Caroline Frankum

5 key steps to creating a Modern Approach to Market Research

Guest Post by Caroline Frankum, 19 November 2018 Today, everything and anything is Digital. It’s a way of life that’s core to the DNA of what we think, feel, say and do. With 3.6 billion Global internet users surpassing half the world’s population in 2018, digital devices are getting better, faster and cheaper. There are now more mobile phones on the planet than there are TVs, which makes mobile a very powerful enabler of digital content, accounting for 69% of media access and 80% of social media access. Voice searches are also soaring: 2 in 5 say voice activated devices are ‘essential’ to their lives, and voice activated search has grown at exponential rates (up a whopping +3400% over the last 9 years), and are predicted to represent 50% of all searches by 2020. No surprise then that brands and businesses who are both increasingly embracing tech to make peoples’ lives easier and using digital media to revolutionize global communications in more engaging, personal and meaningful ways are the fastest growing brands in the world. But the best relationships are also a 2-way street. Good news then that many time-poor consumers want to provide brands their feedback (70% of bloggers […]

Clapper Board with Building a Personal Brand as its message

Hints for Building a Personal Brand

To read the Japanese version of this post (from Mr Ryota Sano) click here. Post by Ray Poynter, 31 January 2018 On Friday, 9 February 2018, Sue York and I are presented a webinar on how to build a personal brand in the market research and insights space, click here to find out more. In the run-up to this webinar I posted a series of tips (on LinkedIn) for people wanting to develop a brand. This post is the collection of posts and some news about a course that Sue York and I are running on this topic. Hint 1 – Research Your Field Before you start creating a brand it is important to understand what other people are doing. For this hint I am simply going to point you to a great post by a new face Ella Beaumont, showing how she systematically researched the MR scene and set about creating her plan. Hint 2 – Be positive and supportive Most people who have created a successful personal brand in the market research space are almost all positive and supportive people, people like Leonard Murphy and Kristin Luck. In the F2F world, make a positive comment when something is […]

Protest Image

Politicised discourse – is Market Research Attuned?

The post below is a guest post from Edward Appleton, Director Global Marketing at Happy Thinking People, based in their Berlin office. We live in unsettled times – Brexit, Trump, opinions polarising and splintering… more and more aspects of life seem to becoming politicised. Whether it’s fake news, cultural appropriation, safe zones – public discourse is often charged, filtered. This “politicisation” – oblique or direct – is happening faster than we think and is pretty pervasive. Some examples: US retailer Nordstrom became part of a storm following its decision to de-stock Ivanka Trump’s fashion line The Budweiser 2017 Super Bowl TV ad sparked a wave of protest following what was perceived as a politicised, pro-immigration message. Consider what the use of capital letters on Twitter can easily suggest. Are we ready for this in market research? The filter bubble is a familiar concept in social media, but what about the interaction that goes on in a Market Research Online Community? Or a mobile chat? Groups? Do we capture authentically how peer-to-peer communication really happens – or are we “shut out” as external observers? The hypothesis is that people become more inhibited in expressing their true views, with multiple social pressures encouraging […]

May roundup of NewMR News

Here is our May round up of NewMR news, containing links to some great blogs and upcoming news. NewMR Survey on Global MR and NewMR: We’ve started a programme of looking into a range of issues related to the changing and evolving of market research. Please take our survey via this link. This survey looks at which countries people want to hear more about, where they want see more speakers from, and looks at some attitudes towards change and quality. So, please do take the survey, it only takes about three minutes, and we’ll be sharing the results. Indeed, you can see the results by clicking here. Blogs Worth a Read: We like to share the posts that we think are worth a read: What Star Wars can teach your company about customer engagement – Kelvin Claveria was first out of the gates to turn the recently announced trailer for a new Star Wars movie into a useful and eye-catching post – Click here Can Market Research Make Big Data More Human? – Colin Strong, one of MR’s leading voices on Big Data, gives a great update on Big Data and what MR can add –  Click here 7 More […]

