Editor’s Note: Anyone who knows me will immediately understand why I didn’t even think twice when the good folks at iModerate asked me if I wanted to post this article. I’m pretty sure you’ll love it as much as I did! Oh, and if anyone wants to work with me to assemble a video playing off this idea let me know…

By Brian Madden, iModerate

Anyone who’s moderated knows that a difficult respondent can bring you down while good respondents can refresh you just as fast. At iModerate, our moderators talk individually to different respondents all day long, so it’s no surprise that we come across a wide variety of personality types. How do we deal with them? Unfortunately, there’s no absolute field guide out there on how to classify and tackle all these individual personalities from a qualitative perspective. So while I don’t have all the answers, I can offer you a simple and fun evaluation, one that reflects what we see day in and day out, personified through a Marvel™ous display of super egos. That’s right, the first ever Avengers Guide to Qualitative Respondents.

If you’re a psych major you can probably rattle off The Big Five traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism – or OCEAN) a lot easier than remembering what SHIELD stands for (Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate.) But for our purposes we are going to forego some of the psych talk and define respondents as “Black Widows”, “Thors”, “Iron Men”, “Captains Americas” and “Hulks”.

Let’s begin with Black Widow, a spy played by Scarlett Johansson. Much like openness, she’s up for adventure; she’s curious, brings unique ideas to the table and is in tune with her emotions. A seemingly great respondent… until you get the feeling she’s the one interviewing you! Sometimes a Black Widow goes so far as to call out your techniques, shifting the focus to you and your questions. Often times you can get the conversation back on track with a widow by adding in phrases that show shared common sense, such as, “though this might seem obvious…” Confiding in them by disclosing why you’re seeking the information and reminding them that their opinion is highly valued also works. Stroking an intelligent respondent’s ego never hurts, so give them their credit and quickly get back to the objectives. You may get off topic for a moment, but at least they won’t beat you down.

Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth, is a demigod. Not a very relevant profession in our world, but his qualities exude that of the conscientiousness persona; Dutiful, self-disciplined and acting with purposeful/predictable behavior. You can usually count on a Thor to answer your questions and participate in a manner that reflects the norm. A typical respondent who gives typical answers makes it all too easy to coast through the conversation. It’s very tempting to go; “Q&A, Q&A – here’s your reward, thank you”- but because our job is to seek deeper insights, it’s important to stay creative and self-disciplined. You have to ‘bring the hammer down’ on yourself and use different approaches to get beyond surface answers. Asking questions that utilize the teachings of cognitive theory, trying different projective and enabling techniques, and other indirect and clever lines of questioning can help a Thor tap into his own psyche. Your persistence and creativity will pay off when you strike that lightning bolt of insight you were looking for.

Robert Downey Jr. plays a perfect Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man. A narcissistic genius, millionaire, playboy, philanthropist, Stark is a near perfect extrovert. He is outgoing and regularly “seeking the stimulation of others”. As a respondent, Iron Man can be a lot of fun and very candid, but it can be hard to keep him focused. With his mind going a hundred directions at once, Iron Man often wants to chat or joke around, even going so far as to ask about you and your personal life. The research can quickly take a back seat to chatter and amusing anecdotes. As a moderator, our job is to conduct sound research within specific time frames. It should be fun and engaging, but if someone isn’t taking it seriously, that’s a problem. We find the best bet is to not play into it. Simply deflecting the extra chit-chat by either ignoring it or by using, quick, objective and close-ended acknowledgements (as it’s important not to use encouraging language) – “understood”, “I hear you”, “Gotcha”, and “Noted” can often do the trick. Adding precursors such as “thinking critically…” or “getting focused again…” before questions can also help steer them back on course. When an Iron Man can stay focused, they have the potential to give you some of the most substantive feedback around. After all… the arc reactor in Stark’s chest keeping him alive proves he has a heart. Simply keep him on track, and he’ll speak from it.

Captain America (Chris Evans) is the original super hero in the word of Marvel™. Like agreeableness he is compassionate and extremely cooperative. He also tends to be very traditional, and after being frozen for sixty plus years, that’s understandable. Captain America isn’t very technologically savvy which can certainly put a strain on conducting smooth online qualitative research. He generally types a little slower and needs to see concepts more for memory. Occasionally when there is media involved he takes a few extra moments to get it working. The best way to deal with Captain America is to be clear, helpful and patient. A little reassurance that there is no rush and that he is doing fine can go a long way. If you can relate to him and put things in his terms he will more than likely deliver wonderful results. Even though he may shield himself from modern product concepts, he’ll lead you to good old fashion quality insight, as long as he knows you’re on his side.

Lastly we come to the Hulk played by Mark Ruffalo. The Hulk is classic neuroticism, a brilliant scientist named Bruce Banner one moment, a rage of emotions the next. Neuroticism is classified as having tendencies to experience unpleasant emotions easily such as anger and anxiety. “Hulk no like long research, Hulk was told this would take ten minutes! Where is Hulk’s reward? Hulk thinks these questions are boring and stupid!” Now you have a dilemma. Do you drop Hulk out of the airplane, or appeal to his human side? It can be hard to salvage such a beast, but sometimes all it takes is a little TLC. Try a little empathy. Apologize, and be very clear about what is to come, how long it will really take, and remind them that their efforts will be rewarded. Sometimes a little love and incentive is enough to get Bruce Banner back, just make sure you’ve got a change of clothes for him.

Is it possible for qualitative researchers to handle these individuals as well as director Nick Fury? That’s up for debate, but hopefully I’ve given you some nuggets from our qualitative research world to take into consideration. After all, knowing what you’re up against will always give you an edge.

Editor’s Note: As research and technology continue to become inextricably entwined and the development of the “data culture” continues to evolve at an increasing rate it is becoming increasingly important for market research to take it’s cues from the tech world. Conversely, tech companies are learning a lot about how to engage with consumers and how to provide additional value through their technology from research organizations. This relationship may be a bit rocky, but it’s creating a lot of value for both sides. Tom Ewing, Digital Culture Officer of BrainJuicer, is one of the folks at the forefront of this intersection and today he gives us a quick overview of his experience at the recent Next Berlin 2012 conference. I suspect we’re going to see more crossovers like this over the next few years.

If you want to read Tom’s talk from the conference, you can find that on his Blackbeard Blog here. I highly recommend that you read it; it focuses on the implications of behavioral economics on technology development and adoption, and has significant takeaways for MR as well.

By Tom Ewing

When I was invited to speak about behavioral science and the web at European technology conference Next Berlin 2012, I was nervous and excited. I’m a research conference regular, but I’d never spoken at a tech event before, and even the ones I’ve attended have had a strong marketing or advertising bent. Next 2012, though, was the real deal – crowds of entrepreneurs, developers, investors and only a smattering of marketing people. I was probably the only researcher at the conference, let alone on the podium. How different would it all be to the research events I was used to – and what could I learn from the differences?

As you might expect, tech is a restless, forward-looking industry. When research conferences talk about the next big thing, it’s with a certain wistfulness or impatience – trackers and large-scale quant surveys still account for the bulk of our industry, and we know it. When tech conferences talk about the next big thing, it’s simple realism: there will be a next big thing, there always is, and it might be one of us who makes it. On day one at Next, in the Arena stage, 12 start-ups pitched to a panel. At a research conference it would be an entertaining sideshow – a round of applause for all our plucky experimenters! – but here it was the most fiercely tweeted part of the day.

