Last year NewMR created a new approach to market research conferences by launching the Festival of NewMR. This year the Festival has been expanded in several ways, including for example an Innovation Challenge with a cash prize of $20,000. But perhaps the most needed addition was the Training Day.
The Training Day is targeted at newer researchers and researchers looking to expand their skills into new areas. The Training Day is also targeted at Asia, a region that has fewer resources for face-to-face training. In a virtual conference targeting means the time of day, and the Training day is going to run from 6:00am GMT to 9:40am GMT (in terms of other time zones the Training day starts at: Sydney 5pm, Singapore 2pm, New Delhi 11:30am, and Moscow 10:00am).
In order to maximise the number of people who can attend the event, the Training Day does not have a fixed charge. If you are a student, if you can’t persuade you employer to pay, or if you live in a country where PayPal does not work, just register and attend. If you can afford to pay we like to invite you to make a donation towards the costs of the event.
Speakers on the day include sessions on Mobile Research, Ethnography, Online Communities, Conjoint Analysis, Segmentation, Online Questionnaire Design, and the use of Storytelling in market research presentation.
If you would like to find out more visit the NewMR Training Day page.
If you would like to find out more about the Festival visit the Festival Website.
Jeffrey Henning, doyen of the MR bloggers, CMO of Affinnova, and top notch presenter is going to be speaking at the Main Stage of the Festival of NewMR. The Main Stage is a virtual conference which you can attend from the comfort of home or from the office.
Jeffrey's presentation is titled "Crowd-Shaped Surveys: Adapting the Experience Based on Prior Respondents", showing how something as esoteric as genetic algorithms can produce something as tangible as better crisps.
To buy a ticket for the event or find out more about the event go to the newmr website.
Remember, even if you can't attend, if you buy a ticket you will be able to access all the 20+ presentations and recordings.
The Festival of NewMR is just 3 weeks away and NewMR have launched a Dutch Auction for their Platinum Sponsorship. At the moment the price is $14,000, but on Tuesday this drops to $13,000, and on Wednesday to $12,000. It will keep dropping until it is sold or until it reaches $5000, at which point it will be allocated to Survey Analytics, the current Silver Sponsor.
For more informaiton visit NewMR.org.
This is an unusual post as it all about me and my new role with Vision Critical, but hopefully it will be of some interest to readers.
I am excited to announce that I have been appointed by Vision Critical as Executive Vice President with responsibility for the UK, joining an established team in Vision Critical’s London office. Along with the current leadership team of Kris Hartvigsen and Mike Stevens, I will be working with clients and research partners to utilise community panels to bring the ‘magic of listening’ to more products and services.
Several people will probably be wondering why I have chosen to move from a consulting life-style to a corporate role and I think there are four main reasons:
I have been saying that community panels were shaping up to change the face of brand/customer research and relations, for some time. Indeed, one of the key interviews in the Handbook of Online and Social Media Research was with Angus Reid (CEO of Vision Critical), exploring the benefits of community panels. However, although community panels have expanded massively in North America and Australia, their growth in UK and Europe has been patchy. In my view this represents a missed opportunity for European clients, who could be benefiting from faster, cheaper, and more flexible research.
There is growing support for the idea that every brand needs a community to keep in touch with its customers and to help it co-create its future. Some people believe these communities could or should be small and qualitative, such as the MROCs of 200-300 members. However, I think the future is going to be dominated by the community panel, which can be configured to provide both qual and quant, intense communities and wider advocacy groups, ad hoc studies and longitudinal analysis, and most excitingly of all a link between the voice of the consumer and the growing petabytes of BI (Business Information) data.
If you have enjoyed my writings, webinars, workshops, and conference presentations, do not worry, I won’t be disappearing from view. Vision Critical were attracted to me because of my immersion in the discourse of new market research, they are not about to lose that insight now I am part of their team. Expect to see me at a wide variety of meetings, talking about a wide variety of topics, and taking polemical positions.
Over the next few weeks, my appearances in my new Vision Critical role include a keynote presentation and workshop for the Australian AMSRS, workshops for the UK’s MRS, a workshop and presentations at ESOMAR events (including the Congress in Amsterdam and the 3D Online Conference in Miami), and of course chairing the Festival of NewMR.
