In September 2012 the market research Twittersphere gained a stand-out new voice. Amid a mostly agency crowd, that rarest of beasts – a client! And not only that, but a client with a message: you should be doing this better. With her provocative and all-too-accurate analysis of research’s weaknesses, @Angry_MR_Client quickly gained 1500 Twitter followers and the attention of industry influencers – not to mention a column in GreenBook. We’ve got something to tell you. We know who Angry is… Now it’s time to let the secret you’ve all been wondering about out!

By Tom Ewing

I saw a presentation last year about digital audience measurement of the Olympics. First of all the presenter showed a slide about the 2004 Olympics, and it showed a single line – web traffic to highlights sites. Then up came the 2008 Games. Three criss-crossing lines, for smartphones, and web visits, and streaming video. And then the 2012 Games. Mobile web, mobile apps, tablets, streaming video, web visits… the graph had become a thicket of lines. Our visuals for measuring a newly wireless world were uncomfortably, ironically reminiscent of the tangled cluster of device leads around every 00s TV.

Audience measurement has never been easy, but over the last decade or so the complexity of it has reached absurdist proportions. Not only must you measure across a range of channels which grows by the year, you have to get to grips with how those channels interact – and that’s even before you start worrying about effectiveness.

So it’s fascinating to look at the program for a conference like the ARF’s Audience Measurement 8.0 – happening in New York next month  – and see how researchers and channel owners are reacting to this complexity.

Some are gamely embracing it – there are plenty of presentations on second-screening and the unstoppable rise of mobile. As “Mobile Is Eating The World”, an excellent set of slides from Enders Analysis points out, mobile is not simply a shift from one platform to another: it’s an unprecedented and colossal shift in scale for global audiences. The audience measurement industry is further ahead in dealing with this than most parts of the research business.

But more complexity can’t always be the answer. The human mind is not wired to deal with complexity – and this is as true of media buyers and CEOs as it is of audiences. There is a desperate need for simplicity – research which can cut through that thicket of lines, boiling down people’s disparate media activity into easy, useful killer metrics.

This next stage in the measurement game isn’t here yet, but it’s coming, and many of the most interesting presentations at Audience Measurement 8.0 look to anticipate it. The first day Keynote is striking this note of optimism – Starcom MediaVest talking about the need for convergence. Some look to Big Data as the game-changer here – take this interesting bit of speculation, Why Google Will Crush Nielsen, as an example. The argument being Google will win because it can integrate user behavior so completely.

It’s a possibility – but they aren’t the only player. As I type, my Twitter feed is full of reaction to the announcement of the Xbox One, a possible fruition of the long-anticipated “one box to rule them all” convergent living room device. A simplifier for consumers, perhaps – but just another thing to measure for researchers.

As for effectiveness, the picture from Audience Measurement 8.0 is more mixed. Facebook promise “census-level” data which links marketing to outcomes, but elsewhere it’s a familiar story of new technology meeting old assumptions. A presentation promising to reveal “how much entertainment in advertising is too much” is barking up a very old, rotten tree in a world where switching and skipping has never been easier.

But the job of conferences is to reveal every angle on a problem, not just the ones you agree with already. As one presentation puts it, we are living in an “Age of Chaos”. The ARF’s new CEO, Gayle Fuguitt, is revamping the ARF’s conference offerings to bring them up to date in a scarier world – it looks like Audience Measurement 8.0 is a big step in that direction.

Editor’s Note: Just to be clear, the list below is not to be construed as something like the GRIT 50 which is a ranking of innovative companies by the industry as a whole. These are simply 22 of the 70 companies that submitted a proposal to the Insight Innovation Challenge who met the selection criteria. There are MANY other companies working to transform MR not included here simply because they didn’t submit. The good news is that a whole bunch of them will also be participating at the IIeX event next month, so if you’re looking for a more comprehensive overview of innovative firms in MR that would be a very good place top start.

After weeks of reviewing almost 70 candidates, the IIeX Advisory Board have chosen the companies  to meet The Top 25 Unmet Needs Of Insights Clients onstage at the Insight Innovation Exchange event in Philadelphia next month.

Since we had so many worthy candidates and considering that originally 25 Challenges were submitted, we’re going to expand the Challenge presentations to 2 hours on Wednesday and allow 22 companies to present.

All are very different in their approaches to solving the business needs originally stated and we think the  attendees are going to love hearing about these different solutions to addressing client business needs. 

There are a few familiar (and  maybe even surprising!) names here, but the vast majority are firms we think are  highly innovative and/or potentially disruptive. These companies represent the pioneers who are helping to drive change in our industry and we believe they will emerge as significant players in the future of the this critical business sector. Make no mistake: they ARE transforming our industry, in most cases they are doing it from outside of the traditional definition of what market research is.

