InSites Blog

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.

The information for generating good consumer insights is out there! The challenge for researchers and clients is to adequately tap into this vast amount of data. New methods bring a lot of uncertainty and debate. Many incumbent researchers have talent but lack the contemporary skills to make the best out of the new information world. They revert to breaking down whatever touches the fundamentals of what they are used to. If both client and agency researchers want to keep pace with the latest developments in gaining consumer insights they need to adapt their skills at several levels:

1. Design & data generation. Consumers generate most information from experiences which are relevant to them. Establishing rapport, being good entertainers, journalists, ethnographers … are becoming at least as important as interviewing.
2. Technical & analytical understanding. Of course it does not mean statistics are no longer valuable. In this era of data overload the researcher of the future will actually need good statistical, software and database understandings.
3. Consultative research. The ultimate goal of research not changed though: insight generation for better decisions. But the story told through research needs to be an experience for decision makers as well. Triangulation, multi-medial and short powerful messages are key!

A lot of the evolution of our skills is in triggering, observing and sensing the information consumers self-generate daily. That’s why researchers have to become DeeJays! DJ’s play and select songs for an audience from their wealthy music collection. The successful ones provide a creative mix, fit to the mood which makes the crowd go wild. They are the cool new super stars, not necessarily the original musicians. What makes DJ’s successful is that they feel the audience and have the guts to experiment without forgetting tradition: they re-use old riffs and blend it with contemporary elements.

So how can researchers take advantage?

• Involve the young. Surround yourself with ambitious digital natives or Gen Y’ers. They will prevent foreign thinking and take things forward.
• Develop partnerships between research agencies, suppliers and end-clients that share a passion for innovation. Experiment with new methods via R&D projects and explore the limits and possibilities of the new.
• Publish and share the results and experiences in all openness. Instead of bluntly downplaying the new, all stakeholders learn much more from directness and the young talent will be seduced by what we do as an industry too.
• Develop a major and a minor specialization in your skill set. The contemporary researcher will be less of a specialist over the course of his/her career, but a fusion researcher blending different skills.

As such, we will build end-client expertise as well as research agency knowledge and prevent from becoming a mere product of the past. It means we need to take a risk, but if we do it jointly it will hamper any unrealistic expectations. Only by adhering to such principles we can make true improvements, develop talent and ultimately prevent the crowd wants to “hang the DJ”.

(Article by Prof. Dr. Niels Schillewaert and Tom De Ruyck, featured in Research World – Issue 22)

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

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.

Social Media Nethnography, a set of groundbreaking research techniques for discovering and applying insights from social media, has received recognition and praise from IBM with the award of this year’s IBM SPSS Insight Award. But the results of InSites Consulting’s application of nethnography have attracted attention and praise across the entire marketing and research industry.

• The Dutch association MWG awarded the Hans du Chatinier-Prize at the AMMA Awards 2010.
• UK digital think tank eConsultancy gave the idea its Innovation Award in 2009.
• MOA (Dutch Market Research Association) recognized the innovation of the technique by awarding it the 2009 Feedback Innovation Award.
• And by applying the analysis of user-generated content in social media to improve life for the elderly, InSites Consulting’s Senior R&D Manager Annelies Verhaeghe won ESOMAR’s 2009 Young Researcher of the Year Award.

These prizes follow several other awards for InSites Consulting (ESOMAR, AMA, ARF and MOA).

Social Media Nethnography combines InSites Consulting’s method, software and techniques with IBM’s predictive analytics to gather and analyse unstructured conversations and feedback from social media. Such insights can be fed back into product development, services and entertainment, and the results of changes can easily be measured.

Why study content of online conversations?

According to Annelies Verhaeghe, Senior R&D Manager, there are several reasons why market research should study the content of online conversations.

‘First of all in contrast to traditional market research where individual answers are not public, comments on social media can be read by everyone. Whether companies like it or not, social media are nowadays a full element of communication and advertising that influence people in their buying decision process. Secondly, at a time where response rates in traditional research are declining, these spontaneous answers are a welcome source of information.
And finally online buzz contains new, high quality information which is not easily available via traditional research. It creates the ability to go back in time, gives a glimpse of the moment of truth and makes it possible to discover blind spots which could lead to new market insights.’

