What can the Asia Pacific Region teach the MR world?

I think some of the best thinking about new market research comes from the Asia Pacific region and I want to share five examples that are helping re-shape the way we envisage and do market research. All five examples will be presented at the upcoming, all virtual, online Festival of NewMR – sharing ideas from Japan, Australia, India and both mainland and Hong Kong China. Shobha Prasad, Drshti Strategic Research Services, India The Fickle Mistress: Loyal consumers changing brands and the change-constancy conflict. Shobha highlights the impact of brand renovation on loyal consumers, and the role of the Change-Constancy Conflict in the loyal consumer’s response to such changes. By analysing multiple cases over the last decade Shobha has determined the stages and allied emotions that the consumer goes through, and has assessed how this plays out across different categories and consumer types. Sign up for our APAC Tuesday 28 February Webinar by clicking here. Mike Sherman, Marketing, Customer Insight & CRM/Big Consumer Data Expert, Hong Kong Big Consumer Data: the Promise, the Overpromise, the Opportunity Mike tackles the main criticism of Big Data, that it is all talk and no action. By looking at Big Data successes and failures Mike […]

How do we define qualitative research in a new MR world?

This post looks at the definition of qualitative research and has been produced as part of a project I am doing with the University of Georgia’s Principles of Marketing Research team to update their Mobile Market Research course. Your thoughts and suggestions are invited! Indeed, the thoughts expressed here arise from a lively and informed discussion in the NewMR LinkedIn group. The growth in new research approaches and the emergence of new tools have raised questions about what the term qualitative means, and by extension what quantitative means. If we can collect hundreds of videos, thousands of pictures, or millions of quotes, does it challenge what we mean by qual and quant. Traditionally, qualitative research was relatively easy to differentiate from quantitative research. The Table below shows how qualitative and quantitative research were traditionally differentiated. However, this simple table is less helpful in today’s modern, mobile, social, passive data collecting world. Some tools are used by both qualitative and quantitative researchers, and the types of data collected have expanded and overlapped. Today, researchers can collect large amounts of text, images, and videos, and these large amounts can be collected from the same sorts of samples that are used for quantitative […]

ESOMAR report confirms that surveys are in decline

Last week I posted an article looking at the decline in survey research, which included some data from ESOMAR and some predictions. This week, ESOMAR posted the latest Global Market Research Report and it includes some interesting figures on data collection modes. Figures which are broadly in line with my predictions. The table below is mostly a repeat of the one I included in my previous post. It shows the data from the ESOMAR reports for 2007, 2010, and 2013, along with my forecasts for 2016 and 2019. In this version, I have added the data from the 2014 ESOMAR Global Market Research report at the bottom. Note, the ESOMAR data refer to the final figures for the previous year, so the 2014 report is based on the completed returns for the whole of 2013. The decline in research spending on projects where the data was collected via surveys, from 53% in the 2013 report to 48% in 2014, is a very large drop and is even faster than implied by my predictions. The ESOMAR Pricing Study would suggest that some of the drop is due to falling costs for online research and a continued switch to online from face-to-face […]

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 […]

NewMR – The Big Picture

Sometimes when I run a workshop or training session people want detail, they want practical information about how to do stuff. However, there are times when what people want is a big picture, a method of orientating themselves in the context of the changing landscape around them. Tomorrow I am running a workshop for #JMRX in Tokyo and we are looking at emerging techniques, communities, and social media research – so a big picture is going to be really useful to help give an overview of the detail, and to help people see where things like gamification, big data, and communities all fit. So, here is my Big Picture of NewMR (click on it to see it full size), and I’d love to hear your thought and suggestions. The Big Picture has five elements The heart of the message is that we have reached an understanding that surveys won’t/can’t give us the answers to many of the things we are interested in. People’s memories are not good enough, many decision are automatic and opposed to thought through, and most decision are more emotion that fact. Change is needed, and the case for this has been growing over the last few […]

When and why does the wrong sample give you the right answer?

