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 [...]

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 [...]

Here at the ARF Industry Leader Forum today one challenge that is surfacing is how to balance objectivity (the core strength of market research) with a greater need for actionable recomendations delivered in a memorable and persuasive way. The attendees rightly view this issue as a tension and not as a zero sum game or [...]

It’s the elephant in the room. It’s the word we use constantly, but have some trouble defining. Market research is supposed to identify insights. Insight is one of our products and something we strive for. But… What is an insight? Today at ARF’s Industry Leader Forum we hear that it’s the “a ha” moment, a [...]

Consumer privacy is a SIGNIFICANT challenge to many industry futures. I’ve written about this previously. Today at ARF Susan Whiting with Nielsen surfaced “privacy” as a core challenge to the industry. She’s right. Given the recent stories regarding privacy and web “scraping”, I think we’re very close to the boiling point on this issue. If [...]

In previous posts and other writing I have predicted that in time management consulting will play an increasing role in the wider insights ecosystem (encompassing traditional MR plus social media research, neuromarketing, prediction markets, mass simulation gaming, etc.) IBM’s purchase of SPSS (for $1.2 Billion!) was the initial spark to my thinking. After all, IBM [...]

The Burke Institute, a venerable market research institution with high quality training just embraced the future of the insights industry by offering a new course – Next Generation Qualitative Tools. This is a noteworthy development. The course will focus on social media, online communities and virtual research platforms. Until now, the Burke Institute was fairly [...]

The Research Industry Trends (RIT) Report is coming soon, and it promises to be quite revealing. Tom Anderson promos the RIT a bit over at Next Gen Market Research. It’s worth a look. The top two concerns are: 1. The non-representative nature of online samples 2. Quality of online sample is worse than most believe [...]

Will 50% of the work being done at market research firms today become “unnecessary” in three years? Marshall Toplansky, President of WiseWindow, explores this question and scans the horizon of market research in a new MRA Alert article. For those MRA members, I highly recommend reading Toplansky’s article titled “Measuring the Future of Market Research.” [...]

Recently Alastair Gordon has asked “who’ll own MR in 2020?” By this Gordon means to ask which players will dominate the market research industry. His thesis is that the answer changes based on the year, but that one probable future is the rise, and ultimate dominance of the sub-contracting firms upon which full-service shops often [...]