TRC

Well, another conference is over, perhaps our best ever. A great roster of speakers, a room full of engaged attendees and a great location was a terrific formula for a memorable conference. Some highlights from the various sessions:

Lenny Murphy, Editor-in-Chief of the Greenbook blog opened with a wide sweep discussing the waves of changes rocking the market research world. Pulling from the GRIT survey, his discussion with emerging and established players, as well as his itinerant investigation, he was able to convincingly make the case that change in the MR industry is happening. Now. He talked about emerging technologies such as mobile, social media and text analytics and how academic expertise was a key to unlocking a future of new ideas. It was a perfect set-up for the group of academic presentations that were to follow.

Tags: Market Research, Market Research Innovation, Conferences, Behavioral Economics, Neuroscience

Over the past year I’ve blogged about the things that I think will drive the future of Market Research and I’m pleased to announce that for our Frontiers of Research annual conference (May 8th, in NYC, view full agenda or register) we have assembled speakers who will drive that conversation forward. The conference will cover the full spectrum of buzz-worthy topics (Behavioral Economics, Neuroscience, Gamification, Predictive Analytics). And the focus, as always, will be on ideas presented in an easy to understand way (no math!). With speakers from four Ivy League schools, and presentations that range from poker to motion picture box office, this should be an informative and enjoyable day.

Leonard Murphy will set the table by calling on his extensive knowledge of the industry to illuminate how academia can and is driving us forward. Anyone who follows his blog knows that he is not only one of the most knowledgeable industry leaders around, but that he has a provocative view of where we are heading.

Tags: Conferences, Behavioral Economics, Neuroscience, New Product Development

I recently came back from the 2011 The Market Research Event (TMRE) conference in Orlando, the biggest marketing research conference of the year. There was plenty to like, not the least of which was the scale of the event. Rarely, if ever, do we get to see an exclusively market research event that is so big. Kudos to IIR for putting it together.

The highlight of the event for me was the Keynotes, of which there were eight. I couldn't catch all of them, but my favorite was Sheena Iyengar from Columbia, author of the best seller The Art of Choosing (and sister-in-law of my friend Raghu Iyengar from Wharton). In a beautifully choreographed and clear presentation, Sheena (who is blind) talked about the problem of plenty in consumer choice and ways to avoid it for both sellers and buyers. The Keynotes were all held in a massive room and very entertainingly emceed by Cayne Collier, an actor and improv artist from Second City Chicago. Discussions with a variety of people indicated that the Keynotes were the favorite part of the conference for many.

Tags: Market Research

Recently I was invited to attend a neuroscience conference at Temple University in Philadelphia, organized by their Center for Neural Decision Making, along with MIT and the University of Michigan. It turned out to be a very interesting experience with excellent speakers, great interactions and a terrific panel discussion. Some highlights:

• Michael Norton of Harvard spoke with humor about the sensitive topic of racial paralysis. This is the tendency of people to refrain from making any decisions when faced with a situation where they could potentially be perceived as racist. His approach used data from experiments, surveys and neural imaging, a nice way to triangulate the results.

Tags: Neuroscience

Last time I talked about how we as an industry worry about response rates and respondent engagement either too much or for the wrong reasons. This time, I'd like to expand on that point by picking up on a comment made by Joan M. Lewis of Procter &Gamble.

The second day of the ESOMAR CONGRESS conference featured a panel of big research buying clients. They talked about the things they wanted and were not getting. Two big areas were boiling data down to as few charts as possible and to help them drive innovation and change. Both are related. In essence, don't give me a 100 page report or a chart with 100 numbers on it. Boil it all down and tell me what to do!

Tags: Reporting

Two other topics that came up a lot at ESOMAR were respondent engagement and representativeness.   Personally, I think discussions of the former are often misguided and discussions of the latter are a waste of time.   Not that I oppose engaging respondents or high response rates, just that I'm practical enough to recognize that neither will happen without a good business reason for them to happen.

With regards to response rate, the boat has clearly sailed. Surely this is clear now that huge research buyers like P&G suggest moving beyond focus on response rate. I suspect they, like me, would love higher response rates, but they have come to realize that it isn't going to happen. The massive increase in the number of surveys being done (I get one every time I take my car in, and I was just handed on here on my plane trip back from ESOMAR) has caused the public to tire of doing them. Add in that improving response rates involves greater costs (more attempts, mixed modes, higher incentives) and greater time. 

Tags: Untagged

I'm on the plane heading back from ESOMAR. I found the diversity of opinions and ideas shared there to be both interesting and thought provoking. Over the next couple blogs I'll share my thoughts on what I got from the event.

First off, gaming; no subject divides researchers more. Several presentations showed tests that used game elements to engage the respondents. One effort by MSI created a sort of fantasy backdrop in which players answered questions to get things they would need on their game quest. The idea was to engage respondents and with that get better data. Sadly, the results didn't back that up at all. Results did not vary much (specifics are available on the ESOMAR site), but respondents who did it were more engaged. At the same time, response rates were lower (loading time put some people off and some had no interest in the game). Easy enough to theorize that the mistake here was that the game was a sort of reward for doing the survey, but not related to it. As such, it does little to engage the respondent.

Tags: Untagged