Here are all of the selected companies and the challenges each will be tackling: 

At the conference, each of these companies will be given 5 minutes to present their solution to the business issue assigned to them.

This special session will take place Wednesday, June 19th as the center point of the special Wednesday session we’re calling  the Investing In The Future Summit: Emerging Markets, Disruptive Innovation & Data Philanthropy.

So why are we doing this? The insight space is changing, but it’s not in a state of chaos: we can influence the direction of the change IF we proactively engage with the key drivers: client business needs, emerging market growth, private/public collaboration, adjacent sector partnerships, data philanthropy and the investment needs of the emerging insight solutions that will lead the future.

Those themes run through-out  the Insight Innovation Exchange conference, but the Investing In The Future Summit is an intensive half day “bonus session” that will focus exclusively on these big issues.

Attendance is limited to 200 and will be on a “first come, first served” basis. Reserve your spot now if you plan to attend.

This is the part of the IIeX event that we believe will create significant long term impact in the insights space, where we’ll stop talking about these topics and instead focus on launching initiatives and solutions to guide the transformation of the global insights space. And the companies we’ve selected for the Challenge are likely to be leaders in this transformation. Now is your chance to meet them first hand and engage with them as potential partners.

We want to build bridges between all of the key stakeholders involved in the industry so that we can establish new collaborative opportunities to support the growth and positive impact of market research. Sound idealistic? Maybe, but these sessions are designed to establish the framework to try it.

And by the way, the Insight Innovation Competition is running right now as well; that is sure to add in even more innovative companies that have been flying under the radar of the industry to the agenda. Combine that with the over 100 industry thought leaders and change agents already speaking and I can guarantee you that this event will deliver more new thinking and, most importantly, solutions, than any other conference this year.

Editor’s Note: Sometimes I read something so brilliant that I am humbled, which is not an easy thing. This is one of those posts. This one should be required reading.

By Ian Murray

I was reminded of something Peter Rees said the other day, during a LinkedIn discussion entitled “How do we define NewMR?”.  Peter is a City Planning Officer for the City of London. I came across his thoughts while reading Londoners Craig Taylor’s absorbing oral history of the world’s most culturally diverse city. Peter’s contribution struck a chord. Here are a couple of the things he has to say: 

  ‘…….I don’t think we should be planning London, we should be managing it. Because planning does require you to come to a definitive answer, have a definitive course of action and then to implement something, whereas managing means watching it on a day-by day basis and just nudging it and helping it….’

I know nothing about town planning. But I can identify with Peter. I don’t know anything about Hollywood screenwriting either. But I can identify with William Goldman when he builds his memoir “Adventures in the Screen Trade”  around the maxim that “Nobody knows anything.”. 

Both are men who seem slightly at odds with some of the key tenets of their professions.  Their discomfort with misplaced certainty and reductionism, and their skepticism about the validity of overly direct approaches, mirror my own increasingly complicated professional relationship with MR.

Back to the LinkedIn discussion- the first answer to “How do we define NewMR?”got my attention. It was “stop being hedgehogs, start being foxes”.

This is a reference to Isaiah Berlin’s “The Hedgehog and the Fox” .  Berlin divides thinkers into two categories: Hedgehogs are visionaries who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea. Foxes are more pragmatic and eclectic in their thinking assimilating a wide range of ideas and theories.

I’ve blogged about Hedgehogs and Foxes a couple of times before. (“Tidy up! and Over 100 other ways Brian Eno Could Inspire Creativity in the World of Real Time and Big Data” and “Are Big Ideas Bad Ideas?“). That’s why this post is titled Are Big Ideas, Bad Ideas (Part 2).

Hedgehogs and Foxes are pretty salient at the moment.  The metaphor is a key component of John Kay’s advocacy of oblique strategies in business and all other walks of life (see his blog here or his TED talk ) where he illustrates the real life paradoxes that arise from slavishly following “the big idea”- and how our complex goals are best achieved indirectly.

Nate Silver, fully leveraging his success in correctly predicting the winner of all 50 states in the 2012 US presidential election, also encourages us to ignore the hedgehogs in “The Signal and the Noise- Why So Many Predictions Fail- But Some Don’t” (find Silver’s blog here and here he is on the BBC Today program recently explaining why we should be distrust pundits and experts).

Both Kay and Silver argue that we need to get more comfortable with uncertainty and nuance. The world is just too complex to be reduced to simple paradigms and models. So we can only ever hope to achieve our objectives through a gradual and indirect process of risk taking and discovery. I think Peter, my town planner, is a fox. So is William Goldman. I hope I am too.

