What are the key MR Buzzwords for 2015?
In a recent NewMR LinkedIn conversation I asked what people thought the MR buzzwords for 2015 will be. This generated a great debate with 64 comments to date. This post is a review of the comments and some thoughts about the trends and emotions they reveal.
A Wordle?
Normally I am not a fan of word clouds, since they are simply counts of terms. However, in this case the source material was a set of words, so a Wordle seems like a good place to start (click on the Wordle in this post for a larger view of it).
In order to produce the Wordle, I did some pre-processing of the words, for example: aligning the spelling (e.g. Behavioural and Behavioral), putting in some hyphens to keep words together (e.g. Internet-of-Things), and some essence drawing as in the different uses of the term automation.
It’s not all about tech
Perhaps the most interesting thing that jumps off the page is that the top term is not about technology, it is the term “Agile”. Other key terms that link to a non-technology focus include: Impact, Behavioural, Privacy, Authentic, Collaboration, Actionable, and Emotion.
Observational Research
Most of the technology-laden terms relate to observational research, for example collecting passive data, using the Internet-of-Things to show what people do, along with the use of wearables to facilitate the data wake people leave behind them and provide access to in-the-moment research.
Automation
Another key theme, and one that utilises technology, is automation, which includes things as varied as programmatic, automated research, automated analytics, and automated reporting.
What do I think the key terms will be?
Having followed the debate in LinkedIn, having conducted the analysis for this post, and having thought about it, my views are:
- Agile is going to be big, along with frugal, growth hacking (indeed several uses of hacking), along with established concepts such as A/B testing and fail fast.
- Automation is going be big, with programmatic being possibly bigger still. Automation holds out the promise of being faster, cheaper, and better than average (it might not be truly inspirational, but it should be less error strewn than much of what is currently commonplace).
- Impact and Actionable are going to be my third pick for the big time in 2015 – storytelling and story showing are only going to be relevant when they deliver business impact.
What about wearables and Internet of Things? I doubt that either of them will get past proof of concept and niche in 2015. Passive data will continue to make progress, mostly in areas like media metering and the targeting of marketing, but I do not expect most of the key problems to be cracked in 2015 to the extent that they are mainstream.
Want to join the debate?
You can join the discussion about buzzwords via the NewMR LinkedIn group (you will need to join the group if you want see it and take part).
One thought on “What are the key MR Buzzwords for 2015?”
Comments are closed.
Literacy .. had a great discussion at the recent ESOMAR MENA conference and in subsequent exchanges about the changing nature of literacy. the decline of long form written literacy ( and long spoken ), the rise of extreme shortform literacy, and more importantly the return to historically dominant graphic literacy. don’t ask people to describe in depth what they think, feel, believe, dislike .. ask them to send a photo?