As many of you know, ESOMAR is taking an important step to facilitate regional knowledge sharing via the ‘Best of ESOMAR’ local seminars.

Wed 19 May, the Vlerick School of Management hosted the inaugural Belgian chapter and I joined the researchers, marketeers and generally interested observers at the Vlerick ‘Chapel’, hoping to receive some divine wisdom.

For me, the overall message was listen, listen, listen whilst adapting and evolving our techniques as market researchers and marketeers. We need to move beyond the traditional paradigm of posing questions to one of listening and managing Web 2.0 conversations.

The opening session reflected on current challenges facing the MR Industry. Bert Weijters of Vlerick made the sobering observation that our brains are not ‘growing’ sufficiently fast to contend with the data explosion that surrounds us – new methods are needed to counter this inability.

Fittingly, Tom De Ruyck of InSites Consulting brought another analogy to the turn-table, suggesting that ‘we are not analysts…’ – the MR skillset now needs to add the plug-in of ‘DJ skills’.

Our MR ‘DJ’:

• Selects groovy and relevant sources from all the MR ‘playlist’. When to use which method or data source?
• Mixes all these together, potentially using new ‘fusion’ techniques of both quali and quant.
• Of course DJ’s are also sexy and admired and that’s where we (MR) want to be!

It’s about time a Belgian audience got to meet the Belgian ‘ESOMAR Young Researcher 2009’ so Annelies Verhaeghe from InSites presented ‘And they lived happily ever after’ – a clear example of fusion market research within the new marketing paradigm. Using Netnography combined with text analytics, the study attached sentiment and frequency mappings to over 81000 social media postings by elderly citizens to learn that (among other things…..):

• Don’t call the elderly ‘old’
• Supermarket experiences need a seniors overhaul
• TV programmes are too long

Laurent Florès of CRMETRIX finished the session and reinforced the new ‘listening’ and ‘conversations’ paradigm. Brands are still doing too much talking, the ratio of talking and listening is currently 50:1! (a bit frightening…). Laurent reminded us that so much potential market insight is out there amongst our ‘free’ Web 2.0 universe. Both Google Trends and Blogosphere proved good predictors for the 2008 US Presidential Candidate nomination and 2007 French election. The buzz volume of Hillary Clinton’s online discussions suggested her defeat, things got a little more conclusive when we looked at Google images attached to her versus Barack Obama.

Laurent concluded that passive listening is not enough in itself – we need to be conversation managers.

Finally, Niels Schillewaert, Belgian representative for ESOMAR outlined how the Belgian community can better leverage the value that ESOMAR offers its members. Participation at conferences is key, but more importantly submitting papers and sharing learnings. A ‘publish and share’ mentality. Let’s also motivate our dynamic young MR community (with advanced DJ skills). Less than 2% of ESOMAR’s membership is under 30!

So all-in-all a good kick-off for ‘Best of ESOMAR’ in Belgium. Till next year!

On May 19, ESOMAR organizes ESOMAR – BEST OF. An ESOMAR evening that will showcase the diversity and talent within the market research industry. Host for the evening is Niels Schillewaert, Managing Partner at InSites Consulting and ESOMAR Representative for Belgium.

The program hosts a dynamic agenda of speakers and topics and is open for all Belgium ESOMAR members. Of course the organization also welcomes anyone else who is active in the industry.

Program:

• 17h00 – 17h15: Welcome
• 17h15 – 17h45: MR Industry Challenges (by BAQMaR, Febelmar and ESOMAR)
• 17h45 – 18u05: And they lived happily ever after… (By Annelies Verhaeghe – InSites Consulting)
• 18h05 – 18h45: From Asking to Listening: the new research paradigm? (by Laurent Florès – CRMMETRIX)
• 18h45 – 20h00: Closing and drinks

Location:

The Vlerick School of Management – Reep 1, 9000 Ghent (BE)

This free evening is an excellent opportunity to network with some of the most influential names in the Marketing Research Industry. Spaces are limited so if you’re interested, sign up today by contacting Helen Parker (h.parker@esomar.org) with your name, e-mail and company name.