Plenty of changes!
This new role will result in several changes, including:
What Next?
For the next few weeks I will be tidying up loose ends, receiving some intensive training on Vision Critical’s systems, completing a 30 mile sponsored run (see http://thefutureplace.typepad.com/saints_way_2011/), taking a two-week holiday, and appearing at conferences and workshops in Sydney, London, and Amsterdam.
After that I will be visiting as many people as possible to share with them my vision of how community panels can give clients faster, cheaper, and more flexible research, and how partnering with Vision Critical can enable market research agencies to profitably provide global brand leader solutions to their clients.
If you would like to have a chat about community panels contact me and we’ll set up a chat.
As part of the changes I will be stopping blogging at The Future Place and will instead by blogging at:
There are a large number of discussions and consultations going on at the moment about initiatives from ESOMAR, CASRO, the MRS and others to try to regulate how social media research should be conducted, especially social media monitoring. The general thrust of the new guidelines is to try and fit the new world into the traditional values and ideas of market research. I think this is the wrong way to go about the change.
I think we need to change the whole of commercial market research to match the 21st Century, rather than try to keep shoehorning the new world into the old constructs.
My feeling is that there will soon be a schism in market research, between those trying to hang onto the past and those embracing the new.
The benefits of traditional market research ethics were that they allowed some exemptions to laws (e.g. data protections laws, laws about multiple contacts, laws about phoning people who were on ‘no call’ lists), increased public trust, and allowed market research to get close to a scientific model – for example to use concepts such as random probability sampling and statistical significance. Complying with codes of ethics incurred extra costs, but they also brought commercial benefits. The ‘proper’ market research companies could do things the non-research companies could not- so there was a commercial argument in favour of self-regulation, codes of conduct, and professional conduct bodies.
However, in several areas, ‘new’ market research is at odds with the traditional guidelines. Examples of where NewMR is at odds with the traditional ethics includes: the brand-related incentives for members of communities, the brand advocacy of community members, the changes wrought by deliberative research, and most of social media monitoring research. Other areas where research is drifting away from the classic model of anonymity include a growing amount of customer satisfaction and most of enterprise feedback systems.
Traditional market research is based on a) anonymity and b) informed consent. Large parts of new market research cannot deliver anonymity and in the area of social media research (and behavioural data integration) informed consent cannot be reliably assumed either.
If market research companies abide by the old ethics, in particular anonymity and informed consent, they will not be able to compete for business in most areas where market research is growing. This is because there will be no commercial benefits that will accrue to sticking to rules and ideas that nobody else does. To stick to out-dated rules simply provides a worse service for clients. Rules have costs, they only work when they also confer benefits.
The view of people like the UK’s MRS is that all of the ‘stuff’ that does not match the traditional view of market research should be done as "NOT market research". The problem with this solution is that it will soon classify the majority of market research as "NOT market research" which is clearly nonsense.
My remedy is that commercial market research should be split from genuine social research (by social research I mean the stuff that is not done principally for commercial reasons, such as some of the research by Governments, academics, and NGOs). Social research should keep the traditional values of ethics and commercial market research should fully embrace the new world. The ethics of NewMR should be based on:
1) The law
2) Not doing things likely to outrage the public
3) Creating high standards (and that can include charter marks and ISOs for those interested)
4) Emphasising the need to be open and honest
Note the case for charter marks and ISOs should not be based on theoretical arguments, but simply on whether they confer commercial benefits. If signing up to an ISO means that market research companies are able to win more work, then the ISO is s a good thing. If the ISO simply makes the industry feel better about itself, the ISO is a bad thing.
These four principles would, for example, mean that if a company told respondents that the study was anonymous and that they would not be contacted, then it would have to be anonymous and there would have to be no follow-up contact – that would be the law in many countries (because a contract has been entered into) and failing to stick to a promise would outrage the public.
Similarly, the four principles would outlaw using a false identity to access a closed community (for example PatientsLikeMe) and surreptitiously scraping comments to be sold to a third party – i.e. the Nielsen scrape-gate case. I suspect that not only would this outrage the public and damage the value of the company, but it could easily fall foul of civil suits, where members of the community could sue for damages.