One upshot of this is that the previous big things in tech barely got mentioned. The research industry is obsessively interested in the doings of Facebook and Google – a speaker from either will draw serious crowds. But at Next there was very little talk about them and what they do – they’re the establishment now, and the point of technology is to think about the future.

Introspection isn’t completely extinct in tech, but it manifests itself in very different ways. The research industry is prone to endless debates about its very existence – everything from the name research, to the jobs we do, to the philosophies that underpin our work is perpetually up for grabs. Tech introspection is more localist and specific, based on the uncomfortable realities of regional difference in a globalized industry, and it manifests itself in questions like “Are Europeans too risk-averse?”. One of the sharper arguments of the conference centered on the uneasy relationship between the German and Russian tech scenes: what could Berlin learn by looking East? Quite a lot, said one Eastern European tweeter: “We’re solving real problems while you’re building apps to find your missing cupcakes”

Cupcakes aside, the conference in general seemed happier with demonstration than analysis. The bulk of presenters had come to show off something they’d built – from an augmented reality children’s book to a robot tentacle worryingly reminiscent of Spider-Man’s enemy Doctor Octopus. And apps, of course – apps by the score. There were terrific, inspiring talks too – like Russell Davies’ celebration of homebrew gadgets and the impossibility of telling silly and brilliant ideas apart. But the soul of a tech conference is the ideas themselves, so here are five of the best:

1. Thinglink: – http://www.thinglink.com/ – is a tool to “make images interactive” – putting in HTML links, extra information, feedback forms, and so on. It’s not dissimilar to the mark-up whiteboards researchers use in MROCs, except Thinglink aims to work across the whole web. At the moment the links feel a little obtrusive but in an ever-more visual internet these kind of tools will be essential.
2. Project Now – an app-in-progress from London music and tech development team RjDj, it’s so new I can’t even link to it! But it’s a great idea – an app which passively identifies your context and learns from your music preferences to find the right soundtrack for any activity or environment. Context is a hot topic in research, and of course tech is fascinated by it too.
3. Evrything – http://evrythng.com/ – is another angle on the “internet of things”. It’s a way to give existing objects unique digital identities without having to build it into them. So you might have “Tom’s guitar” or “Lenny’s Shoes” with their own identity and profile online. For me it opens up the possibilities for “thingnography”, where the focus is on an object, its location, and its uses – and that object could report on where it is, remind its user to tell us about it, and so on.
4. The Arena Stage – most of the conference formats at Next 2012 would be familiar to researchers, but the Arena Stage was a little different. Mostly used for start-up, it was an open stage in the round, in the middle of the main networking area – very easy to drift in and out and ideal for informal, quick, passionate presenting. It made the whole event a lot livelier.
5. 3D Printing – with the first under-$500 3D printer just launched, there’s a sense that 3D printing might just be where home computing was 20-25 years ago, so 3D-printed objects gained a lot of attention. We were entertained by a recital on a printed violin, saw gamers make their World Of Warcraft characters into unique action figures, and were left to contemplate the implications for manufacturers of a world where any household object can be exactly customized.

Editor’s Note: It’s been a while since we  had an entry in ‘The Global View” series, so today’s post from Adriana Rocha of eCGlobal is well timed. It’s also a great reminder that for emerging markets, mobile IS the internet, and in many cases these countries will leapfrog the PC and Broadband phases and go straight to mobile as the dominant connectivity model. This poses massive implications for market research and Adriana helps explore those a bit in her article.

If you want to join Adriana, I and other thought leaders, visionaries, innovators, and change agents in charting the course of the future of Market Research, join us July 18-19 in Cincinnati, Ohio for the North American edition of the Market Research in the Mobile World conference. You’ll get a global view as well as a peek into the future; this is one event you simply can’t afford to miss!

By Adriana Rocha

It’s no news that Brazilians are passionate about social networking and that they are one of the most active Internet users worldwide. In fact, Brazil recently surpassed India and has become the 2^nd biggest country on Facebook!  But in addition to the social media phenomenon, there is another big movement happening in the country that will surely vie for our attention as researchers: the fast growth of the Brazilian smartphone market.

With cheaper devices (prices went down 33% in 2011**) and a growing variety of models, smartphones have become a new Brazilian passion!  In 2011, retail sales of smartphones in Brazil grew 179% versus 26% of mobile phones in general*. 10 million new devices were sold last year alone – that’s double the number sold in 2010.Varied socio economic classes are making a run on these new devices. The age of a booming smartphone market in Brazil is looming.

2011 was also a milestone for Android devices in the Brazilian market.  As per Nielsen, at the end of 2010, Android had only 16% of market share against 60% of Symbian. By the end of 2011, the situation had reversed.  61% of all Smartphone’s sold were Android devices, 19% Symbian, 9.7% Windows, 5.5% Apple iOS and 2.7% Blackberry OS. With manufacturers such as Motorola, Samsung, LG, ZTE and Huawei overflowing the market with cheaper devices and telecom companies offering attractive post-paid plans with internet access, we will continue to see an exponential growth of smartphones in Brazil. More and more Brazilian consumers will go mobile/ social through their devices.

With an eye on this trend, and in order to better understand the consumer’s perspective around the theme, last month we conducted a study with 1,190 smartphone users. This study was conducted within our Brazilian online panel and communities that contain more than 300,000 people nationwide. We found that almost half of Brazilian internet users have smartphones (the penetration is even higher among men (52%). And the good news for market research is that half of them are willing to participate in surveys and other activities using their smartphones.

Among other interesting findings, we identified that smartphones accompany Brazilians from the time they wake up till bedtime. About 79% of women consult their phones before leaving bed in the morning and right before going to sleep where the percentage rises to 82%. Among men, 72% use the devices in bed before sleeping, and 66% when they wake up. Sometimes the device is also used when consumers are shopping, helping them to choose products and compare prices. Approximately 69% of participants have this practice – which is more frequent among women and individuals in younger age groups.

The use of social networks appears as one of the most performed actions by Brazilians through their smartphones (82%), after making calls at 96% and sending SMS at 95%. Women are the heavy users of social networks via handsets; 86% of them view their profiles through their devices. The habit of reading emails through the devices is also recurring, 82% of respondents do always or sometimes. 91% of respondents said their smartphone is so essential in their daily life, and they cannot even leave the house without it.

With consumers going digital, multi-tasking and having the world at their fingertips, everywhere and anywhere, researchers need to take the opportunity to interact with them, gathering real-time insights, opinions and feedback. There is no doubt; researchers should embrace mobile research methodologies and technologies now.

By Neal Cole

Much of the attention given to Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, fast and slow has been about how people make decisions and the implications for models of consumer behavior. However, the book also points out that researchers have their own bias – the law of small numbers! Is this bias to blame for many modern day myths?

What is it?

It’s a general bias that makes people favor certainty over doubt. Most people, including many experts, don’t appreciate how research based upon small numbers or small populations can often generate extreme observations. As a result people have a tendency to believe that a relatively small number of observations will closely reflect the general population. This is reinforced by a common misconception that random numbers don’t generate patterns or form clusters. In reality they often do. Kahneman makes this observation:

“We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.”

Why are researchers prone to the law?

