EMEA Thursday
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Chair: Ray Poynter
Jeremy Hollow
Listen + Learn
Why does my son like hiding under his bed? Finding the creative power of weak signals in social data.
Tom De Ruyck
InSites Consulting
What do clients want from market research?
Neil Gains
Tapestry Works
Visualizing emotions: Measuring motivations simply, quickly and intuitively
Dr Marie-Claude Gervais
Further and Versiti
‘Cultural irrationality’ and its implications for market research
Alexandru Dincovici
Izibiz Consulting
Embedded research-how to maximize consumer interactions
Martina Olbertova
Meaning.Global
How can semiotics gain more traction in solving business problems?
Return to the Main Festival Page.
Presentation Outlines
- Jeremy Hollow, Look + Learn
Why does my son like hiding under his bed? Finding the creative power of weak signals in social data.
For most brands, when it comes to social data, our eyes are focused on our own reflection. We think social is about us when it’s very obviously not (brand mentions are, but a mere drop in the ocean).There’s another world out there.We’d like to open this door for you by sharing one thread from a global study of people’s home lives.It starts with a theory, an idea of what’s important in our lives. This theory inspired a line of enquiry, one that helped us look for something special, but hidden, in the conversations people have with each other on social.With this in mind, we’ll share how we went beyond simple listening; to something we call social learning – an active process of observing and thinking about people and their lives.We don’t want to talk about the obvious big, bolshie findings. Rather we’d like to talk about one of the quieter signals. It’s here that one of the best insights came to light. It’s here that we found a rich source of creative opportunity.It’s here that I began to understand why my son likes to hide under the bed.
- Tom De Ruyck, inSites Consulting
What do clients want from market research?
In the spring of 2017 InSites Consulting conducted a quantitative research piece among German corporate researchers and insights managers (participants were all a member of P&A’s PUMA Network of research buyers/users). The sample of this study consisted out of 101 experienced client side research professionals – 57% of them had more than 10 years of experience in the market research industry.The results of the survey allow us to sketch a picture of the key trends and evolutions in the (German) market. In order to make the conclusions of the study ‘actionable’, we will map them on the 3 strategic horizons of consultancy firm McKinsey:
1. What do corporate research professionals see as things they need to act upon ‘today’;
2. What are the aspects they are working on to be ready for ‘tomorrow’ (or: the near future) and
3. What are the key elements that are on their radar and that they are exploring to do things (radically) different in the ‘day after tomorrow’ (being: the further away future).
- Neil Gains, Tapestry Works
Visualizing emotions: Measuring motivations simply, quickly and intuitively
Although emotions are difficult to articulate and measure explicitly, they are a very tangible part of human experience. Visual stimuli help researchers make emotion more tangible, even if they remain implicit and unspoken. In this presentation Neil will share insights into the psychology of female beauty based on simple and quick visual tasks taking no more than two or three minutes.His examples will cover qualitative and quantitative work, highlighting the key beauty goals of women in Asian and Western countries including UK, Australia, Thailand and Indonesia. The focus of the presentation will be on cross-cultural differences, and how visual approaches can capture cultural differences more effectively than traditional verbal research approaches.
- Dr Marie-Claude Gervais, dub and Versiti
‘Cultural irrationality’ and its implications for market research
There is a clear drive to acknowledge human irrationality in recent theories of human behaviour. However, most recent approaches take either the individual (e.g. System 1 thinking, blink, behavioural economics) or the social group (e.g. nudge, herd behaviour, etc), as their unit of analysis. They explain irrationality either as a function of cognitive heuristics or of social pressures in human interactions. This presentation discusses the shortcomings of these approaches and argues that “irrationality” also needs to be understood at a properly cultural level. Irrationality is patterned, and the patterns are cultural as much as cognitive and social. Using three examples of ‘cultural irrationality’ from our research across diverse cultural groups in the UK to look at why, despite huge budgets spent on public health:
- Chinese people rarely complete their course of antibiotics;
- Obesity is rife among many Somali parents and children; and
- Pakistani and Bangladeshi men continue to have extremely high smoking rates.
Our evidence shows these ‘irrational’ behaviours are best explained at a cultural level. Finally, the presentation discusses the methodological implications of adopting a cultural approach to understanding human behaviour. It highlights the need for the market research industry to triangulate (purposefully) a range of methods in order to tap into properly social and cultural phenomena, in order to really understand human behaviour.
- Alexandru Dincovici, Izibiz Consulting
Embedded research-how to maximize consumer interactions
Traditional market research processes suffer from a few shortcomings that make them mostly unusuable for SMEs. They are expensive, take a lot of time, often result in deliverables with little to no usability for a client with no research knowledge, and are very difficult to adjust sometimes.Embedded research is a way for small and medium companies to integrate a research process inside their organization. They are already making contact with their clients/customers. Why not use those existing interactions to collect structured data about them? This will result in more meaningful and actionable insights than a traditional research process while retaining full control and ownership of everything.
- Martina Olbertová, Meaning.Global
How can semiotics gain more traction in solving business problems?
Semiotics is about scanning the intrinsic systems of culture and understanding that invisible net running through our society, business ecosystems and political landscapes like a thin red line. Semioticians are those, who can see the line and trace it back to the original cause through reading and understanding signals and symptoms of cultural change. It’s the cultural systems thinking for business. We’re the hackers of cultural systems allowing others to see where the real value is. This way, we can become the hackers of value creation & growth for businesses. Currently, I am developing to a new concept of ‘Meaning Architecture’ – the cultural systems thinking for businesses, which looks at brands and organisations as living organisms and holistic systems of interlocked meanings.Meaning Architecture is to Semiotics what Choice Architecture is to Behavioural Science – it takes the theory and contextualises it to solve the most apparent and pressing business problems. Just that where CA looks at the inherent decision-making fallacies and cognitive biases, MA looks at the structure of meaning around a particular business problem to understand and solve it in context. There are many interesting overlaps and potential synergies that can be found in business, whether it’s optimizing communication streams and messaging for the clients, transforming customer journeys and organisational cultures, aligning meaning and sense in signage & coding or their cultural adaptations or adding the extra cultural lens/layer to complex behavioural challenges and client briefs.
Register for the webinar here.