This model of market research ethics changes the balance of who determines what can and should be done. In the traditional market research model the rules were set by the wise market researchers, to protect respondents and brands. My suggestion is that respondents should determine what can and should be done with their data, and that citizens should set the framework.
What do you think?
Earlier today I had the pleasure of a chat with Daniel Fazekas from KwaliTools, a new service for market researchers which provides a powerful and flexible way to conduct video online focus groups. Daniel is an interesting person to be running this sort of company as he has a background in ‘real’ qualitative research and in software development.
One of the key things about KwaliTools is that it is highly focused on creating online, video focus groups. The system is not compromised by being multi-function, and multi-market, it is allows researcher to conduct synchronous web video, qualitative discussions – it is not a conference platform, it is not an asynchronous tool, and it is not a text-based focus group.
Daniel gave me a demonstration of the system and I look forward to giving it a proper trial at some future point. Key things that stood out for me were:
I think one of the key things for anybody wanting to make a success of video chat focus groups is to move beyond just replicating what happens in a face-to-face group, to take advantage of features like the separate rooms and the power of virtual white boards.
Compared with a text-based online focus group the video group is much more like a face-to-face group. In a text-based group everybody tends to speak (type) at the same time, in a video group normal patterns of taking it in turns to speak prevails. In a text group the transcript is immediately available, with a video group there is the positive of having all that useful video, but it takes longer to review, especially if several rooms have been used and recorded.
One of the most surprising things about Kwalitools was the price. I can’t reveal the price (KwaliTools will tell you it if you contact them), but I was amazed at how cheap a one hour group was.
For any qual researcher looking to offer something different to their clients, perhaps in conjunction with traditional face-to-face research, this looks like a really interesting option, one well worth giving a try to see if it suits you.
Going forward another option might be to link KwaliTools to other systems, for example community panels, via an API, to allow qualitative depth to be added to quantitative breadth.
Following my earlier post about why PowerPoint will remain the delivery standard for the next few years I was asked about SlideRocket.
Well, I still need to evaluate SlideRocket, but from an early view of it I would say it looks interesting, suitable for some needs, but certainly not a replacement deliverable for most clients.
Why do I say that? The main reason is that SlideRocket is flexible, dynamic, and web-enabled. All of these sound like good things, and they are good things for some purposes, but not for delivered insights.
One of the most important things about research findings is that they need to be static. If I give you a presentation and a set of recommendations on Monday, you may write a summary for your boss on Tuesday, and forward them to her on Wednesday. You do not then want to find out that we change/improve the report on Thursday, making your summary completely nonsense. In the way that most companies work at the moment, the insight/findings presentation is a handing over of the baton, the agency has committed to these as the findings and the ownership of the thinking has moved to the client. The client may reduce, expand, or amend the findings as they see fit. However, if they do change the findings they are no longer the delivered findings of the vendor.
SlideRocket has a couple of other features that will be an advantage in some situations, but a problem in terms of delivering results to a client. The first is that SlideRocket is web-linked. Many, perhaps most, clients' IT and compliance departments do not want results that link to sources that are on the web, for security reasons. One interesting feature of SlideRocket is that you can track who sees your slides. I can see this as being really useful in some situations, but most clients are not going to want you to know who is seeing your materials.
Another potential weakness in SlideRocket is the metaphor it is using, namely one of co-creation and collaboration. In a growing number of research suppliers the process of creating deliverables is shifting away from the researcher towards design professionals, and most of the design professional seem to have very strong views about not letting researchers modify or edit the slides. By contrast, the metaphor SlideRocket extols is one where groups of people work together to produce the output.
The pricing of SlideRocket is a potential problem. The most expensive way to buy PowerPoint is as a standalone fully-featured package, which costs about $140. Most people will buy PowerPoint as part of a package, so its cost is much less. The standard SlideRocket package costs $24 per month, which means that over three years the cost would be about $864 - although I imagine the enterprise version would work out cheaper per user. This extra cost may be worthwhile for users who take full advantage of the web/networked facilities of SlideRocket, but not otherwise.