Kahneman acknowledges that researchers (social and behavioral scientists in his case) have too much faith in what they learn from a few observations:

• They select too small a sample size which leaves their results subject to a potentially large sampling error.

• Experts don’t pay enough attention to calculating the required sample size and instead use rules of thumb.

A well known example of this is the supposed ‘Mozart effect’. A study suggested that playing classical music to babies and young children might make them smarter. The findings spawned a whole cottage industry of books, CD and videos.

The study by psychologist Frances Rauscher was based upon observations of just 36 college students. In just one test students who had listened to Mozart “seemed” to show a significant improvement in their performance in an IQ test. This was picked up by the media and various organizations involved in promoting music. However, in 2007 a review of relevant studies by the Ministry of Education and Research in Germany concluded that the phenomenon was “nonexistent”.

What is to blame for the bias?

Kahneman puts much of the blame for people being subject to the bias of small numbers on System 1. This is because system 1:

• Eliminates doubt by suppressing ambiguity and automatically constructs coherent stories that help us to explain our observations.

• It embellishes scraps of information to produce a much richer image than the facts often justify.

• Is prone to jumping conclusions and will construct a vision of reality that is too coherent and believable.

• Humans are pattern seekers and look for meaning in their observations.

• People do not expect to observe regular patterns from a random process and when they do see a potential correlation they are far too quick to reject the assumption that the process is entirely random.

Overall Kahneman believes people are prone to exaggerating the consistency and meaning of what they see. A tendency for causal thinking also leads people to sometimes see a relationship when there isn’t one.

Questions for Researchers?

Kahneman’s work raises some important questions for researchers and customer insight specialists.

• We are pattern seekers, and we often use small samples in qualitative research and usability testing. However, is there a tendency to extrapolate the findings from small scale studies to the wider population?

• Do researchers sometimes select too small a sample size in quantitative studies and experiments? Is this because they use a rule of thumb rather than calculating the statistically required sample size?

• Are we too quick to reject a random process as being truly random?

As with all forms of bias reality is characterized by a spectrum of behaviors from the rigorous to the lax. From my experience on the client-side of research there are a number of reasons why research sometimes falls foul of the bias.

Observations from a client-side researcher!

• Usability tests evaluate actual behavior so normal sampling rules don’t apply! 

I read this recently in a blog about website usability testing. This is a myth.  The reason for only undertaking a small number of tests is because there are diminishing returns. After 5 to 10 tests few new usability risks tend to be generated. The law of small numbers still applies even when it involves human behavior.

Like any form of qualitative research usability testing is a valuable way of uncovering potential risks and perceptions of a new design. However, just like traditional qualitative research, usability testing still benefits from being validated by using quantitative techniques (e.g. A/B or multivariate testing).

• Treating qualitative findings like quantitative data!

• Senior Management comprehension of sampling & statistics:

When I worked for a life insurance company I was constantly being challenged about the reliability of findings from small samples. The reason for this was simple. Almost all the senior management were actuaries. This meant they had an excellent grasp of the potential bias caused by sampling. This had the benefit that other departments were unlikely to be able to misuse research based upon small samples because they would meet the same challenges as I did.

• DIY research tools (e.g. Surveymonkey):

DIY tools have given non-researchers easy access to the means of conducting and analyzing their own surveys. I am not against the use of these tools. Unfortunately though many non-researchers who use DIY research tools may not have sufficient knowledge of sampling and statistics to correctly design or analyze data from surveys. If this is the case it suggests that non-researchers may be particularly prone to bias resulting from the law of small numbers.

• Correlation does not mean causation!

Key driver/multiple regression analysis is often used for modelling the influence of independent variables on a single dependent variable. However, such models can only infer a causal relationship and further experimentation and analysis is needed to support such a relationship.

The nature of survey data (e.g. independent variables are often correlated) and sample sizes does not always justify the use of such statistical techniques. Big data can play a key role here in providing more robust evidence for causal relationships. But without evidence to suggest a reason for a causal relationship it is important that a correlation between two variables is treated with the utmost caution.

• Death by PowerPoint!

This is a training issue, but I frequently see PowerPoint slides that highlight differences between sub-samples that are not statistically significant. In most research agencies the modelling and analytics are carried out by a separate department from the  account executives. This is not a problem provided the account executives who present data have sufficient understanding of the nature and limitations of the analysis they present. From my experience this is not always the case.

• Budgets and treating research like a commodity!

When companies treat research like a commodity and constantly expect to make cost savings there is a danger that sample sizes will be cut to the bone. As a result studies don’t deliver the required level of reliability. I briefly worked on a multi-country brand and advertising tracking study that only had sufficient sample to analyze on a three monthly basis. This proved very frustrating as it wasn’t sufficiently sensitive to measure the short-term impact (i.e. monthly) of bursts of advertising activity.

• Pressure to identify insights!

Researchers are by their nature pattern seekers and this can make them susceptible to seeing phenomena that are generated by a purely random process. There is nothing wrong with this provided we treat such patterns with caution and seek further data or more robust research to test our hypothesis. This is why researchers need to be trained to present results in a balanced and critical way so that management don’t jump to conclusions.

• Reporting continuous data too frequently! 

There is a growing tendency to expect to have data on tap. This is a characteristic of the digital age. But sometimes this leads to pressure to analyze and communicate continuous survey data too frequently. I came across a continuous customer satisfaction survey a few years ago where high level Key Performance Indicators were communicated to each business area on a monthly basis. However, despite most of the base sizes being far too small to identify any significant differences, the Customer Insight Manager was expected to comment on  changes from the previous month’s score. This encouraged the inventing of reasons for changes that were not even statistically significant.

• Implications: 

The law of small numbers gives researchers an interesting insight into our own potential fallibility. It warns us against listening to our intuition and relying on rules of thumb for determining sample size. Kahneman also provides a useful reminder to be careful on how findings are communicated when dealing with data from small numbers. Research and experimentation is after all an iterative process, so we should always be looking to validate results, whether from large or small scale studies. It is only through trial and error that we are ultimately able to separate insights from myths.

Thank you for reading my post and I hope it provided some useful insights.

I have not had the pleasure of meeting Kristof in person, but have met many other members of the InSites team and have continuously been impressed with the caliber of people working in this organization. As I went through the interview process with Kristof it became readily apparent that the exceptional folks I’ve met are just taking a cue from their leadership team, because Kristof clearly is as exceptional as his team.

InSites is one of those companies that just has “it”; smart, creative, bold, focused, and high performing. Their growth and leadership role across the global industry is proof that they are no flash in the pan, but are a company to watch and learn from for the rest of us. They are one of the “new breed” of research firms that is reinventing the industry and I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

This is a “meaty” interview; Kristof really dug into my questions and I think you’ll be as impressed as I have been with the answers he offered up. We conducted this interview via email over the last few weeks.

LM: Hi Kristof, thanks for agreeing to chat with me! First, congratulation on the ranking of InSites in the Top 20 of most innovative research firms in the recent GRIT report. You guys have certainly been growing like crazy and garnering a lot of attention with your social media activity and presentations at conferences. Can you tell us a bit about what has been fueling that growth and what part of the InSites story do you think is really resonating with folks?

