quiet?”

Guest blog by Mark Earls, who will be presenting a webinar on this topic on Thursday April 16 – click here to register. Boom time The last decade has been boom-time for insights professionals who embrace innovation. Whereas back in the 2000s, many in our community were still angst-ing about the impact of doing online surveys and groups on the quality of the data; today, we are awash with new techniques and new frameworks (from neuroscience to semantic analysis, from agent-based modelling to emotional response). Just look at the changing agendas of any of the many insights conferences around the world to see how far we’ve come. Some of this flourishing is down to the continuous outpouring of new insights into our specialist subject (human behaviour) from the cognitive and behavioural sciences which has called into question many of the assumptions behind established research practices. Equally, changes in available technology are also driving innovation (some of it, it must be said, seem more like technology in search of a solution, than market-led innovation). And of course demand-side pressures continue to draw out new practice: the need to provide more powerful techniques to “get behind” the consumer and their unreliability as […]