Kay and Silver should be required reading for anyone who is interested in the vision for NewMR. Both can get us beyond our preoccupation with method and help us re-discover the fundamental role of MR: For me, that is to connect business with the realities and messiness of the outside world.

At the end of last year I received a polarized response to a post that asked “Isn’t it about time market research grew up?” (Read it on Greenbook here). In the post I suggested that an innate egocentricism had resulted in market research and many “NewMR” approaches failing to fully connect with this messy, real world.

But in my own oblique way I have arrived at an even more challenging conclusion. MR isn’t inherently egocentric. But that’s because it doesn’t really have a personality of its own. Egocentrism is just one characteristic that MR inherits when it defaults to supporting, rather than challenging, business’s hedgehog thinking and all-consuming pursuit of the big idea.

There is a famous and much quoted line from David Ogilvy  about marketing executives’ relationship with research:

“They use it as drunkard uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.”

Ogilvy was giving advice to the marketing exec and lamenting what he saw as an increasing reluctance to use judgement. Even before Ogilvy, and ever since, MR has invested a great deal in what Eric Reis would now describe as  vanity metrics and success theater: the action of “making people think that you are being successful rather than energy you could put into serving customers.”

Quite simply many MR frameworks serve simply to banish uncertainty and nuance and validate the prevailing mental model or latest big idea rather than confront marketers with the awkward and difficult “illumination” of the real world.  

As a result many of the hard wired myths and mental models of marketing and advertising go largely unchallenged.  Byron Sharp’s recent book “How Brands Grow- What Marketers Don’t Know” is an all too rare MR based challenge to marketing orthodoxy. Sharp collates decades of market research from many of the world’s biggest brands (including Coca-Cola, Kraft, Kellogg’s British Airways, P & G and many others) with the aim of falsifying some of marketers most deeply held assumptions. Here is a quick summary of the more prominent assumptions that Sharp sets out to debunk:

• Differentiating a brand is a vital marketing task
• Customer retention is cheaper than acquisition
• Who a brand competes with depends on the positioning of the brands image
• The consumers of a particular brand are a distinctive type of person
• Mass marketing is no longer competitive

Obviously we don’t have space to examine these in any detail here. But, for the purposes of this piece, I am less interested in the validity of Sharp’s evidence (for the record I am convinced by most of it) and am more interested in the powerful example he provides to all NewMR revolutionaries. 

There are no innovative new data collection techniques on display in ‘How Brands Grow’.  Mostly he is using “traditional” brand equity, sales and tracking data to support his arguments. But, in many ways, it is a far more revolutionary and powerful narrative than the majority of what we see in NewMR. Sharp uses “traditional” methods to ask new and exciting questions. A great deal of NewMR uses new (and not so new) techniques to generate the same old questions and answers in service of the type of hard wired paradigms listed above… 

But then, Sharp’s book isn’t about method. It is about effecting deep cultural change in marketing practice. To achieve this Sharp simply looks at the data through a new lens and exhibits a heretical zeal in bringing his ideas to the attention of the world’s biggest brands.

Sharp argues that he has established a series of laws that should govern marketing practice. You can probably tell by now I am less convinced of the need for such laws.  But the heretical zeal he exhibits should be the day to day currency of all MR (“new” or otherwise). And NewMR, if it is to be worthy of the name, needs to be about more than innovative new methods. It needs to insist on a new relationship with the businesses and organizations it serves.

The first step is a new mind set and a will to break the mutually comforting and self-fulfilling cycle of overly direct and reductionist big ideas (by the way, much of the new thinking around the role of implicit and emotional response, cognitive psychology, behavioral economics etc. can be just as reductionist and dogmatic as the “traditional” rational paradigms….). I think the way to achieve this, and avoid our new thinking repeating the mistake of the past, is through the adoption of more oblique approaches and strategies in MR.

In the oblique approach there is only one fundamental requirement- generalized, “one size fits all” approaches (old or new) that support the status quo or get in the way of adaptation are out. There is no need for consistency, changing your mind is allowed. To quote John Kay- “Give me a one handed economist” goes the saying, but careful judgement really is a matter of “on the one hand and on the other”.

As yet, the assertion that we need more foxes and fewer hedgehogs remains a pretty hard sell in MR. It is difficult to market your agency based on such eclectic principles. “It depends” is not a bankable answer for clients reared on an expectation of certainty and control. But MR could and should learn a lot from Peter, the City of London Planning Officer and Mr Goldman the famous Hollywood screen writer.

The biggest prize of all may be in driving a cultural, rather than methodological, transformation in business. Enabling decision makers to develop more humility about what they do and don’t know and helping them find competitive advantage in nuance, complexity and contradiction. This is my answer to the question- “How do we define NewMR?”  