Most samples used by market research are in some sense the ‘wrong’ sample. They are the wrong sample because of one or more of the following: They miss people who don’t have access to the internet. They miss people who don’t have a smartphone. Not representing the 80%, 90%, or 99% who decline to take part. They miss busy people. Samples that suffer these problems include: Central location miss the people who don’t come into central locations. Face-to-face, door-to-door struggles with people who tend not to be home or who do not open the door to unknown visitors. RDD/telephone misses people who decline to be involved. Online access panels miss the 95%+ who are not members of panels. RIWI and Google Consumer Surveys – misses the people who decline to be involved, and under-represents people who use the internet less. Mobile research – typically misses people who do not have a modern phone and who do not have a reliable internet package/connection. But, it usually works! If we look at what AAPOR call non-probability samples with an academic eye we might expect the research to usually be ‘wrong’. In this case ‘wrong’ means gives misleading or harmful advice. Similarly, ‘right’ […]

Forewarned is forearmed! The case for IIeX

Next month I will be in Atlanta as one of the co-chairs of IIeX USA. If you can attend one of the IIeX events (in Europe, North America, Latin America, and the Southern Hemisphere) I strongly recommend it. Business is changing, society is changing, and consequently research is changing. If you hope to be enjoying work in five years then you need to have a plan for how you are going to stay relevant to clients and customers. Why IIeX? Most conferences and events have their purpose, AAPOR explore the methodological boundaries, MRMW advance the cause of mobile market research, the trade bodies provide coherence and shared learning for the members of the industry. IIeX has a very different purpose, in my opinion. IIeX represents the contested future, a set of different visions pitched in dialogical conflict. IIeX is not curated to find the best, or the most likely, or the most thought through. IIeX presents the superposition of differing waves of innovation, investment, and imagination. To give you a taste of what I mean, here are some of the highlights you can see in Atlanta (June 16 to 18) Clients agitating for change: Sion Agami from P&G, Ryan Backer […]

Why social media mining and monitoring have met with limited success in Market Research?

OK, let’s get one thing clear from the outset; I am not saying social media mining and monitoring (the collection and automated analysis of quantitative amounts of naturally occurring text from social media) has met with no success. But, I am saying that in market research the success has been limited. In this post I will highlight a couple of examples of success, but I will then illustrate why, IMHO, it has not had the scale of success in market research that many people had predicted, and finally share a few thoughts on where the quantitative use of social media mining and monitoring might go next. Some successes There have been some successes and a couple of examples are: Assessing campaign or message break through. Measuring social media can be a great way to see if anybody is talking about a campaign or not, and of checking whether they are talking about the salient elements. However, because of some of the measurement challenges (more on these below) the measurement often ends up producing a three level result, a) very few mentions, b) plenty of mentions, c) masses of mentions. In terms of content the measures tend to be X mentions […]

Appreciating Asia Pacific – Part 2

Last week I wrote about my week in Singapore, with Vision Critical and MRMW. This week I exchanged the warmth of Singapore for the distinctly more chilly streets of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Monday and Tuesday were spent in Hong Kong, with my Vision Critical colleagues and, one of our key partners in the region, ABN Impact. Monday focused on meetings with clients and prospects and on team training/briefing sessions. On Tuesday morning ABN Impact put on a great insight community event at the JW Marriott. The speakers included Bashuli Sane from Cathay Pacific and Mike Sherman (ex-SingTel) who wowed the audience when they shared how insight communities were bringing the customer into every aspect of the decision making process – I gave an introduction to communities presention, helping fill in the broader picture of what an insight community is and how they are built, managed, and developed. The market in Hong Kong is quite developed and the Q&A session focused on practical issues, such as recruitment, language (e.g. working in English, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese), and incentives. Wednesday morning saw the Vision Critical roadshow in Shanghai, the guests of the Mandarin Oriental, and in the company of […]

Key learnings from the European IIeX

I’ve just spent two days at IIeX in Amsterdam, and had the pleasure of being a co-chair for the event. IIeX was a great success and I think the event has several lessons for other events (including my own NewMR events) and for the research industry; and here are my initial thoughts and observations. (BTW, the image is of Patricio Pagani form Infotools, and in the background you can see the wonderful architecture of the venue). Fast, exhausting and big The main event was two days long, starting at 8:30 and finishing after 6pm (just one of the North American influences on the event). I am not sure how many presenters/speakers/sessions there were, but I know that the chair’s briefing pack included notes, photos, and bios for 123 people – a testament to the hard work of the behind the scenes admin team (you would be surprised how hard it is to get photos and bios from speakers!). A large part of both days was delivered in two streams, which means that nobody saw everything. One of the key things about this sort of event is that you need to give yourself permission not to try and see everything. It […]