of other management-related roles.

The type of applied research most frequently conducted in the private sector is market research. Market research is not itself a research method. Rather, it uses various methods to help guide companies in making decisions about increasing their sales or improving their performance.

Let’s say a firm wants to promote a particular product or service. Before they dive into a marketing campaign or invest money into research and development, they need to collect data about what their potential customers are looking for and what their potential competitors are doing. Oftentimes, they will want to get a better understanding of the overall industry or local market that they’re operating within, especially if they are moving into a new area of business. Companies can hire market research firms to do this data collection and analysis for them, or they may have in-house research operations.

When reaching out to customers, companies typically seek out particular niches—say, young, single college-educated consumers with plenty of disposable income. To appeal to this target demographic, it is important for a company to understand that population’s preferences and tastes. That’s where market researchers come in. Their methods can focus broadly on people’s general attitudes, or more narrowly on their interactions with products and advertising. For example, market researchers routinely observe clientele in stores to watch which displays draw them in, and which they ignore. They conduct focus groups (an approach we’ll examine further in Chapter 10: In-Depth Interviewing), where they interview a group of people in a particular target demographic and try to gain a fine-grained understanding of what issues they have that a particular product or service might address, or how they feel about existing market offerings. They also administer surveys to assess customers’ use of a particular product or service and their satisfaction with it.

When companies track consumers’ attitudes and behaviors to get a sense of the current and future state of a market, the research they do often looks a lot like the analysis of social and cultural trends that academic sociologists regularly do. Indeed, well-known global research firms such as Nielsen, Gallup, and Ipsos often hire trained survey researchers with social science backgrounds. Nielsen is a global market research firm that is best known for its Nielsen ratings, a measurement system that calculates the size of audiences for television and many other media markets. Gallup and Ipsos are well-regarded among social scientists for their public opinion polls (which aside from their market value, can be useful for government officials making decisions about policy, as we will describe later). But both companies also offer analytics services, consulting with government and corporate clients around the globe. (Data analytics involves the use of scientific methods to interpret available information, identify trends and patterns, and map complex relationships.)

As you might imagine, tech companies like Apple and Google regularly generate mountains of data about their users, and they need skilled researchers to make sense of that data. For that reason, sociologists with strong quantitative skills often work for these companies as data scientists, exploring what useful patterns emerge in the big data they have collected. Social media companies in particular are in need of researchers who understand social network analysis—the study of social ties, how they emerge and evolve, and what consequences they have (we’ll discuss social network analysis in Chapter 15: Materials-Based Methods).

While companies often prize researchers with the advanced quantitative skills needed to analyze big data, there is also a growing appreciation in the private sector for what the sociologist Tricia Wang (2016) has called “thick data”—ethnographic research that generates rich and nuanced qualitative data that can help companies adapt the ways they think about and measure a particular problem. (We’ll have more to say about ethnography and the sort of thick description it prioritizes in Chapter 9: Ethnography.) Market research can employ both qualitative and quantitative methods, as we can see most vividly in the burgeoning field of market research called user experience research, or design research. The goal of UX research is to better understand the perspective of the “end user”—the person who ultimately will use the company’s product or service. Through conversations with potential or current customers and observations of their interactions with that product or service, UX researchers gather data that can be used to improve its design.

Companies who conduct UX research regularly hire sociologists: in-depth interviewers who are good at probing users’ motivations and needs, ethnographers who can parse out the various ways they use the product, and survey and experimental researchers who can obtain quantitative measures of their behaviors and attitudes. Prominent UX firms in the United States include Bare International, a global company headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, and California-based AnswerLab, both of which conduct research for a wide variety of corporate clients. Large companies like Facebook also employ their own UX researchers—qualitative and quantitative—and even offer research internships.

In the corporate sector, you don’t need an advanced degree to get a job conducting market research. Internships are perhaps the best way to break into these commercial fields, though sometimes a master’s degree or PhD will be decisive for more technically demanding research positions such as those involving data science. Indeed, with the growth of big data, graduate programs have proliferated in recent years to train data scientists, who have job prospects that extend well beyond the private sector. (Our own sociology department offers such a master’s program, which includes coursework in digital sociological research methods.) In particular, government agencies and think tanks have a great need for social scientists to crunch their numbers, as we will describe next.