Scott Keeter of Pew Research Center discussed Pew’s experiments with Google Consumer Surveys at the AAPOR annual conference in Boston today. While Pew Research remains committed to rigorous, probability-based sampling for all major work, Scott took pains to point out, the organization wants to look at non-probability sampling for particular purposes. Working with Google was a partnership rather than a blind test because Pew wanted to understand the methodology “under the hood”.

Google Consumer Surveys (GCS) are sampled from online publisher websites who have a “survey wall” for access to content instead of a paywall. GCS uses quota sampling and then weighting on inferred demographics.

Pew is not ready to make a bottom-line judgement on GCS but discussed “fit for purpose”, with different purposes including: national point estimates, tracking change over time, quick reaction measurement, pretesting question wording, open-end testing, diverse question formats and associations between variables. If GCS is biased in a systematic way, can you use it for trending? GCS is weakest at associations between variables, given the limit of two-question surveys.

Looking at 52 comparisons of RDD samples, the point differences average 6.5 points and median differences are 3.5. Some of these are mode differences, some are population differences. GCS sample has an older, more highly educated population than RDD sample. Correlations by age for inferred demographics line up with RDD estimates, even though there is slippage in the inferred demographics. Individuals might not be who Google thinks they are, but overall the demographic breakdowns worked for the questions tested.

Pew has asked people about volunteering and GCS under reports this considerably more than RDD but GCS is closer to the Current Population Benchmark than RDD, perhaps due to social desirability bias. GCS sample is less religious, which is a demonstrated Internet mode effect.

Some observations:

• In the past month, Pew ran three surveys which provided reliability over time with stability of estimates.
• For quick reaction surveys, the first presidential debate didn’t line up as well as the second debate did with RDD sample.
• Pew tested an open-ended question on Google for fielding as an open-ended question on the phone but providing interviewers coding categories identified from the most common responses on GCS.

Google Consumer Surveys produces results quickly, cheaply and timely for specific events. It allows for the use of multiple question types. Unfortunately, because of the reliance on non-probability sampling it is difficult to predict when it works well and when it doesn’t. Google Consumer Surveys is a work in progress.

Pew Research plans to continue to use GCS for quick reaction polls; for testing of survey questions including wording, order and format; as well as testing open ended questions to help inform development of closed-end questions.

Pew is interested in exploring how well it can measure media use at various times of day and hopes to explore types of non-probability methods to see how they might supplement traditional probability-based surveys, even though they won’t be using GCS for national point estimates.

In the question and answer session, Pew was asked if national point estimates were off in any specific way. Scott said that some were off by a little and some off by a lot and those that did worse tended to suffer from mode effects or vague questions. For instance, a question about looking online for health information in the past several months showed an enormous disparity, but posing the question differently produced closer estimates. Pew was unable to come up with a good theory for why certain questions had big differences.

Another question asked, “Have you shown here that we can apply weighting and modeling to non-probability panel surveys and get somewhat similar estimates to probability surveys? Is that a sign that we are good modelers even though we don’t know anything about validity?”

Scott answered that the GCS modeling is very light and optional: in the interface you can turn the weights off, and if you do it makes a point or two difference. GCS does use quota-based sampling for building the sample and that can’t be changed.

A panelist said, “I came away from this experience with non probability modeling realizing that if you are a sampling from a relatively large and heterogeneous frame of people visiting websites then your need for modeling may be greatly reduced, but if you have an opt-in panel you have to do more modeling.”

Editor’s Note: Reg Baker has his take on this topic on TheSurveyGeek blog as well. It’s a bit more skeptical, as you’d fully expect from Reg.  Check it out.

Editor’s Note: Join me in welcoming our newest member of the GreenBook Blog author community: Nelie Shah! Nelie is an attorney that shifted her focus to executive-level research years ago and has been on the forefront of focusing on big business issues ever since. I asked her to go to the newest IIR event “Future of Consumer Intelligence” this week and share her thoughts on it for our readers. I think you’ll enjoy her take.

By Nelie Shah   

The Future of Consumer Intelligence conference provided a comprehensive overview of how the market research industry is changing and the challenges companies and brands are facing in dealing with the rapid increase of social and digital media. 

There was an overwhelming theme of the “old” type of market research versus the “new” in which multiple tactics are employed and a myriad of data is available to get to know your customer/target audience in a better, possibly slightly more invasive manner.

Below please find my “highlights reel” of what stood out and resonated. 

“New Qual” Is the New Normal:

Nina Leask of GM explained how she was able to gain valuable insights into design and consumer behavior utilizing respondent self-administered video ethnography. Additionally, Buick gained more actionable insights by probing appropriate touch points via an online chat platform with individual respondents.

