The announcement that Google had launched a formal market research offering sent shock waves through the industry today. What was surprising wasn’t that they did it but how well thought out the offering was. Is there a silver lining in this apparently oh so dark cloud? Yes, I think there is. Continue reading »

I am pleased to be at the PMRG 2012 Annual National Conference in Orlando, listening to invigorating speakers and making important connections. Here are some of my thoughts as I listen to speakers and attendees. Continue reading »

While different in scope, the market research industry faces its own “global warming.” And, like its climatological cousin, it too carries warnings of an impending crisis that will shake the foundation of our discipline. Continue reading »

We now have increasing evidence from behavioral economics that people are often irrational in their decision making. This has major implications for how we conduct and analyze market research. But what else can we learn from behavioral economics? Here are few key observations that have implications for focus groups and market research in general. Continue reading »

Behavioral economics, and the cognitive theories that underpin it, gives us insight into how people interpret the world, what people want, and the actions people take in response. It invalidates traditional methods of market research and marketing cliches – but only once it is taken seriously. Continue reading »

In a previous post for Greenbook, I talked through the concept of Research Outlaws, the panel I ran at the MRS 2012 conference this week. In a world without direct questions, four brave researchers would be set a real problem by a real client and solve it using innovative methods. On paper, it worked. In reality…. Continue reading »

Let’s imagine our industry were a product – what do we do to rejuvenate it? How would we diagnose ourselves? Continue reading »

Next week marks the beginning of a pretty intense period of travel and events for me, but I can’t think of a better way to kick it off than with the annual ARF Re:think conference, arguably the largest and most prestigious industry conference around. Continue reading »

In case you missed it, here is the GRIT Report summary Infographic. Continue reading »

The opportunity of big data is also its challenge. We are drowning in data, and tweets, posts and video are not the structured data that fits well into relational databases for traditional querying. As a result, big data simply requires a new way of thinking about how to store and analyze data to accommodate these new realities and turn insights into actionable decisions. Continue reading »