We asked market research clients to tell us their most pressing unmet need from insights suppliers. Here is what they told us. Is your firm up to the challenge of solving them? Continue reading »

We need to think differently about what we are trying to achieve in marketing research, what the problems are we are trying to solve and how to do it. This means different processes and different tools for insights discovery and insights adoption. In my new book The Insights Advantage: knowing how to win (2012) I discuss how firms can adopt an approach that leads to more and better insights and will lead to more insights-driven decisions. This is the first of a series of blogs that will summarize selected topics out of the book or additional thoughts on the topic of the book: how to win with insights. Continue reading »

I believe that our industry needs an independent, flexible, non-political and not purely financially driven channel to explore cutting edge innovation. I see these efforts as aligned with the goals and strategic objectives of other organizations and trade associations, often even collaborative with them, but we are still free to chart our own course and see what happens. Continue reading »

Market Research is bifurcating – becoming at once more grounded in real people through the rise of ethnography and shop-along interviews where real people bring you into their real-ish lives (or as much as they can given you are an interviewer with a giant video camera in their very very clean house) and at the same time, MR is becoming more Technology centric and dependent. And, it is the intersection of these two where some true beauty happens in terms of human understanding. Continue reading »

An article in the July 2011 issue of Research Live got me thinking about how much industry structures in MR could change in the coming years. Continue reading »

I spent two days this week in suburban Atlanta at Market Research in the Mobile World 2011 (MRMW 2011), a conference as its name suggests (almost) totally focused on mobile research. It had an imposing agenda with a whopping 29 presentations all in the same room over two days. Obviously, all of this is speculative. But then everything about mobile is speculative, a combination of powerful technology and wishful thinking. That’s part of what made this conference so interesting and the main reason I was glad I went. Continue reading »