Gamification Passes Go:

We all know that traditional survey administration and design is on the decline and consumers want to be engaged, stimulated and even challenged while providing insights and feedback. Thus, utilizing game elements in survey research is becoming increasingly popular and is often successful in returning salient information.

Utilizing gamification techniques to peak the interest of consumers while providing an incentive (points, monetary – real or imitation) promotes a feeling of being invested and, thus, responses are theoretically more thoughtful.  That said, it has been well studied that when playing a game one’s senses are heightened as are concentration and focus.  The natural transition to utilizing this technique to engage consumers in exercises that included recall, associative memory, rapid reactions to stimuli and problem solving while being able to potentially “win” a tangible or even intangible prize is clearly on the rise.  Clearly the amount of time allotted to these exercises is still a work in progress but Bill MacElroy thinks 17-42 minute surveys are feasible.  As a seasoned recruiter and moderator, I would say under 30 minutes is optimally the maximum to maintain someone’s attention for a “survey game” but that’s just my opinion.

Research Tools Applied In Non-Research Settings:

A prime example is a company that presented and I happen to think is quite a genius idea called CrowdMed.  It is a platform that aims to “solve” medical issues that have eluded doctors using prediction market mechanisms. The theory, as espoused by Jared Heyman, is that prediction markets work best when people are betting on something that matters to them or has some intrinsic value.  Essentially, it is a medical diagnosis crowdsourcing site that uses gamification techniques to engage it’s “medical detectives” while also providing some social good.  They donate $1 for every 1,000 points someone “wins” to an organization called Watsi, a global funding platform for patients in serious need of low-cost medical care which enables one to fund high-impact treatments.

Consumers Are Calling The Shots (And They Know It):

Consumers are clearly more vocal than ever and continually demanding of innovative products and services that are relevant and tailored to their specific needs.  According to Henry Mason, transparency is critical and actual corporate social responsibility and sustainability results influence consumer purchasing.  He spoke about crowdfunding and provided examples of several innovative new companies where consumers are invested either financially, emotionally or both.  Check out: Kickstarter the leading platform for crowdfunded projects; Tribewanted where you can invest in sustainable communities and in return for the money you invested you get a discount on a holiday at that location; The China Survival Guide an iPhone app that tracks food scandals across China;  ABN Amro started Seeds.nl in 2012 which encourages investment in socially responsible startups; TrackTrips was created to battle express kidnapping in Bogota; and Islendingabok – their tag is “bump in the app before you bump in bed” an app designed to prevent incest in Iceland – now there’s a real problem!

Big Data = Big Questions

Nate Silver spoke about surveying the data landscape and the importance of quality, quantity and observations collected under a wide variety of circumstances. But the big question that seemed to linger throughout the conference is that although the magnitude of data available is rapidly increasing, as are the ecosystems from which a company or brand can extract this information, how does a company/brand measure it and track the direct correlation to an increase in ROI?

TNS uses passive listening and has an app that tracks consumer exposure to ads on tablets and mobile devices that allegedly can provide a direct correlation to an increase in sales.  Digital media can be tagged to gain precise information on exposure across channels but this has to be balanced with the legalities of privacy. That’s the lawyer in me talking.

Many brands (Clorox, J&J, Heineken) are still trying determine how to utilize and link all the data they are mining to exemplify the tangible impact not only on marketing to their target audience(s) but also the direct correlation to their corporate reputation and increased ROI. 

It’s The People That Impact The Bottom Line!

Alex Hunter pointed out that people don’t communicate with brands. People talk to people and the personification of a brand is critical for success in today’s market.  Success equals an increase in revenue and, in reality, money talks. At the end of the day that is the only way to sell this stuff we call market research to the C-suite.

Final Thoughts:

The Future of Consumer Intelligence event was great in terms of providing much food for thought and painting a clearer vision of what the future of research is likely to be focused on. Lots of questions were raised and it will be exciting to see what answers materialize as enterprising companies step-up to start providing solutions.

By Patricio Pagani

The ‘data is the new oil’ metaphor is overused these days. And it’s not particularly apt. After all, we aren’t drowning in an excess of fossil fuels, are we?

But if data is the fuel that powers your business, then we have a problem.

We’re setting fire to our fuel with the inefficiency of 19^th century colonials in a Kauri forest.

If your data is oil, a well-designed database is your motor

Just like setting fire to our fuel can give us short-term warmth, a primitive approach with data management gives us haphazard results. We’re not seeing the fullest picture which our data could give us.