KDW: Thanks for the invitation Lenny! It’s indeed great to see we have moved up from the 18^th to 11^th position in the GRIT report, it indicates our investments in R&D and international presence are paying off. Though it’s not that clear cut, here is what I consider to be the major drivers behind our growth over the last years. A first and evident one is the fact that we think and act outside of our home market. Having started our business from Belgium (one of the smaller research markets in the world), obtaining fast growth automatically implied we needed to look for new markets to enter. Today, more than half of our revenues are realized through our offices based in Rotterdam, London and New York. Our online only focus enables us to serve our clients on a global scale, having run projects in more than 60 countries.

Secondly, I believe that our never ceasing focus to ‘take research forward’ has been of tremendous help to put us on the world map. Since 2005, we are structurally dedicating a significant amount of resources to method innovation, with talented people like Tom De Ruyck and Annelies Verhaeghe now leading our ForwaR&D lab, taking over from my co-founder Niels Schillewaert who is now active in our US office. By integrating solid research know-how with more experimental, creative and non-traditional methods, we are able to surprise our clients, but at the same time also reassure them. Our academic roots have been instrumental in supporting our credibility in this.

Thirdly, thinking outside of the strict marketing research box has been fueling our growth as well. As we believe the true added value of market research should lie in what we do with the insights we generate and not how we get to them, we felt we needed to invest in marketing thought leadership. Steven Van Belleghem and Joeri Van den Bergh, two of our managing partners, have been doing an excellent job in inspiring companies with the new marketing thinking comprised in their best-selling books. Steven’s first book “The Conversation Manager” has been selling over 24,000 copies and his newest one “The Conversation Company” promises to be a hit as well.

Something to be proud of as well is that Joeri’s book “How Cool Brands Stay Hot” was recently voted as Marketing Book of The Year 2011 based on feedback from 2.154 marketers spread across 85 different countries. The ideas comprised in the books definitely helped us to reach higher in our clients’ organizations, often all the way up to the CEO. Finally, our growth is very much related to our people, values and culture. We are still completely independent, with all 4 founding partners still actively involved in managing and growing the company. At the same time, we welcomed 5 new partners who significantly contributed to where we are today. When we recruitment new people, we first take a look at personality and value fit before we dive into a candidate’s technical or marketing competences. In the end, there are only people; they make up our strongest asset.

I think the part of our story that is really resonating with folks is that we are changing the nature and boundaries of the marketing research industry. We are firmly convinced that research needs to rethink the way it acts and to redefine its reason of existence. The days of “one-way, one-shot” research are counted. Clients are increasingly looking for “information-based business services” instead of a series of techniques. They are in need of fluid and always-on “insights-on-demand” capabilities that are not interrupted by the set-up of one-shot ad hoc studies. But also participants are looking for something different from what the research industry is offering them today. In “The 24-Hour Customer”, we read that companies are in need of better understanding the economics of customer time and attention in order to win in today’s competitive landscape. For sure, research is more than ever in competition with a whole series of activities consuming precious time. That’s why we believe so strongly in engagement and activation of participants: making them part of something bigger, providing real value to them, and connecting with them in their natural environment. It implies giving them real power, even to the extent that they can take over tasks from professional researchers, actually often being better at executing them.

To us, the future of research lies in bringing consumers in the boardroom of companies, narrowing the gap between employees and consumers, and enabling ‘ordinary’ consumers to create extraordinary value for companies. It serves the needs of clients and participants altogether. But more importantly, it puts marketing research higher up the organizational ladder.

LM: How does InSites differ from other players in the MROC field?   

KDW: There is quite some confusion today on what a MROC is and what it is not, making it more difficult for clients to assess the nature and quality of different vendors offering MROC solutions. To us, a MROC is a moderated group of 50 to 150 consumers structurally collaborating via an online closed platform over a certain period through various engagement and activation techniques, thereby supporting one or more marketing objectives.

From this perspective, let me explain how we aim to make a difference versus other key players in the MROC field. First, we have developed a complete flow of activities boosting participant engagement in MROCs, benefiting the quantity and quality of the insights we derive from them. This relates to the way we recruit people, the challenges we provide to participants through “gamification”, “positive disruption”, or other techniques, the way in which we give back to MROC members, etc. But equally important is to deploy similar techniques for engagement at the client side as well, creating maximal organizational impact through changing the hearts, minds and actions of employees. Research communities provide an ideal vehicle to support this, being able to connect the dots, to immerse in the daily lives of consumers, to directly interact with consumers. Sometimes we even put clients and consumers in one interactive game, where both parties provide valuable input and learn from each other.

A second differentiating element of our MROC philosophy is the flexibility in community formats we apply, optimally suited to the specific needs of our clients. Our communities vary in duration from a minimum of 3 weeks to an ongoing community. This enables us to deal with all kinds of specific marketing challenges, to craft and review a complete marketing plan or to collaborate with consumers in a very structural way. But flexibility also pertains to the specific role MROCs play within a broader mix of methods. For instance, our insighting activation process makes use of a mix of methods such as mobile ethnography, individual blogs, and crowd interpretation facilitated via a game, all connected with each other in a unique way. Thirdly, we have been working very hard to establish truly local connections with consumers, embedded in local culture.  Our network of trained and certified moderators all over the world applies all of our MROC know-how, but makes it truly relevant from a local perspective, ensuring the best possible way to understand, connect and engage with consumers across the globe. Finally, I think our creative reporting formats often stand out from what competitors have to offer. We select those reporting formats that are optimally suited to the project specifications. Apart from the classic PowerPoint debrief documents and client presentations and workshops, we offer short movies, infographics, updates via social media, dashboards, blogs and news sites, and online tests and competitions as alternative and sometimes more powerful ways to activate insights within the organization.

LM: It seems that a large part of your DNA comes from Ad Agencies; you look, feel, and sound more like them than traditional research firms (which is a compliment by the way!). First, do you agree with that and second, has that been a strategic decision or simply an outgrowth of your focus on consumer engagement?

KDW: Thanks for the compliment! For us, it has been a deliberate, strategic choice. For too long, the marketing research industry was seen as a “dull” industry stuffed with number crunchers and nerds. It couldn’t be more distant from the glitter and glam of the cool and edgy advertising industry. Even more so, researchers were typically perceived only to be able to kill the great creative ideas of ad agencies through validation or to support decisions that had already been made …

About 5 years ago, we defined our BHAG or “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”: to make the market research industry “sexy” by redefining its purpose and the way it behaves. Evidently, shifting the industry in a fundamental different direction requires several industry players to play along, and we are very happy to see that several agencies are joining us in the same endeavor. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that the industry is dedicating attention to granting awards, that we are able to recruit people from outside the research / agency business, that young talent is recognized and put in the spotlight, and so on. But we might need to take it a step further, being more bold in our aspirations by not trying to mimic ad agencies, but by adding new meaning and relevance. My favorite example here is the work we do for the Belgian ad agency Famous. Their ongoing “Everybody Famous” research community connects 300 everyday consumers with all people working at the agency. They truly consider these consumers as their virtual employees, acting as co-inspirators at critical moments of campaign and creative development. To me, this example shows the great complementary power of both worlds: while ad agencies have classically taken up the role of “brand custodians” towards their clients, research agencies are in a great position to claim the role of “consumer custodians”, bringing the voice of the consumer inside organizations, all the way up to the boardroom.

