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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

When I asked a good friend in the research industry to give me a one word prediction for 2010, he sent me a clip of Mr. T saying “pain”. That wouldn’t be my first word choice, but to get a sense of what leaders in the industry are thinking, you can check out their one [...]

Peter Van Brunt addresses a colleague who feels that MR just “isn’t fun anymore.” His colleague’s frustrations: 1. Too much email communication rather than face to face. 2. Increased speed of communication and deadline expectations. 3. Non-traditional competition from “non-researchers purporting to do or know how to do MR”. The first is a general societal [...]

Tom Ewing asks: “Are the Kids Alright?” What are they thinking about the future of market research? Why aren’t we hearing from them? My take: I don’t think we’re asking their opinion and I’m not sure the industry is listening. But, I would add another option somewhat related to “they’re too busy doing amazing stuff.” [...]

The Boston Consulting Group released an excellent report on the state of client-side (in house) market research departments. You can read it all here. Highlights: 1. Only 35% of executives describe their in-house MR function as “best in class.” (see page 4) 2. Although corporations should strive to move their MR departments from “order takers” [...]