AMSRS conference: Humour, optimism and solid case-studies – Betty Adamou

Guest Post by Betty Adamou of Research Through Gaming, who was a keynote speaker at this year’s AMSRS Conference in Melbourne. Let’s face it, Market Research conferences aren’t a place we normally associate with a few laughs (from the stage, it’s different off stage!), but not only did the AMSRS provide delegates with two comedians (one of which was a Market Researcher) but we also had presenters using humour to make some valid points. These giggle-inducing moments were in the opening talks; Tom Ewing of BrainJuicer keynoted about Reasons to be Cheerful with his ever-present-on-Twitter co-presenter buddy ‘Old Man CrossTabs’ (@OldSchoolMRX on Twitter, if you’re interested in following) who would chime in every now and then during Toms talk with some words of wisdom, but was used to provide a stark contrast between the expectations of ‘Old MR’ (personified by Old Man CrossTabs) and ‘New MR’, brought to life through BrainJuicer case-studies and examples. The next talk included a flying lettuce through the slides, meant to highlight to power of subliminal messaging and subconscious decisions. Interestingly, the presentation which included a flying lettuce in Leigh Caldwell’s talk didn’t make me want to choose lettuce for lunch, but did act as […]

My take on social media – Sue Cardwell

Guest post by Sue Cardwell, marketing manager at Infotools Sue is a keen proponent of effective data visualization for business success. Sue has 10 years of experience in the consumer insight field across several countries. She now lives in Auckland, New Zealand and works for Infotools. Sue is an inveterate blogger and self-confessed chart geek who loves creating new vizzes in her spare time. Click here to see a list of the other posts in this series. If you would like to contribute a post to this series contact admin@newmr.com. “Do you want to allow this app to post to Facebook?” No, I did not! I felt each new socially-connected service was an invasion of my private life. I was a classic lurker: someone who watches what other people post on social, but is shy about sharing. But I’m also a marketer. We get excited about the shiny new toys of social media. Gradually I found my barriers being broken down in favour of the benefits I gained. Time for a major attitude shift. As I gained confidence with social sharing, I made the decision to embrace transparency. I am who I am, and I’m happy for you to see […]

My take on social media – Maya Middlemiss

Guest post by Maya Middlemiss, Managing Director of Saros Research, a UK-based company specialising in market research recruitment. Click here to see a list of the other posts in this series. If you would like to contribute a post to this series contact admin@newmr.com. This post focuses on what social media means to Saros Research. Research participant recruitment is all about connecting with people, reaching out to potential new audiences – and the social media revolution of recent years has given us an amazing array of new tools with which to do this. Our social media and content creation strategy is at the heart of our database development process, alongside a range of powerful offline tools which will always be needed as well. We create and curate extensive content to introduce the idea of research participation to people, and encourage them to register as potential participants – via our own blog and also guest blogging (such as a resident slot at Birds-on-the-Blog). Having pioneered database-driven recruitment in the UK since the turn of the millennium we are aware that there is still a vast potential audience out there who simply don’t know they can get paid to share their views […]

My Take on Social Media – Mary Aviles

Guest post from Mary Aviles of Bauman Research. Mary has 16+ years experience in strategic marketing, competitive intelligence, trends analysis, market research, product management, content management and now social media listening. Click here to see a list of the other posts in this series. If you would like to contribute a post to this series contact admin@newmr.com. In his recent Greenbook blog post, Ray Poynter–someone we consider one of the rock stars of market research (#MRX)–discussed the current limitations of social media monitoring and listening for market research applications. From a quantitative focus, we totally agree with the challenges he cites and we very much appreciate his raising these issues. In fact, in working with the Qualitative Research Consultants Association (QRCA) Social Media Research (#SMR) Special Interest Group (SIG), we’ve struggled with many of these same issues: poor quality sentiment analysis, the inability to export social media comment streams, the challenge of analyzing items like retweets, shares and the contents of those links. Certainly, there are significant hurdles to overcome in social media research. These can be extremely difficult if we’re talking about quantitative research. Several remain challenging if we’re talking about qualitative research as well, but as a supplement […]