Five tell-tale signs that your organization is wasting its data fuel:

1. You sit through meetings where oodles of meaningless data sprawls over endless PowerPoint bar charts.
2. When the somnolent audience finally speaks up, it’s to question something which looks wrong.
3. The speaker can’t explain the mistake.
4. Information-sharing initiatives are launched, the quietly fade away…
5. Management prefers to make decisions based on instinct, because using data-driven insight is just too hard.

For most of us, the word ‘database’ conjures images of the clunky interface of early versions of MS Access, mysterious acronyms and lines and lines of dull-as-dishwater raw data. Hearing the word makes people either go into a panic that they don’t have database skills, or switch off because it sounds out-moded.

Perhaps a better way of thinking of databases is as a well-organized storage facility or knowledge bank: an organized structure in which to store all that valuable data.

It’s curated by skilled data managers. You can dip into it whenever you want, and the data is ready to use when you do. In this ideal world, you won’t have to repeat a huge research study because you couldn’t access the study that your predecessor (or somebody in a different business unit) run. In this ideal world, all the research studies that your company has purchased over the years are available at your fingertips. And before you decide to ask to burn new fuel, you will definitely check that the tank is empty,

Locked in silos

Most large businesses have several agencies supplying them with consumer insight data, often in many styles. But marketers need to look at the bigger picture. Keeping your data-fuel in silos (be it PowerPoint decks of study results or even an Excel dashboard with prettily-formatted tables) doesn’t help marketers drive brands forward. It shouldn’t really matter to marketers where the insights come from. They are agency-neutral. By bringing the data together into a single knowledge bank, you can:

•        Mine and compare consumer insights across studies from one country or many countries

•        Find new patterns and relationships in your data

•        Get more value from your existing research and save money because you don’t need to repeat old questions just because they aren’t accessible.

 Speak a common language

But in order to be able to extract all that value from your investment in consumer insight, the first step must be to plan the way you want to look at the answers. We call this the ‘data architecture’. The best architecture for your data is one that is aligned with your business.

It’s tempting to organize data by source, or by the internal team who commissioned the project. But what if we organized it by the kinds of questions which marketers ask? For example, ‘Where are our greatest opportunity segments?’ or ‘What impact do our campaigns have on awareness?’.

Don’t settle for ‘researchey’ labels like ‘Grouped socio-economic class of HH’ on your variables. Take the time to align them with internal language. The outputs will look less intimidating to the non-researchers you want to engage.

Even more importantly, align the labels of common variables between studies. For example, you have a weekly behavior tracker and a monthly brand tracker. Wouldn’t it be great to overlay brand performance on purchase behavior? Net up the weeks into a new month variable in your behavior tracker in order to easily look at the two studies side-by-side.

Harness the power

As data-driven approaches take organizations farther than ever before, the need for well-designed databases is more relevant than ever. If competitors are able to harness the power in their data fuel, then they will be the ones to go places with it, leaving us in the dust.

Let’s stop being gas-guzzlers, and start being disciplined data consumers. We’ll cover more distance when we use our fuel in a finely-tuned motor.

By Jeffrey Henning

Of the 1,681 unique shared URLs in the past two weeks, here are 10 of the most retweeted.

 1.      UPDATED: The Top 25 Unmet Needs Of Insights Clients – Lenny Murphy highlights the top unmet needs of clients of consumer insights organization that were identified as part of the Insight Innovation Challenge.

2.      Ipsos Warns of Slowing Pace in Market Research Market – Ipsos reported that year-over-year sales for Q1 were down 5.3% and that the firm expects continued softness the rest of 2013.

3.      Innovation in Marketing Research and Consumer Insight Conference – The IIeX conference in Philadelphia June 17-19 focuses on highlighting research innovation to leading client-side practitioners.

4.      Steve Jobs Proved Data Can Tell Any Story You Want – I never get tired of railing against pie charts, and Ciara Byrne (writing for Fast Company) gives wonderful examples of how misleading pie charts are, especially when plucked from Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field.

5.      A Brave New World: Thoughts On The Research Now/Vision Critical Partnership – Lenny Murphy interviews the CEOs of Research Now and Vision Critical about a new strategic partnership in which Research Now will sell Vision Critical communities to its customers.

6.      Twitter Rolls Out In-Tweet Surveys – PSFK says that Starcom MediaVest Group will be running in-tweet surveys for its major clients.

7.      4 New Approaches to Consumer Segmentation in a Digital & Social Age  - Joel Rubinson, formerly chief research officer of the Advertising Research Foundation and now an independent consultant, shares some disappointments with many common approaches to consumer segmentation. He offers some fresh thinking about how to segment consumers: segment them for the moment, by brand loyalty, by shopping behavior and by explicit interests.

8.      Are Millennials Paying Attention? – Hannah Mumby of Vision Critical discusses recent research her firm did which showed that Gen Y respondents were less likely to be taking a survey at home and more likely to be multitasking while taking the survey than respondents of other age groups.

