InSites Blog

Media Marketing (Belgian Marketing and Communication magazine) is searching for the most innovative companies in Belgium. Yesterday they announced their nominees and InSites Consulting is one of them!

The MM Marcom Innovation Ranking composes a top 10 of the most innovative companies and initiatives. These are the 9 other nominees (in alphabetical order) next to InSites: Alfacam, Bananas, Boondoggle, Brandialog, Deepblue, Good Deal (SBS), Kinepolis, mortierbrigade, Netlog.

Don’t miss the magazine’s September issue on September 15, where they will publish the number one. We’ll of course keep you posted on the final ranking.

The Rotterdam branch of InSites Consulting is conquering space with a September move to larger premises. The change of address is the result of our rapid growth in the Netherlands. The new office has capacity for over twenty staff and includes space to hold events for 100 attendees.

Space for work and events
Since opening in August 2008, InSites Consulting’s Rotterdam office has expanded from two to ten members of staff. The new site will let the team breathe again, since it creates room for over twenty people and provides an ideal location for our seminars and workshops.

On the opening night on 9 September we invite contacts across the industry to celebrate the move. The Director General of ESOMAR, Finn Raben is one of the confirmed speakers to welcome the attendees. (More information on http://www.insites.eu/newoffice)

“Since opening in Rotterdam, we’ve been running just to keep up with demand for research and consultancy” says Kristof De Wulf, Managing Partner. “The new office will give us space to work efficiently and gives us the capacity to continue recruiting in future”.

On a mission to teach
The features of the new office are intended to benefit the entire Netherlands research community, Ramon Pardo, Research Director points out. “An important part of our mission is to help researchers learn new approaches and practices they can use in their work. Our events are a vital aspect of that work, and the new office, with its large auditorium, will allow us to hold bigger and better events”.

The new office is just off the main A20 highway, giving easy access from the rest of the Netherlands.

New address:
InSites Consulting
Barbizonlaan 45
2908ME Capelle a/d IJssel
The Netherlands

Tom De Ruyck, Senior R&D Manager at InSites Consulting has been accepted for the ESOMAR Research Superstar. On Tuesday 14 September Tom will present his submission at the ESOMAR General Conference.

The ESOMAR Research Superstar is a chance for researchers to show they can present themselves in an engaging, fun, entertaining and passionate way, getting their message across succinctly and in an easy to understand manner.

Tom’s outline will talk on why researchers should become dj’s. Got you triggered? Find out more about the Research Superstar at the ESOMAR website or contact Tom De Ruyck.

Having almost three years of experience in offline qualitative research I have to say I was curious, but also a bit wary, to do focus groups online when I started working for InSites Consulting a few months ago.

Would the people that participated be as open?
Would the insights be as deep?
And would the client feel as satisfied with the output?

It came out that all these questions could be answered with a definite YES.

1. Participants appeared to be very open and spontaneous in their answers. Perhaps it’s the relaxed setting of being at home and the anonymity that causes people to really open up and share their views on things.
2. The depth of the learnings also doesn’t suffer by doing group discussions online. You can use exactly the same projective techniques and the same exercises to stimulate imagination and creativity. We use a special online platform that allows showing all kinds of visual stimuli to participants to enable these techniques. Next to that we work with 8 participants in each session which is surprisingly easy to manage online. This of course generates additional input.
3. Finally, as for the clients, I have been pleasantly surprised by their enthusiasm about our approach and our platform. They are able to follow the sessions from home and post additional questions to me to ask the participants if needed.

Is it then really such a success story? Well… I would say yes. In my opinion there is actually hardly any difference between offline and online research and next to that, all ages (young and old) can participate and geographical boundaries are crossed effortlessly.
Of course I cannot unravel facial expressions from consumers, but smiley’s appear to do the job just as well. I don’t have a flip chart to write on, but now I just use the white board for that purpose and to show all kinds of material.

For me it’s been a great experience so far, that’s why I’m planning to take online qualitative research forward…

Want to read more? Check out our ESOMAR award winning paper.

Next month ESOMAR will reward their ESOMAR Excellence Award for Best Paper at the General Conference in Athens. The award is given to the best paper from ESOMAR conferences throughout the year that best reflects the broad aspects and challenges faced by the market research industry today.

This year InSites got nominated with no less than three papers!