But more is needed to turn our industry around and to make it sexier. In order to enhance the conversational impact of what we are doing and to create real impact within organizations, the medium is equally important as the message. For example, we have a designer in our team boosting the conversational impact of the content we are spreading every day. What was really cool to see is that our slideshare presentation of “Social Media Around The World” was viewed more than 750,000 times, making it the 7^th most popular presentation on slideshare this year. From an InSites Consulting perspective, we don’t really have another option. We need to walk our own talk and apply the principles included in our books.

LM: One of the most impressive things about InSites is how many incredibly smart young people you have on your team. At most any event you see them taking center stage rather than your senior team, which has fostered a real sense of connection and equality with their industry peers. Another double question: First, what is your recruitment strategy to identify these great folks and second, what is it within your corporate culture that has allowed you to give them room to shine on a wider industry stage?   

KDW: Great question! Let me first start with the why followed by the how, answering your questions in reverse order. One of the key success factors behind our historical growth has always been attracting young and talented people, providing them with a lot of challenging opportunities, and putting them in the spotlight. We recently started realizing that – by becoming larger – we were losing a bit of this through defining more strict processes, roles & responsibilities. We also believe in building a broad and balanced base of talented people who can take the floor and act as a ‘spokesperson’ for our brand. This approach has really paid off, with Annelies and Tom as great examples, both having received prestigious awards such as the ESOMAR Young Research of the Year and the 4 under 40 awards. It also has to do with our corporate culture: we want our organization to feel and behave like a start-up every day, growing a culture of hard work, where people can act as entrepreneurs seizing new opportunities within the framework of our corporate strategy and goals. Our partnership structure reflects this: anyone can grow into a shareholder, fully identifying with what we are trying to achieve.

In terms of recruitment strategy, we are fortunate to have strong links with the academic world (in particular the Vlerick Management School), having enabled us to recruit the very best people out there. As we are taking up teaching assignments at various universities and business schools, we are in a good position to detect talent and make people excited about research in general and InSites Consulting in particular.  Next to that, our social presence has helped to boost the inflow of great people. Important to notice here is that we pay a lot of attention to the values and mindset of people, striving for a strong fit between the personality of our organization and the individual candidate.

LM: With the rise of the MROC, Mobile ethnography, social media analysis, gamification models, advances in behavioral economics theory, etc.. it often feels like we’re entering into a new “Golden Age” of truly context driven insights. What do you think?

KDW: These are exciting and energizing times indeed. A whole new world of revolutionary possibilities is opening up, enabling us to break barriers of time and space. Think about the context in which consumers are interviewed most of the time: we force people to do things that they would naturally not do, we rely on their cognitive capabilities all too often, and we assume people are dedicating full attention to the tasks we present them with. For too long, researchers have put themselves at the center of attention, while we clearly need to put consumers at the heart of what we do. Otherwise, the relevance and validity of what we are doing as an industry will suffer.

The great thing about contextual research is that it enables us to do exactly that: using methods that directly tap into the natural environment of consumers, resulting in more reliable and relevant answers to the questions we have. At InSites Consulting, we are working hard to make this happen: our mobile application allows consumers to easily upload pictures or videos to their personal blog embedded in a research community; we use the same app as a convenient second screen allowing participants to take the community with them everywhere they go; we can fully integrate communities into the most dominant natural context for most consumers today, Facebook; our contextual surveys allow consumers to embed their own personal context into a survey.

While we are true believers in context driven insights, there are some important things to consider though. First, we need to increase our understanding of the fit between particular methods and contexts. For example, we don’t really believe that using mobile technology to fill out lengthy online surveys is a good idea. Moving from a 15 inch PC screen to a 3,5 inch mobile screen makes a whole difference, limiting the capabilities of mobile for this purpose. Efforts to solve this problem via text-to-speech technology have proven to be unsuccessful. Second, talking to people in their own natural environment can also have disadvantages. Sometimes, it makes sense to explicitly create an artificial context for consumers to get to refreshing insights: by activating or deprivating consumers from their normal activities, we create a positive disruption in people’s lives, enabling consumers to learn new things about themselves and generate new insights.

Using crowds to get a better sense of a particular context is also very useful. Especially in markets where we as researchers are less familiar with, using consumers as “co-researchers” can be very beneficial. We recently conducted a project for Philips in China, generating insights related to people having sleeping problems. Next to the research participants involved in the project, we used an additional pool of 10 consumers acting as co-researchers, assisting us in connecting the dots and challenging the work of our qualitative researchers. Finally, contextual research implies that we are getting really close to consumers, accessing their very personal and private space. This requires more trust from participants, calling for stronger engagement and connections with them.

LM: Of all the changes happening in the marketplace right now (new competitors, new client needs, changing technologies, etc..) which one excites you the most and why do you feel that way? 

KDW: The one I am most excited about is the general trend that, accelerated by technology and social media, consumers are truly taking the lead in shaping brands and organizations. This is not only disrupting the research industry, but any marketing service industry such as advertising, consulting, innovation, etc. This marketing revolution is causing boundaries between industries to blur, making it harder for customers to understand when research starts and when it stops. Different players in the marketing services domain are vertically integrating, with new value chains arising. The marketing research industry is perfectly positioned to be the spider in this web. With consumers being more empowered than ever, our aim at InSites Consulting is to facilitate ordinary consumers to create extraordinary value for companies. Consumers are more than just buyers or respondents. We empower them to take up different roles, acting as peers, colleagues, advocates, or judges. It drives our ForwaR&D lab agenda, where we try to understand how far we can stretch “outsourcing” research activities to consumers, thereby improving them throughout the methods we deploy.

LM: Play amateur futurist with me for a minute. Thinking ahead five years, where do you see the research industry positioned and what is your vision for InSites?

KDW: Not that easy to know how the world will look like in five years’ time, but here’s my calculated guess. First of all, I think (and hope) that ad hoc research will be more the exception than the rule, fishing the river much more than we do today by making use of behavioral data, having ongoing consumer connections via research communities, tapping into natural communities, listening in through netnography, and so on. A direct consequence of being closer to consumers all the time is that the industry can move up on the ‘research-based consultancy’ ladder, representing the voice of the customer at the client side in a more continuous fashion. This will enable researchers to understand the business of their clients better and to immerse in their day-to-day environment. The industry has been saying this a long time (“we are consultants”), but has never really succeeded in achieving this goal. In five years, I think we actually might be in a better position to claim a consulting positioning, reserving a seat for research (“Chief Consumer Officer”) in the boardroom.

Second, I think there will be a stronger focus on efficiency, integration and impact. Regarding the latter, I am curious to see whether or not we will see new business models arising, e.g. making fees for our work dependent on the impact we generate for clients. Impact also means that research will play a bigger role in terms of influencing the hearts, minds and actions of our clients’ employees. There used to be a time when research agencies only used to talk to insight and research managers. This already has changed quite a lot and I expect the role of research agencies in touching different functions and departments inside organizations to further extend. Third, if there is one thing that will remain constant, it is the people factor. While speed and value for money are still important drivers for our industry, “old school” requirements such as dynamism, responsiveness, attentiveness, solid judgment and personal service are still long-term growth drivers. What we will see though is a much broader mix of people having different backgrounds being involved in the market research industry. This is an essential condition in order to be able to tap into the extended method toolbox offered by the “Golden Age” we are living in.

From an InSites Consulting perspective, I hope that we have been able to significantly contribute to the shift we feel the industry should be making. By 2017, our company should be recognized on a global level as a partner helping out clients to maximize the value they can derive from consumers. And foremost, I hope we will still be having lots of fun and energy along the way, as I believe the journey we are in is more rewarding than the end result.

