While walking the convention floor this week at The Market Research Event I had the pleasure of talking with folks at Clarabridge and Nunwood. Both offer knowledge management archiving services that are accessed by a custom-built interface. Nunwood’s “Fizz” is a good example. Historically market research has been defined by data scarcity. The market research [...]

How does an organization like the BBC shorten the feedback loop across the global population that accesses its journalistic content? The answer? One very large MROC. In what was easily the most interesting nuts and bolts presentation of the day, the folks in room 306A were treated to an in-depth view of the 15,000+ BBC [...]

Tom LaForge at Coca-Cola presented his thinking on macro-forces shaping our world (what Smith and Raspin in their book “Creating Market Insight” call “remote environment factors”) and Coca-Cola’s strategy. It was all strategic foresight. Tom, with his focus on the trends driving our futures, represents one aspect of where I believe market research is headed. [...]

Here in San Diego at The Market Research Event there are five (5) symposia today and one is on “Culture & Trends.” I’m particularly looking forward to Saatchi & Saatchi’s presentation on the evolution of wellness and Coca-Cola’s presentation on “how macroforces are reshaping relationships, roles and the very idea of ‘consumer.’” With all this [...]

I just arrived here at the San Diego Bayfront Hilton in anticipation of The Market Research Event 2010. On the flight from Washington I had some time to think and finish reading Rachel Botsman’s new book on “the rise of collaborative consumption.” Botsman paints a sweeping landscape of consumers cooperating in their purchase and use [...]

What are the social, economic and market research implications when location based services like Foursquare or Gowalla go mainstream? We know from research released by Pew today that 4% of online Americans and 8% of online Americans under 29 years old are already using these services. Pew is now tracking this trend. And, while we [...]

Here at the ARF Industry Leader Forum, Donna Goldfarb, VP Unilever Consumer & Market Insights for the Americas, stated her significant skepticism that we can use the recent past to predict the future. As they say, perhaps the future just isn’t what it used to be. We can think about the futures (plural, because there [...]

We’re hearing the word “foresight” quite a bit today here at the ARF’s Industry Leader Forum. As I’ve noted in a previous post, I think the word is being used in a general way to mean “thinking ahead of the curve” and not in the specific sense used by professionals working in “strategic foresight.” I [...]

Those attending the ARF’s Discovering Consumer Insights, Industry Leader Forum today at the New York Athletic Club were treated to an excellent overview by Joel Rubinson (formerly of ARF and now the President of Rubinson Partners). Citing Intel’s Andy Grove, Rubinson argued that market research is itself at a “strategic inflection point.” He’s obviously right [...]

We hear a lot these days in MR circles about research transitioning from “questioning” to “listening” to “observing.” Although we will always need to ask consumers questions, the trend toward “passive research” is fairly obvious. But, what about gaming? Could gaming enter into the MR toolbox in a serious way? I think so. Gaming has [...]