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 [...]

One of the fascinating things about examining the futures of almost any domain is that weak and strong signals can typically be found for them today. Because of this, those of us who are scanning the horizon tend to compress our view of future time and expect trends we see today to blossom fully (and [...]

Have any of the following given you pause and made you think: 1. Shared bicycle services or short term home-apartment rental sites or freecycling 2. The viral spread of marketing messages via social media 3. The idea of social currency based on reputation (eg “Whuffie”) They have something in common. They all are aspects of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

One of the macro trends that most of us assume is that the earth’s population will become more urban and that this urban population will become more concentrated. I have operated on this assumption, and it is an important one when thinking about conducting research in the emerging economies around the world. Most researchers know [...]