LFM: This has been great Kristof! Thanks for your candor and thoughtful responses; they are much appreciated.

KDW: Thank you Lenny, this has been fun.

By Gyurka Jansen

The two  days of the ‘Market Research in the Mobile World‘ (MRMW) congress – that took place on 18 and 19 April – were filled to the brim with several international experts in the field of (mobile) research sharing their knowledge and insights. Literally from America to Australia and India, researchers have come to show us what the current state-of-play in the field of mobile research field is. Because excellent summaries of the first conference day have already been written, we will focus on one term which has been mentioned at least three times during the first day of the conference: the ‘customer journey’. It all comes down to one question: “How does somebody come to buy something?”.

The journey

The way someone eventually becomes a consumer, meaning they actually buy a product, is the holy grail of the advertising business. Despite the criticism towards online, many advertisers still struggle with similar questions offline: who looks at an ad and what are the effects of that?  Others struggle with this problem as well; when does whom experience what? Although steps are being taken in the right direction, questions such as “Why is nobody buying my product while they must have seen my ad?” are still omnipresent. The ‘customer journey’ describes the entire journey someone takes from their first contact with a product or product group to the eventual purchase. This journey can lead the consumer over many different roads.

Mobile devices such as phones or tablets offer unique ways to stay constantly connected to somebody. This gives you the opportunity to literally follow people all day, partaking in their journey. In theory this is also possible offline, of course, but that becomes much more difficult. Without going into too much detail on the problems every mobile application faces – because there are many – we can certainly say that ‘mobile’ deserves the attention of the (market) researcher. For the first time we are able to continually question people who are part of our research, or they can pro-actively provide us with their data.

Narratives

The interest in the story behind people’s purchases comes from a number of different developments. We have already seen that there is technology available to follow people every day, there are several apps, employed by different bureaus, to accomplish this. On top of this, the fact that the holy grail has not yet been found plays an important part: we want to be able to see what processes are taking place long before a purchase is made. If you want, you can of course replace “purchase” with “decision”, because like every purchase, every decision we make is based on our earlier experiences, experiences that the researcher does not always have access to. And then we have not even discussed the context of those experiences or those later decisions yet.

Finally, we see that ‘narratives’ are going to play a bigger part in marketing and research. If you are a qualitative researcher, you might say they were never really gone. Consider concepts such as ‘storytelling’, where we try to tell our own story to consumers. Looking up stories that suit that (potential) consumer fits into this picture perfectly, on top of which we can even use this data to see if we have our own ‘story’ straight.

And the approaches?

We see then that mobile research into the experiences of consumers is stimulated in three different ways. First there is the technology, second there is the already existing need for better insight – especially when it comes to the use of different media – and finally there is a strong current towards storytelling. That final current could, in turn, very well be fed by Social Media.

All of this explains the rise of the interest in the ‘customer journey’, and specifically the use of mobile technology to chart that journey, but that does not make for a complete picture. The most interesting thing is still how the researcher builds on his research and analyses his results. Many researches are based on diary studies, because intuitively they are most intimately linked to the mapping of how consumers spend their days.

For this kind of research, it is possible to ask people to take a few pictures every day of what they buy in the supermarket and to upload these. And of course you ask they to “say something about them”. The way in which you can actually shape this are endless, and research that uses these kinds of techniques is only just getting started, so there is room for experimentation. Are you building your own app or a mobile website, do you want short videos or just pictures? And what kind of description would you want with those? With a GPS in every smartphone you will probably want to use the location data of this picture, or – the other way around – have people take pictures when they are in a certain location. Proper research in this area is not a Wild West, but a wasteland that calls for people who want to shape it and bring substance to it. Every possible thought that now springs to mind (phone types, countries, languages, speech and design) is extremely relevant, that is what makes new research extra special.

CC Picture: ‘ALT1040‘

Editor’s Note: I met Adam Di Paula at NetGain 6 in Toronto this year when we were both on the agenda as speakers. We had a great chat about the future of the industry and I was impressed by how astute his observations about the business issues impacting market research were. When he asked me if I’d be interested in posting his own supplemental analysis of the recent GRIT Report findings it was a no-brainer to say “yes!”, and I think when you read his take on the tension suppliers are feeling between the “cheaper vs. faster” imperative I think you’ll see why.

By Adam Di Paula, PhD

In some ways there has never been a better time to be in the market research business. Yes, suppliers are under increasing pressure to deliver results faster and cheaper. However, we now have unprecedented access to a myriad of cost-effective—and often free—tools to deliver what our clients want. We are being coaxed away from endless discussions of process and method to focus intently on results and outcomes. This should be cause for optimism, right? The latest GreenBook Research Industry Trends Report (GRIT) suggests that many research suppliers are not always ‘on side’ with a vision of the future filled with endless possibilities. And they continue to feel the pressure to serve two masters that are hard to please at the same time—quality and speed.

The Promise Gap. While the GRIT report showed that 66% of suppliers look to the future with more of a sense of promise than threat, this is well below the percentage of clients who see promise on the horizon—92%.

The Commoditization Gap. Suppliers are now more likely than clients to see the fruits of their labor as a commodity. The majority of suppliers surveyed (58%) agreed that market research is becoming a commodity. Compare this to 43% among clients.

Some of these gaps might be a function of differences in the factors that clients and suppliers believe influence the selection of research suppliers. Comparing the two groups across 25 factors revealed some large, and telling, disconnects between client and supplier.

Clients are much more likely than suppliers to rate ‘supplier provides highest quality data’ as a significant factor influencing the client’s choice of a supplier.  Suppliers are much more likely than clients to rate ‘previous experience with client/supplier’ and ‘lowest price’ as significant factors that influence the client’s choice of a supplier.

Here is where I had an image of a jaded research supplier (an image of myself comes to mind more easily than I’d like) having just gotten word that his—what could only be described as truly innovative—RFP response was rejected. Of course the client offers the typical condolences—‘yours was a strong proposal, and we almost went with it, but we decided to stay with our current supplier based on a combination of…..” In an effort to preserve our own egos—and build up enough energy to respond the next RFP—it is understandable that suppliers might be quicker to attribute rejection more to commodity factors like price, and less to factors that suggest something about the supplier’s ability, like quality.

Wither Quality? A somewhat disturbing, but perhaps not surprising, trend is the assumption that quality is becoming less important. Just over half of suppliers (55%) agreed that ‘quality work is becoming less important than speed of deliverables’. Only 40% of suppliers agreed that ‘if they had to choose, clients prefer quality over speed’.  The tight squeeze is not lost on clients—only 46% of those on the client side agreed that, when given a choice, clients prefer quality over speed.

This led me to a question that I don’t know the answer to—but would love your thoughts—Is it possible to deliver quality and speed, or do useful insights take time?

The Spring 2012 GRIT, prepared by MR trendspotter Leonard Murphy and his team, is essential reading for those who want to stay abreast of how MR clients and suppliers see the industry and where they think it’s headed. The full report is available at www.GreenBookBlog.org/GRIT.

