As all the big brands value most, is the consumer insights. Companies spend millions of dollars on focus group, online survey, interviews, so on and so forth to try to listen what their consumers are talking about.

The new social media provides companies new thinking and new approach towards consumer research. Coca-cola, P&G and many other big companies realized that they need to keep pace with what is going on around brands/products. However, they are not only looking at the tracking report, brand health monitoring and spent most of their time debating report cards. They see these data as the past, which can’t be countable to predict the future.

Because the market is changing every day, consumers are more empowered. Marketers need to help companies to change, not following the change as fast as possible. Hence, a question mark has drawn to the traditional research approach---does analysing previous and present behaviour really help?

"Inspiration. Insights. Activation. People want it right here and right now. And, as market researchers, we have to adapt to the needs of the people," said Coca-cola’s marketing VP, Sthanunathan. He commented that Vitamin Water from Coca-cola was a masterpiece to showcase the members of the public contributed its formulation and launch in market via a simple application on Facebook. Devices such as Apple's iPhone also offer unique opportunities for gathering information about how people live and shop, particularly for an organisation with the global reach. Interestingly he was saying that if Coca-cola was doing the massive and time consuming consumer/product research as today, the coke never would have been launched.

The big companies still worry about how to interpret the data collected in the past 6 months, maybe should reconsider the validity of the data?