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 [...]

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 [...]

I’ve recently written about the privacy challenges of some “passive” research tools, specifically in the social media space. No sooner had I written this, than ESOMAR’s Research World publishes an article by George Pappachen and Richard Coombe titled “Licence to Peek” on the same issue. As they put it: “…data management and consumer privacy – [...]

Although the Wall Street Journal piece on Nielsen/NM Incite scraping messages from the PatientsLikeMe community (“‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on Web”) has generated some buzz in MR circles, I’m surprised that it is not THE topic. It should be. Consumer listening is one aspect of the evolution of MR. This listening comes in a [...]

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.” [...]

Hat tip to Market Research Deathwatch for highlighting a new type of MROC – lockerz. MROC Variant 1 is what we think of as a traditional MROC built exclusively (usually by Communispace, Passenger, etc.) for a client with the members coming exclusively from the client’s current customer base (raving fans typically). MROC Variant 2 is [...]