My interview with Lenny Murphy at GreenBook is now live: http://bit.ly/gFm0W8 I’m looking forward to discussing these topics, but especially privacy, at the Technology Driven Market Research Event.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Reading Joel Rubinson’s excellent post over at his ARF blog, recalls some futuring I’ve been doing around the likely evolution of the industry. Rubinson takes a look at the evolution of the ad agency and applies this evolutionary footpath to MR with media buying the analog to the data collection side of the business and [...]