Also available at sentisresearch.com/blog

Editor’s Note: Last week The Market Research Technology Event was held in Las Vegas and it was a truly great event. The theme was on how data convergence is driving intelligence, insights, and impact and the agenda was chock full of  examples of the changing players, methods, and scope of market research. There was little “theory” here; it was all about proving that the game has changed via real world case studies. I was fortunate to be on the advisory board for this conference, and it was thrilling to see the hard work we had all put in (especially the IIR team) come to fruition so well.

A special shout-out should be given to NewQual blogger Ben Smithee for Chairing so masterfully (Ben should consider being a professional MC!), Kelley Styring for providing such insightful commentary and blogging during the conference (rather than repost them here, you can find her take on the IIR blog), and to Marc Dresner for being the coolest roving reporter around.

The highlights for me were presentations by Greg Heist of Gongos Research on consumer authenticity & anonymity in mobile communities, Jane McGonigal on the application of game theory for data collection, Dan Ariely on Behavioral Economics, A.K. Pradeep on applying neuormarketing to social media theory, Christopher Frank and Paul Magnone on harnessing Big Data, Tiffany Schlain on the profound impact of the convergence of technology and personal relationships, John Kearon of BrainJuicer with an update on Digividuals, Stan Sthanunathan of Coca-Cola on his predictions for the future of the industry (I am proud to say they are similar to my own!), GreenBook blogger Tiffany McNeil of Del Monte on the importance of experimentation in market research, and Chris Jones of Zynga on leveraging real time data for business decision making. I also moderated a panel with Tom Anderson, Rapleaf, and Retargeter on data convergence and the drive to achieve a “Minority Report” type vision of the future of marketing which I think turned out well, but the real star of  the event was Google Consumer Surveys. To put it simply, they blew away the audience and succeeded in converting some and scaring the bejeezus out of the rest.

I am still digesting the event, and that combined with being gone for the past 7 days and getting ready to be out for another 3 while also trying to keep about 100 balls in the air (yes, I do have a day job!) means that it is going to be a few more days before I offer my own thoughts on the conference. In the meantime, Tony Cosentino has our collective back and offers up his unique take on the conference and what we learned from it means for the market research industry.

By Tony Cosentino

Call it PGA 2.0. Call it the convergence of distance, accuracy, and perseverance. Whatever you call it, the PGA tour has showcased a new generation of athletes. These are the kind of players that interact differently, process the game differently, and to the chagrin of the last generation of players, are not afraid of the big stage. Luke Donald with the perfect technical swing, the always positive Keegan Bradley, the unflappable Hunter Mahan, the sincere Bubba Watson (2012 Masters Champion), they are all so different, and all…so good.  There is something else, though. These players are highly adaptable. Just look at the comebacks of Kyle Stanley after he crumbled at 18 at Torrey Pines, or Rory Mcilroy (the world’s #1 player and 2012 US Open Champion) after the meltdown at the 2011 Masters.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of PGA 2.0 is that it showcases a large diversity of new talent and it is no longer dominated (nor intimidated) by a few names. Think of this statistic: rookies winning PGA events from 2000 to 2009 averaged two and a halve events per year; in 2010 and 2011, ten different rookies have won on tour, a rate double the previous years. So as older players such as Tiger Woods and Ernie Els battle to stay relevant, the new players think more and more about battling each other…

As the 2012 PGA Tour is a showcase for PGA 2.0, we might think of this year’s IIR The Market Research “Technology” Event (TMRTE) at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas the showcase for Market Research 2.0. Instead of the diversity of new golfers, however, our industry is seeing a wide breadth of new technologies, techniques and companies that are challenging the status quo. As they did last year (the inaugural year of TMRTE), IIR staff brought together the biggest and brightest names in market research innovation and did so in a most professional and entertaining manner.

The most notable aspect of TMRTE was the mood. The client heavy event (I think the statistic was about 70%) created an atmosphere of mutual respect and curiosity. No longer were the client side participants turning around their name badges so that they wouldn’t be bothered; instead, some of the best learnings were to be had away from the major presentations. Topics such as data mash-ups, integrated analytic platforms, mobile security and visualization, social, and the emergent cloud industry were of particular importance to me and apparently others as well.  As a result, this event felt much more like the original IIR Market Research Events that I attended when I first arrived in the industry.

The first big presentation of note was Chris Frank and Paul Magnone who’s book, Drinking from the Firehose has struck a chord in the industry. Mr. Frank opened with the fact that in his role as head of insights at American Express, he receives 3-5 calls a week from people trying to introduce a new technology. The problem, he suggests, is that he doesn’t need a new technology; he needs someone that understands his environment and can help him do a better job to ‘curate the customer conversation’. Without going into details, the presentation (as well as the book) offers a pragmatic approach for dealing with the complexities of Big Data in order to derive insights and compel action in the organization. This of course is coveted advice in the industry today.

Dan Ariely gave a good presentation, but unfortunately it did not give much more insight than his book, Predictably Irrational. The basic message is that our subconscious rules our decision making, and therefore the industry must continue to innovate especially with respect to experimental designs in research. The most practical idea he offered was that of asymmetrical dominance which suggests that we as researchers must pay very close attention to choice context within our designs. In one of the breakout sessions, Jeffrey Henning of Affinova (who offers his own summary of the conference here), after a dramatic entrance, did a very good job of clarifying this idea with particular applications of monadic and discrete choice designs.

Stan Sthanunathan of Coca-Cola gave his 2020 predictions for market research. With the risk of shortchanging the ideas, they are as follows: 1. Focus groups go virtual, 2. Q&A is passé, 3. Top MR Agencies will include Google, Facebook, and McKinsey, 4. Mobile will primary data collection method, 5. Biometrics will be mainstream, 6. TV ratings will give way to ‘connection’ ratings, 7. Privacy battles over personal information will become bigger and more frequent, 8. Death of random sampling, 9. Dominance of situational research, 10. Digital natives will be the new breed of researcher.

IBM gave a good presentation regarding text analytics. What surprised me is how early we still are in this field. (I guess I should have remembered the Intel presentation in Orlando last November). For IBM, as with Intel, there was obviously an extensive amount of human intervention necessary to interpret results. For example, taxonomies often need to be created by hand, thoughtful prioritization decisions need to be made, and weighting schemes through mechanisms such as Klout scores are still questionable.

Accenture discussed the customer journey and how they are approaching this space. As would be expected, the presentation was well thought out and focused on the story as much if not more than the methodology. The most compelling sub-plot was the move from a silo’d view of the customer to a more holistic view. That is, as companies such as TCOM and Financials start to combine information, the view of the customer becomes much more complete and actionable.

The very last presentation of the conference may have been the most impactful, and it also included the quote of the conference. When the two bright young Google employees came on stage, the packed room listened intently. (For a recap of Google’s strategy in the space, please see this blog piece by Leonard Murphy.) While there wasn’t a lot of new information given, there was some ability to read between the lines. In particular, the Q&A revealed that they are currently thinking about mobile surveys and approaches to multi-question surveys. They also said that they have thought through offering open-ends, but they didn’t see this fitting with their core value proposition.

The quote of the conference had to be when the gentleman from Google moved through the software demo and after a few minutes he brought up the prompt to write the actual question. He said with all seriousness (and I’m sure without intention), “this is where all of your expertise is put to the test. This is where you write the question.” I couldn’t help but chuckle and think that is how the technology industry perceives the market research industry- a bunch of question writers.  If this is indeed the case and we do not find the adaptable spirit of a Stanley or a Mcilroy, we may find ourselves as Tiger Woods and Ernie Els do today, somewhat irrelevant to the real competition.

