by Jim Lundy
(Aragon Research) – In 2013, Aragon coined the tagline “Video is the new document” as a way to signify and communicate the importance of video for both consumers and enterprises.
It struck a chord as video rose to become the king of content, dominating online platforms—like Instagram Stories, which boasts over 250 million daily users—and marketing platforms alike.
In 2014, we thought it was time that our research took advantage of video content, and began working on what would eventually become our new offering: Visual Research, integrated research documents embedded with video.
This blog provides an overview of Visual Research and what makes our offering unique to Aragon.
Visual Research Is the Future
Last week, we announced that we will be making all of our research notes visual, which means they will all have embedded video. No other research firm is doing this and no one will for quite a while. Why? The short answer is that it’s time intensive. Over the past three years, we’ve spent our time developing and fine-tuning our methodology that allows us to create compelling, on-demand videos. But it took a lot of experimentation to figure out what worked and what didn’t.
Digital Transformation Calls for More Than Text-Based Research
While text documents will never go away, today, the fastest way to learn is through visual content. This is one of the reasons why video is so popular with consumers, and why many enterprises are being inundated with demands from users to support more video.
Aragon is responding to this need by introducing Visual Research:
Why Visual Research Now?
On Facebook, 100 million hours of video are watched every day, and YouTube has over a billion users, almost one-third of all people on the internet (source). Users like video because it’s fun and provides information in an accelerated format, and Visual Research is about just that: learning and absorbing knowledge faster.
The benefits of video learning are numerous. People can process visual images faster than text—in just 13 milliseconds (source: MIT). Traditional text documents need to be read multiple times to be burned into memory, but when we watch videos, we retain 95% of what we saw.
For enterprises, the benefits cannot be ignored:
- Increases learner engagement, participation, and satisfaction
- Immediate recognition: video images are processed 60,000x faster than text
- Visual recall: up to 80% recall of videos seen in the last 30 days
- Fastest way to learn and recall a complex or new topic
Who Is Offering Visual Research?
Today, Aragon is the only major research firm delivering Visual Research. We know we have a multi-year lead and we know that it’s just a matter of time before others follow us.
| Firm | Visual Research |
| 451 | No |
| Aragon Research | Yes |
| Forrester | No |
| Gartner | No |
| IDC | No |
| Ovum | No |
| Sirius Decisions | No |
How Can You Take Advantage of Visual Research?
In the era of digital transformation, there is no better time to empower your people to increase their knowledge. Visual Research can help you minimize the learning curve when it comes to competitive insights. Reach out directly to us to see the difference Visual Research will make in your enterprise.
Editor’s Note: Visual Research is a trademark of Aragon Research.