The Big Apple was the place for the 2010 ESOMAR Health Conference. During the breaks the appropriate amounts fresh fruits (not including apples though) and herb teas were served. Obviously in the evenings, NY’s recommended restaurants easily made up for this with copious meals and – for some – more BMI-threatening dishes. Honestly, I was actually a bit shocked by the ‘size’ of some health marketers and researchers alike attending this health conference…

In the introduction Finn Raben, the new quick-witted ESOMAR Director General (male, Irish, and not to be mistaken for a cop – US practical joke) revealed that Health Research now accounts for 12% of the total market research investments. The big chunk of this budget is spent on research among health care professionals. Today’s biggest challenge for pharma and health providers is that care is moving out from the clinical environment into patients’ and consumers’ homes, their PCs, their mobile phones… and health research is bound to move there as well.

Rod Falcon, first and most inspiring keynote (Institute for the Future, USA), anticipates that we will soon be tracking people’s moods and biometrics to better understand their medical condition and needs. Reasonably it will take some more time before we all start measuring our blood pressure daily (although my 81-year old grandfather already does!) and upload it online. However, already today user-generated health information can no longer be ignored by the health industry and its research providers.

We may indeed be a couple of years apart from massively uploading proper biometrical data; we already post huge amounts of health conversations online and we do this at critical moments (e.g. when we experience unusual symptoms, when we receive a new diagnosis, after an attack, after a prescription change…). This content is freely available for us, health researchers, to analyze and better understand health management in this new empowered society where patients demand involvement and want to understand more about their (family members’) disorders, diagnoses, and treatment options.

When scraping, analyzing, or tracking their online conversations about illnesses, HCP relations and product use, pharmaceutical companies (including the research agencies that do this on their behalf) obviously have both legal and ethical obligations to report and act upon irregularities such as drugs’ adverse effects. Mind you, this is by far the most obvious reason for many actors not (yet) to engage in observational research online. Other reasons include ‘no interest in patient research whatsoever’ (how much longer can this be justified?) and ‘having no idea about the current research possibilities’ (the conference was a good step forward closing this knowledge gap).

Merz Pharmaceuticals (and The Third Eye) and UCB Pharma (together with Prof. Dr. Niels Schillewaert from InSites Consulting) – first movers to engage in ‘social media netnography research’ in the industry, put their best feet forward on stage to overcome the existing knowledge barrier. With a lot of passion and practical examples they explained how they embraced the insights gathered on social media content and put it to practice in their organizations.

Questions received about the ethics of such ‘big brother’ practices were confidently bounced back to the audience by Rudi Van Campenhout (UCB) and the Merz team: ‘Is it maybe more ethical to know that a lot of questions and frustrations are out there about our brands and products and to just shut our eyes to them? Isn’t it more human to start listening (obviously only on freely accessible platforms!) to understand how we can act upon this in the future?’

Clearly some people in the room remained in doubt (because personally they have never engaged in online conversations about their overweight, cholesterol levels, restless leg, cardiac arrhythmia, hair loss, pregnancy, impaired vision… online? Or because regulatory and pharmaco-vigilance seems barriers too difficult to take?). But fact that our Health 2.0 paper – Social Media as the Central Nervous System for Learning about Epilepsy – received one out of two conference nominations for the ESOMAR Health Excellence Award shows that many minds were opened to these new views!

I would like to end with a quote by Rudi Van Campenhout for the sceptics: ‘I mean it if I say that the Web 2.0 journey was not only insightful, but also very fun (…) it also gave me the opportunity to get to know ESOMAR as an organization and I really liked it.’

Also our Young Research of the Year Annelies Verhaeghe – we also tend to call her our World Champion Research in the category -30 (in years and in BMI), shined on stage presenting her award-winning paper “And they lived happily ever after… – Analyzing user generated content on social media to increase the elderly’s quality-of-life.’ Still not convinced? Just read it!