The rate of change today is the slowest you will ever experience!

This year represents the slowest rate of technological and societal change you are likely to experience in the rest of your life! That was the stark message from keynote presenter Jonathan MacDonald at a recent Vision Critical Summit that I attended. Wow! Today, this year, right now represents the most stable, most structured, least strange period you will experience over the forthcoming years. This simple and plausible statement has some major ramifications, including: The trend towards agile and away from trying to be ‘perfect’ is likely to continue. Knowing when your business should pivot instead of preserving is going to keep increasing in importance. Feedback from customers to decision makers needs to be faster, more relevant, and the implications of the feedback need to be immediately available. Old knowledge and old skills will need to be constantly reviewed to see if they are still relevant (some will be, some won’t). Legacy problems and issues will be increasingly destructive. For example, keeping a tracking study because you have 6 yeas of back data or keeping a specific product or service because you have been providing it for 25 years will tend to hurt organizations even more in the future. The need […]

What’s special about RIWI?

The post below is the result of a discussion between Ray Poynter from NewMR and Eric Meerkamper from RIWI.   Q:   Can you describe RIWI for me in 140 characters? A:    RIWI is a global survey technology and risk measurement company using its proprietary, patented methods to capture a new stream of consumer and citizen opinion data in any region of the world. Q:   Can you tell me a little bit about how you do that? A:    RIWI’s Random Domain Intercept Technology (RDIT) is the only all-device technology capable of randomly intercepting and gathering citizen opinion from anonymous, yet verifiable, non-panel online survey respondents in every country in the world. This enables our clients to randomly collect opinions from the vast majority of the Web population that does not participate in traditional MR. Q:   What sort of organisations are using this approach with you? A:    RIWI works directly with global organizations (World Bank, Procter and Gamble, Accenture, Freedom House, Viacom, MasterCard Foundation, etc.) and also through innovative market research and analytics firms that are seeking fresh and diverse respondent data and market intelligence unavailable through any other technologies. Q:   When people choose RIWI for a project, what are their main reasons? A:    […]

Futures Festival by BAQMaR on November 24 in Ghent, Belgium

Guest post by Tom de Ruyck of InSites Consulting and Belgian research association BAQMaR. Discover the different Futures of Market Research, Marketing & Business in one day! Learn, network, play, discuss… and go home with a fresh view on Your Future! The Futures Festival includes: 1 opening keynote (Ray Poynter), 3 afternoon stages, 3 inspiring and world-class evening keynotes In an amazing venue (an art gallery)! Don’t miss the best value-for-money conference of the year, in one of the most beautiful cities of Europe (Ghent, Belgium). Check the full program on www.baqmar.eu/conference Click here to read Ten reasons to visit Ghent.

Six Tips for Creating Integrated Insight – from the No Nonsense Tour

Everybody is talking about ‘insight instead of data’ and ‘storytelling instead of tables’, but how do we find and communicate the insight that everybody is talking about? These six tips on how to find and communicate the insight are drawn from the No Nonsense Workshop that we (Ray Poynter and Maria Domoslawska) will be running in New York on October 15 – as part of the North American No Nonsense Tour, click here to read more about the tour. Creating the right question is half way to solving the problem. Before trying to provide an answer you really need to understand what is needed. This typically means talking to people; asking them questions like “What would success look like?” and “What actions would you like to take once you have this answer?”  Establish what is known and what is available. It is likely there are multiple sources of information including market research, reports, transactional data, corporate knowledge, social media and much more. You need to establish what is available and the nature of that data – for example its reliability, its granularity, and its coverage (in terms of time, place, brands etc).  Unless you are a gifted and intuitive finder […]

6 Tips for Mobile Market Research – from the No Nonsense Tour

Here are six tips for using mobile market research. All six are drawn from the workshops I will be holding across the USA in October with Roddy Knowles and Maria Domoslawska from Research Now. To find out more about the workshops click here. You do not get to choose what device your research participants use. About one-third of them are already taking your online surveys via mobile and the number is increasing. Your role is to make sure the experience is good and the data you collect is right. That is why device agnostic is so important. In many cases mobile devices deliver the same results as PC-based interviews, but in some cases they don’t – for example multi-select grids deliver different results on PC and smartphone. You need to know what works and what doesn’t, and avoid the things that don’t provide comparable information. There is not a hardware or automated solution to making your surveys device agnostic. Good software helps, but intuitive design is critical. You need to design surveys with shorter questions, shorter answer lists, and in many cases shorter surveys. Location-based research is about more than GPS. Locating people via iBeacon, cell tower, or Wi-Fi are […]

Social Media Research shows Market Research is too inward looking

Ray Poynter and Lenny Murphy Earlier this year, NewMR and GreenBook set a challenge for the providers of social media research to highlight the strengths of social media research. Six companies took up our challenge and you can access their findings by clicking here. Now that all the reports are in we (Lenny Murphy and Ray Poynter) have had a chance to review the material and findings and this is our take on the big picture they create. Social Media Research has shown its value The task we set was not easy, we asked companies to explore what people (for example research buyers and the wider public) thought about market research and we asked them to come up with both findings and recommendations. Note, the companies were not exploring how MR uses social, it was using social to explore attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours relating to market research. To put this in context, we were asking them to conduct B2B research (something which is often thought to be a challenge for social media research) and we wanted strategic advice. The approaches adopted by the six companies varied, but they all produced useful input, and the picture they have painted of the […]

The story of the timetable that wanted to be an itinerary

Most of the timetables in the station office were happy to be timetables. They prided themselves on being comprehensive, on being up-to-date, and easy to read. They worked hard to add symbols for things like buffet cars, cycle racks, and special notes. But one timetable was different to the rest. This timetable wanted to be an itinerary. The timetable had looked at the way that travellers seemed to have a very casual and disinterested relationship with tables. But when they travelled with an itinerary they held it securely, they consulted it at every step in the journey, trusting it to guide them from A to B safely and efficiently. The timetable re-invented itself; it picked an exciting destination with a fun-packed and informative route, expecting that the travelling public would be delighted. However, the table-turned-itinerary was left on the shelf. Not only was it not respected like the itineraries it had watched, it was not even used in the way the other timetables were being used. This left the table-turned-itinerary sad and disgruntled. Luckily, one day a flaneur passed through the station, a women who sauntered around observing society. The flaneur took pity on the table-turned-itinerary and explained that to […]

6 Tips for Using Social Media Research from Ray Poynter and Annie Pettit

Here are six tips for using Social Media Research drawn from the workshops we are running in October in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. If you’d like to attend the workshops click here to find out more. The quality of the social media you collect is defined by where you search and the search terms you use – you need to be able to specify online locations and you need to be able to use Boolean search terms. Free and simple tools are great for learning, but will not deliver a commercial outcome. In most cases a majority of the data you collect will NOT relate to your investigation. Budget plenty of time/resources to clean up the information. For example, if you search for Apple you will want to remove fruit and cider, as well as a large quantity of spam. Automated coding is not as good as manual coding, manual coding is not perfect, and a wise trade-off is often to start with manual coding and then automate it. Do not trust automated options straight out of the box. Social media research is great for some things, for example finding out whether people have noticed your new […]