9.      Sean Copeland brings revolutionary consumer research technologies to market – This is a press release from Abacus Data on Sean Copeland’s appointment to director of research.

10.  Kids These Days! – How to Engage Teens in Online Qualitative Research –  Kerry Hecht of Dub shares lessons from the difficulty of keeping teens interested in participating in online qualitative exercises.

Note: This list is ordered by the relative measure of each link’s influence in the first week it debuted in the weekly top-5 analysis. A link’s influence is a tally of the influence of each Twitter user who shared the link and tagged it #MRX.

By Adriana Rocha

I’ve been a hybrid technologist, marketer and market researcher since the early days of the Web and, for the past 13 years, I’ve been working with MR agencies, end clients, panel companies and technology companies.   I’ve had the privilege of seeing the evolution of market research technologies from several perspectives – and how technology is changing the practice of market research. I can say these are exciting times for this industry.

Let me start with a thought on digital. I think we can accept this truth: digital has won. It’s not new that discussions around digital and market research have been fertile and multiplied in the industry. In fact, MR agencies will have to quickly adapt their digital strategies.  The digital MR specialists will have to evolve from “online research experts” to encompass digitally-savvy specialists for social media, online communities, mobile, text analytics, “big data”, gamification, DIY tools and more. It almost goes without saying: a digital market researcher must be fluent in using technology. Actually, we could even say more broadly: pretty much every modern market researcher needs to be fluent in using technology.

But not necessarily building it; many tech companies are vying for that role and MR agencies will be hard pressed to compete with them, and some should argue they should not all. 

I could imagine some market researchers thinking “Oh! I can’t recognize this industry anymore. Are we technologists or researchers?  I have data collection automation, social media listening platforms, facial coding technologies, panel platforms, routers, online communities, text analytics and sentiment analysis technologies, big data, dynamic dashboards, mobile research platforms, and the list doesn’t end – I can’t afford all of these technologies!” Yes, it’s a complex world, my friend!

However, I believe we are in the beginning of the Golden Age of Market Research Technologies. Let’s look into five recent effects of technology on the relationship of consumers and brands

• The experience consumer-brand has become almost entirely digital-ish — even real world events, coupons from the store, calls to call centers, visits with a sales rep, discussions with friends sent via email or remarked on Facebook, etc., have a tendency to end up echoing somewhere in the digital space.
• The purchasing decision is not taken in a single instant anymore—shoppers more and more acquire information from different digital sources before considering a purchase (query search engines, visit brand’s web site, read educational content, follow related accounts on Twitter, visitor competitors’ sites, read reviews, discuss with friends, check online communities, comparison shop, etc.)
• The decision is shaped by real-time dynamics – a consumer’s perspective and interest evolves over a time period, and there’s a tremendous opportunity for marketing to adapt with them.
• The boundaries between prospects and customers are blurring – Consumers don’t proceed precisely, lockstep through a funnel — they zoom in and out, up and down. The cycle goes through — discover, search, research, compare, decide — leveraging the web, mobile, physical stores, call centers, and social media.
• The entire experience now defines the brand. What used to be separate —marketing/advertising, product/service, prospects, and existing customers — is now being mashed together, and from the first touch point onward, this whole mix is the new customer experience. And its loop defines the brand.

With that in mind, can we imagine that market research will continue applying the same methods and tools for understanding consumers, measuring brand awareness, purchase intention, ad recall, shopper behavior, etc?  Of course it won’t work!

But let’s not panic! Digital can be the root of the problem, but can also be the answer. And thanks to cloud computing, SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) models, open source, expert communities, and a plenty of new languages and frameworks, it’s never been easier or faster to build great software. This means a huge opportunity for disruptive innovation in market research.

New technologies will continue to be developed and opening doors – almost every single day we hear about a new technology, a new startup or a new entrant in this industry. But these new creations will increasingly need to integrate with the client needs more deeply as well. Agencies that have the right teams and quickly adapt will be in high demand. With the advantage of many clients demanding for such transformation, MR agencies have the potential to become curators of knowledge and best practices for the future of market research. This too can be a high value service.

Something to think about…

References: “Agencies and the Marketing Technologist Revolution”, Scott Brinker 2011; “Platform as a Service – a logical evolution from SaaS”, Manjunath Gangadhar – Sun Mycrosystems 2008; “Zero Moment of Truth”, Jim Lecinski – Google 2011

It’s that time again folks; time to launch the 3rd Phase of the Insight Innovation Competition!

Have an idea that helps brands better understand consumers? Want to support the creation of the solutions of the future? This is your chance to make a difference.