Editor’s Note: It’s always a privilege to to have Seth Grimes contribute to the GreenBook Blog, but this time it is especially cool since his topic dovetails so nicely with many of the recent posts here regarding data convergence and the future of the research industry. The timing is also perfect since I am at the The Market Research Technology Event and the topic of how sentiment analysis and text analytics fit into the evolving model of data convergence for insights generation is certainly a major theme. It is a critical aspect of the transformation of our industry and Seth does a wonderful job of breaking down the current thinking on how it all fits together.

On May 8th in NYC Seth will be hosting  The Sentiment Analysis Symposium. This great annual event bridges technology and business in one of the most exciting applications to emerge in recent years: software that discovers business value in opinions and attitudes in social media, news, and enterprise feedback.

The symposium program features expert, authoritative, interesting speakers from research and industry. Come learn and network! You can register here. In the meantime, enjoy this great post on how social media analysis is changing our world from one of the Gurus of that space.

By Seth Grimes

“Thus the orb he roamed/With narrow search, and with inspection deep/Considered every creature.” – A market researcher? No, Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost

A year ago, IBM Watson bested two human champions at Jeopardy, a game that calls for broad knowledge and quick reasoning. Watson does “DeepQA” — QA is for “question answering” — via technologies that include text and data mining for knowledge-base compilation and query. While healthcare is IBM’s next application target, others are applying similar sense-making techniques to domains that range from military intelligence to financial markets, where traders build strategies around online and social-media sentiment. What about market research?

The sense-making common ground is lots of text and structured data, purpose-collected and crunched via analysis tools that tease insights from evidence. This is familiar territory for market researchers, especially those on the leading edge — call it NewMR, Next Generation Market Research, Digital MR, etc. — who seek to reinvigorate decades-old market-research practices with data from social sources. Taking a cue from IBM –

Our vision is DeepMR, enabled by an ensemble of text analytics, sentiment analysis, behavioral analyses, and psychometric technologies — applied to social and online sources, as well as to traditional surveys — with the potential to revolutionize market research.

MR in the Digital Age

Can the newer elements in the DeepMR ensemble, in particular, the use of free, open, expressive social-media and online postings, replace traditional methods such as surveys and focus groups? Is social-media mining the only fast-enough, sensitive-enough, authentic-enough method for the digital age? These are questions I posted to three participants in the up-coming, May 8, Sentiment Analysis Symposium, a conference I organize. Andera Gadeib, CEO of Dialego, an Aachen, Germany based market-research firm, Carol Haney, VP of product marketing at survey-research firm Toluna, and Tom Anderson, founder and CEO of Anderson Analytics.

First point: Traditional MR is not enough. “Classical research has great potential to deliver boring output, too many bar charts, tables, data,” according to Andera Gadeib. “In contrast, social media is exciting because there are real consumers involved in real discussions, talking about what’s relevant to them,” Gadeib continues.

Carol Haney echoes these thoughts and focuses on the role of subjective content. According to Haney, “sentiment analysis on social-media data helps companies understand important opinions shared by their consumers.” She elaborates on the technologies that may be applied to extract value from social sources: “Text analytics — specifically, classification and clustering techniques and sentiment analysis — on text data combined with data mining techniques is a proven approach to finding this opinion.”

Tom Anderson says that MR adoption of new methods is typically very slow, but that social changes everything. In 2005, none of Anderson’s clients had heard of text analytics, but “now, in 2012, partly because of social media and all the monitoring companies out there, it seems everyone has heard of it,” although “there’s still a lot of confusion about how it should best be used.”

Anderson has been promoting text analytics (and machine-learning techniques applied to text and data) as a centerpiece of Next Generation Market Research approaches since 2007. NGMR now extends to neuroscience, eye-tracking, crowd-sourcing (to be explored by Sentiment Analysis Symposium speakers from CrowdFlower and Crowd Control Software), and social-media monitoring (the forte of symposium participants including Attensity, Crimson Hexagon, and NetBase). This ensemble of technologies enables faster, more accurate, more usable consumer understanding than ever before possible. But this brings us to a second point. There’s still a role for traditional methods, but in conjunction with social-media mining.

Social and Traditional

Andera Gadeib characterizes focus groups as one of the few venues where marketers meet the customer in real life, and she says that traditional, scientifically designed surveys (as opposed to the catch-all social harvesting) are essential “whenever you need to understand the structure of a market, thoughts about a brand, and an understanding of target groups and their attitudes and needs.” She continues, “You will need background information such as demographics, usage patterns, [and measures of] brand (and competitor) awareness to fully understand behaviors and decisions.”

Gadeib advocates a multi-faceted approach: “Social analytics is good for exploring. Focus groups help to touch base again. Surveys support decisions.”

Tom Anderson puts is succinctly: “There’s no way to get the data from social media that you can get from well planned and executed survey research.”

Carol Haney provides examples of data missing from social conversations. According to Haney, “We know what people are saying online, yet we do not who they are and what their belief systems are? Are they young or old? Do they have an advanced degree? Are they married? What is their brand usage, for example, are they ranting about Brand X in their blog, without being a Brand X consumer? Or are they advocating on their influential blog for Brand X, yet turn out to be a paid marketer?  These are all areas where focus groups, quant surveys, and other research techniques are invaluable.”

An Unfolding Revolution

There’s more to social, however, than just data. Social involves a mindset that prizes openness and collaboration and a method that stresses agility, capabilities that allow individuals to work quickly, on the go, on the cloud. These aspects of social are transforming market research. Carol Haney goes so far as to say, “right now in the midst of a true revolution.” She explains, “As do-it-yourself tools in the survey, social-media scraping, and text-analytics spaces become more user-friendly and sophisticated, individuals in large and small organizations are able to go online, perform social-media monitoring, analyze the data, and do follow-up quantitative surveying that is representative of the population under test… at DIY prices and without needing to pay a full-service agency.  The impact of this on concept testing, ad testing, brand awareness, and many other corporate needs is huge.”

So we have emerging ease-of-use, but also sophistication. According to Tom Anderson, “the next inflection point is when clients and researchers get more educated about text analytics and best practices. Then we’ll see the technology incorporated everywhere, as just another tool.”

This ability to go deep is already producing results, including for Dialego clients. CEO Andera Gadeib describes use of a “meta-ontology” with nine categories ranging from product and brand-specific concepts to emotional and functional attributes, fueled by use of mining technology on survey data and social-media input, facilitating comparison across groups. Dialego’s “emotions radar,” in particular, dives deep into emotional attributes. Gadeib says, “We divide all emotions into eight dimensions, ranging from pleasantness, engagement, high positive and negative effects plus their opposite pole. This radar helps us to discover interesting patterns, often again by contrasting different groups.”

Adding Up…

These various strains — do-it yourself, text analytics, sophisticated classification, and sentiment analysis — add up to an emerging ability to have it all: Fast and broad (social), intensive and interactive (focus groups), decisive (surveys), and corroborative (triangulation with behavioral, psychometric, and transactional analyses). Breakthroughs have been propelled by social media — sentiment is central — enabled by new and better technologies, and motivated by a desire to go deep, to push the fast-big-varied limits of sources and methods. The DeepMR ensemble will revolutionize market research.