Exploratory Research on the US Baby Care Market

Market research provides insights to improve business decisions. Traditional market research methods have several potential problems, including bias, the accuracy of results, and time and skill requirements. The author proposes the use of big data analytics to complement traditional market research methods. Exploratory market research on the US baby care market was done to demonstrate this idea and examine what insights can be generated from data available on the Internet. The objectives of this research were: (1) proof of concept: identify data science approaches that can be used to conduct exploratory market research; (2) data collection automation: build a web scraper to collect data for topic analysis; (3) harness customer insights: conduct topic analysis to understand topics that the target customers talk about, concerns that they have and identify topics for more detailed market research; (4) market trend analysis: explore the trend of a few characteristics of this market; and, (5) demand forecasting: predict the number of newborns for the next 5 years. The results suggest that big data analysis is very useful in exploratory market research. Big data analysis techniques allow market researchers to obtain objective results from different perspectives; achieve economies of scale; obtain timely and more frequent market insights; and, overcome the potential problems of traditional market research methods. The amount of data available has risen dramatically. Integrating big data analytics into market research methods can uncover hidden insights from big data. These hidden insights can help companies to make more informed decisions and gain competitive advantages.