• Health 2.0: Social media as the central nervous system for learning about epilepsy (by Prof. Dr. Niels Schillewaert)
• Even better than the real thing: Understanding generation Y’s definition of ‘authenticity’ for the Levi’s brand (by Joeri Van den Bergh and Tom De Ruyck)
• The Longest day: Cultural differences in CSR (by Tom De Ruyck, Niels Schillewaert, Michael Friedman and Annelies Verhaeghe)

We’re already looking forward to the award ceremony.

Want to find out more about the nominated papers? Contact our Marketing department at Marketing@insites.eu

The world is in constant evolution… consumer behavior is evolving rapidly… but are our methods, techniques, research designs and skills evolving accordingly?

Contemporary Consumers demand for Contemporary Research Methods
Response rates in traditional research projects are in decline, as well as the good image of our work among research participants. As an answer to this trend, the market research industry wishes to move from ‘transactional’ to more ‘relational’ types of research. Researchers need to (re)bond companies with consumers (our participants) through more ‘connected’ research methodologies.

Additionally, we may state that the context in which consumers live has changed drastically during the last decade. It has affected their behavior accordingly. The contemporary consumer is:

• Empowered – Today’s consumers are more eager to declare their opinion (even if not asked for it) and make or break brands and products on a scale never seen before. They also choose their own tools and moments to do so.

• Cosmopolitan – Consumers’ online and offline lifes are blending, they use different multi-media interchangeably (cfr. life caching), are always on the go and create their very own ‘cocktail’ of attitudes. That’s why they have become more difficult to grasp!

• a Co-creator – Today, consumers want to interact with marketing professionals. More than half of the Europeans want to co-create products/services with companies.

• Emotional – For far too long, emotions and social behavior have been concealed behind closed doors and ignored in favor of rationality and efficiency (Hill, 2009). Today we are more aware of this & tapping into these dynamics has become ‘easier’ through new media (e.g. social networks & communities) and research technologies (e.g. text analytics & implicit measurement tools).

Taking into account this new reality, we are convinced that the way we do research, in terms of skills, research methods and techniques, needs to be adapted. As Kim Dedeker stated during the 2008 edition of the ARF Leadership Forum: “My call to action is that we would figure out the way to return to the consumer’s backyard. We have to rebuild that trust. We need to listen to them on their time and in the ways they want to communicate with us.”

We summarized our vision on the future in our ‘10 commandments of contemporary market research’:

1. Conversations and stories of consumers should be at the heart of our marketing and research thinking as they are key in generating insights; and it is the main way innovations, customer experiences and marketing campaigns are being spread.
2. Researchers need to create more opportunities for participants to say what is on their minds, even if it is not directly part of the survey or topic guide.
3. Research should give participants a more active role throughout the whole research process not only during the interviewing phase. They like it and it will deliver us richer and better insights.
4. Research methodologies should be adapted so they are able to grasp fragmented consumer behaviour (both over time as on the go).
5. Methods should be combined to fusion designs in order to capture the whole picture and create a 360 degree view on the consumer (Blades, 2009).
6. We should unveil the goals of a research project and clients should show their ‘faces’ more to research participants.
7. Researchers should feedback intermediate results to research participants so they can influence the final outcome of the study if desired. Next to that it will motivate them to keep participating.
8. Participants should not be asked to provide us with new information if we can obtain the same information indirectly. We should therefore recycle our data if possible. Tons of data is available on the web or in customer databases.
9. We should stimulate rapport and trust between participants and researchers, next to bonding among peers in order to obtain higher quality data and more emotional insights.
10. Contemporary market researchers need DJ skills. They are responsible for keeping research participants enthusiast. They need to have the ability to choose the right methods and data sources and throw them in the right mix. Last but not least, they need to perform well in the boardroom by playing the most relevant tunes to management.

Want to find out more? Read our white papers or Steven Van Belleghem‘s book The Conversation Manager. Or contact one of the authors.

(Article submitted by Annelies Verhaeghe and Tom De Ruyck)

This month the QRCA (Qualitative Research Consultants Association) rewarded the 2010 QRCA Global Scholarship to Sophie Van Neck, Senior Research Consultant at InSites Consulting. The scholarship is a great opportunity for Sophie.

With this scholarship Sophie gets the opportunity to attend the QRCA International Annual Conference.

“This will be one of the most exciting experiences of the year and it will be a perfect start of going to international conferences. I’m really looking forward to meeting the QRCA members at the QRCA Annual Conference in Philadelphia in October.” says Sophie.

Find out more about the scholarship online or contact Sophie Van Neck.

Mid-September ESOMAR organizes their general Congress in Greece, Athens. The Congress theme is fully focused on the changing landscape in market research ‘Odyssey 2010 – the changing face of market research‘. The face of market research is changing and with it so are many of the approaches and methodologies we employ.