As I said, I have not tried SlideRocket yet, and I look forward to giving it a try. If the tour and video on its website are indicative of what to expect then I can see several situations where it might be useful. The first and most obvious thing is that because it is not PowerPoint it has the chance to stand out, to show that somebody is thinking and trying something new. The second use I can see is for marketing or promotional presentations, for example a presentation showing how a software package might be used. Because SlideRocket is dynamic the version of the presentation that people are looking at would always be the most up-to-date, and the tracking facility would help the creator check which slides were reviewed the most, and the questioning facility would allow the sales presentation to be more of a conversation as less of a lecture (to quote SlideRocket).
Another area where SlideRocket might be useful is in the process of creation of presentations, however, this will probably require a change in the current trend, i.e. towards collaboration and away from the trend of using specialists only.
It is probably also worth pointing out that all of the above relates to a presentation that has been given to the client as a deliverable. The rules for a presentation used as part of a face-to-face presentation are even more in PowerPoint's favour. Good debriefs and presentations are rehearsed, and you can't reliably rehearse a web-enabled, dynamic presentation - I am sure that for a presentation SlideRocket can be frozen, but then it is much more like PowerPoint anyway.
In the ASC LinkedIn Group AJ has posed the question "Complete this sentence. 'Over the next 3 years, powerpoint will be replaced as the default method of delivering results and insight to clients by....?)"
I have posted my reply in the LinkedIn group, but I thought I would also share my thinking here.
It is hard to imagine anything replacing PowerPoint in the foreseeable future.
There are some key elements that a system for delivering results and insights has to have to be a standard, including:
1) Available technology, the system needs to be able to produce PDF files and a file format that can be widely read by clients (e.g. Excel, Word, or PowerPoint 1997-2003), or WMV
2) The standard deliverable must not need to access the Internet, the intranet, or supporting files
3) The standard deliverable needs to be static, so that different clients see the same view, this rules out deliverables like What-if models, GapMinder, interactive tables.
4) The standard deliverable needs to be supported by tools and skills in the supplier side, to ensure that the deliverables are cost effective.
In the foreseeable future I do not see anything coming along that does what PowerPoint does better, cheaper, or faster.
I think there will be some great developments in reporting tools, but most of these will be for analysts, not end clients. I think that interactive infographics will facilitate analysts gaining better insights. But when that insight needs to be shared with 40 non-specialist clients spread across 20 offices and perhaps 8 countries, it needs to be turned into something like a photo, or a book, or a newspaper, or a report, i.e. something static, reliable, and which requires relatively few skills to read and interpret.
Most end-clients want results and findings, they do not want a method of finding the results for themselves. Most interactive systems are a method of finding results, they are not the findings themselves.
One of the problems for vendors is that many clients say they want a system that is really easy to use and is at the same time flexible. But what they mean by flexible is inescapably linked to harder to use. As an example, SPSS is a relatively powerful way of storing quant data, it is relatively flexible in its analysis, and it is pretty easy to use. However, most end clients would not dream of using SPSS to access their results.
BTW, when I say end-clients I do not mean insight managers inside client companies, many of whom are perfectly willing and capable of working with interactive analysis tools. I mean the people whose full-time job does not include analysis, for example: brand managers, finance teams, creatives, designers, i.e. people who would like to be informed by the outcomes of research, but who do not have the time to learn how to do or analyse research.
In the longer term I think we will produce a reporting paradigm that reflects the fact that different people learn in different ways, some people like pictures, some like numbers, some like written text, some like to hear it, some like videos, and some like interactive learning. The results product would include the raw and processed data (but out of site to 99% of users), the analyst's findings would be linked to the data and would be capable of being presented in text, infographics, in colour or black and white (remember colour sucks for colour blind people), in sound rather than images (images suck for people with visual impairment), and with differing degrees of abstraction (a senior exec might say - show me it in 100 words, a doubtful exec might say about a particular finding "substantiate that"). Such a system would also seek to have a natural language processing system for queries, perhaps a bit like WolframAlpha, so the exec could simply ask, "Which concept performs best amongst our younger customers?" and the system would report back the answer.
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to London to take part in a debate organised by NatCen, the UK's leading independent social research organisaiton. The event was chaired by Radio 4's Mark Eaton, the case for the social survey was presented by Penny Young, and I presented the contrary case. Below are three recordings from YouTube, Mark's introduction, Penny's presentation, and my response.
Mark Eaton - Chair
Penny Young, CEO NatCen
Ray Poynter, Author The Handbook of Online and Social Media Research