The Insight Innovation Competition helps budding entrepreneurs bring disruptive ideas to life, while connecting brands to fresh and untapped sources of competitive advantage through deeper consumer understanding.

The goal of the Insight Innovation Competition is simple: to identify potentially disruptive innovation in technology, methodology, or business process related to the $33B global marketing research and consumer insights industry. We align entrepreneurs with potential clients, funding partners, and resources to accelerate their growth, shorten their path to market, and achieve critical mass in their business.

Our recent establishment of direct access with the European Commission CORDIS Fund ($75B), the U.S. Department of State AMP Project Fund ($1.75B), the Centre for Social Innovation, and many venture capitalists and angel investors help us take this promise to the next level and truly support the growth of our industry.

We’ve lined up an extensive ecosystem of potential foundational clients, strategic investors, and funding partners to further accelerate participating companies. Our network of corporate partners, including Campbell Soup Co, The Coca-Cola Company, Ericsson, ESPN, Lowe’s Home Improvement, Merck Pharmaceuticals, Procter & Gamble, and several other organizations will also be present at the Insight Innovation eXchange to evaluate strategic investment opportunities and potential partners for new projects.

The winner will gain exposure to a broad global audience of potential clients and partners, mentorship from successful senior leaders within the market research space, access to office space in Manhattan provided by the Centre for Social Innovation, public relations and promotion assistance, and the opportunity to engage with GreenBook’s network of funding partners.

For more information on the competition and to learn more about how to submit an idea or vote, visit our newly redesigned and enhanced website (courtesy of eCGlobal!) www.iicompetition.org.

Submissions and voting are now open and will run through May 22, 2013.

HOW IT WORKS

• Innovators submit a great idea that will change the future of marketing research and consumer insights.
• The market research industry votes on the ideas that have merit.
• Five finalists (and possibly a couple of wildcard entrants selected by the judging committee) are selected to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges at the Insight Innovation eXchange North America 2013.
• The winner gets mentoring, fame, and access to possible funding partners.
• The industry benefits from a great new solution that improves how companies understand consumers.

In this third round, we’re giving new innovators the opportunity to submit their concepts for a crowdsourced round of voting. Past participating companies have seen their businesses accelerate due to their involvements in the Insight Innovation Competition, resulting in funding, partnerships, new clients, and global brand exposure. Past winners are Decooda and Zappistore, and I think both will attest to how beneficial to their business participation has been.

RULES FOR SUBMISSIONS

• The company presenting the idea must be in business and the concept must be within the public domain already. You must be able to share your idea publicly. We’re not responsible for IP protection.
• Your company must be majority privately held. Angel seed funding is OK, but if you’ve taken outside investment money and do not have a majority stake left, this isn’t for you.
• Your company can reside anywhere in the world, but it’s your responsibility to ensure that the legal and tax requirements of your home country are met.
• It’s also your responsibility to get to the Insights Innovation Exchange event. A virtual presentation may be allowed under special circumstances, but it is less than ideal.

On June 17, 2013, as part of Insight Innovation eXchange North America 2013, the finalists will present their concepts to a panel of judges comprised of sponsors of the competition in a live event. Each presentation will last 15 minute: 10 minutes to pitch and 5 minutes for Q&A from the judges.

Using a 10-point scale for each category, judges rate each presentation on:

• Originality of concept
• Presentation quality
• Market potential
• Scalability
• Ease of Implementation

 After the presentations are complete, we’ll poll the audience on which pitch was best and factor the vote score into the judge scores.

The panel of judges will be comprised of leaders in technology, innovation, the insight industry, the public sector, and related industries such as Snorri H. Gudmundsson of the European Commission, Jonathan Ewert of TransforMedia, Brian Singh of Zinc Tank, Scott Miller of Vision Critical, and Keiko (Kay) Iwaisako of Macromill.

On June 18, 2013 we’ll reveal the scores. The highest final score wins. The winner will be engaged with our funding and business partners in private discussions and chooses which of the judges they would like to engage with afterwards as a mentor.

WINNER PRIZE

• Exposure to a large international audience of potential prospects, funding partners and investors, including the Accelerating Market-driven Partnerships (AMP) Program, the European Commission CORDIS, and independent venture capitalists and angel investors.
• A “Hot Desk 60”membership for one year at the Centre for Social Innovation’s newest facility in the iconic Starrett-Lehigh building in Manhattan, which includes 60 hours of coworking space and 3 hours of meeting room access per month
• An invitation to present at the next Insight Innovation eXchange
• An interview to be posted on the GreenBook Blog, viewed by 36,000+ industry professionals per month
• An opportunity to work with successful senior leaders within the market research space

Good luck to all the participants!