The R&D department at InSites Consulting continuously works on co-creating research solutions together with clients, suppliers, academics, consumers, and professional organizations. Probably one of the reasons we’ll be well-presented at this year’s general Congress.

First up are Annelies Verhaeghe and Niels Schillewaert on 13 September: User Generated Content and Research. While consumers participate less in traditional surveys, they generate more information than ever before. Consumers cache their lives online and are ubiquitously available via mobile devices. As researchers we have the chance now more than ever to fuse methods and generate more insights without actually asking questions. By observing consumers’ actions, becoming friends online, scraping publically available content and text-analyzing it, getting physiological measures like reaction times and mouse clicks we can come to a more full understanding of consumers through these neo-observational research.

On 14 September Tom De Ruyck and Annelies Verhaeghe will co-present ‘Exploring the world of water‘ with Michel Rogeaux of Danone Global R&D. A case on fusing contemporary research methods.

Joeri Van den Bergh will also attend the Congress, hopefully the collect an award for his paper on authenticity. And finally on 15 September Niels Schillewaert is one the chairmen.

Interested to attend the Congress? Sign up online!

Every year ESOMAR gives high-potential students the opportunity to attend ESOMAR global conferences. A great way for them to connect with real practitioners in market research and to build their professional networks.

In 2009, Elias Veris (Research Consultant at InSites Consulting) was regarded one of the high-potential students of 2009 by ESOMAR. Last year ESOMAR invited him to attend the General Conference and also feature in the ESOMAR newsletter. Read the full interview online (page 6). It’s Elias story on how he got interested in market research and how he joined InSites Consulting.

MTV Networks and InSites Consulting have looked into the coolness of brands and the impact on the purchasing decisions and brand loyalty among young people for several years now. These cool brands are awarded annually at the Cool Brands Award (initiative of MTV Networks).

Over the past years it has been demonstrated that young people buy twice as many cool brands as non-cool brands and that there is a strong positive correlation between brand loyalty and coolness. For the fifth edition of the Cool Brand Awards, we went a step further. The Coolness study was expanded with two new parameters: emotion and conversation.

The emotion that a particular brand evokes among young people is directly related to the purchase intent. Thus, young people will choose brands that make them happy or give them a good feeling. These brands linger in their memory. The happier a brand makes young people, the more tempted they will be to buy this brand again.

The second parameter focused on is conversation. It turns out that up to 2.4 brand names are cited per conversation between young people. Clichés are seemingly confirmed here, as women talk significantly more than men about chocolate and salty snacks during these conversations, while more men than women talk about mobile phones, mobile phone operators, beer and spirits. The brands that both men and women most frequently discussed during these conversations are Proximus, Nivea and Red Bull – three brands that were running advertising campaigns at the time of the study.

Brands that want to score with the young target group better make sure that their brand is part of the conversations between young people. The coolness of the brand is the decisive factor here as the cooler the brand, the greater the chance that young people will discuss it. Coolness also increases brand loyalty and has a positive impact on the purchase of the brand.

Contrary to popular belief, young people do not solely communicate by way of social media. In fact, 86% of their communication takes place via face-to-face conversations and only 9% takes place online. The importance of these conversations is demonstrated by the fact that a change of opinion takes place in 60% of these cases.

These are the results of the Cool Brand Awards – 2010 edition

• Coolest Mobile (Smart) Phone: iPhone/Apple
• Coolest Mobile Phone Operator: Generation MTV
• Coolest Beer Brand: Jupiler
• Coolest Spirits Brand: Bacardi Mojito
• Coolest Soft Drinks: Coca-Cola
• Coolest Energy Drink: Red Bull
• Coolest Chewing Gum Brand: Mentos
• Coolest Chocolate Brand: M&M′s
• Coolest Mints Brand: Tic Tac
• Coolest Bank: Mine (BNP Paribas Fortis)
• Coolest Female Beauty Care Brand: Nivea
• Coolest Male Beauty Care Brand: Axe
• Coolest Male Razor Brand: Gillette Fusion
• Coolest Female Razor Brand: Gillette Venus
• Coolest Salty Snacks Brand: Lay′s
• Overall Coolest Brand: Coca-Cola

Joeri Van den Bergh (Youth Expert and Managing Partner at InSites Consulting) was awarded Coolest Research Expert at this 2010 edition, a special edition Award for his contribution to the MTV Cool Research. Congratulations Joeri!