InSites Blog

TalkToChange (formerly known as ‘InSites’ Research Panel’) recently launched a community platform towards its panel members. 2 weeks after launch already 1500 participants from all over the world joined the platform.

Those consumers will get the chance to participate in our ‘Wishes of the World Study‘. The study will take a look at how people from different parts of the world celebrate Christmas and New Year. Our research design consists out of a forum discussion, an ethnographic part (people will upload and describe pictures from their Christmas trees, dinners, New Year’s Eve outfit and the spectacular parties they went to) and a survey about Christmas shopping and the frustrations that come with it!

Via www.insites.eu/takingchristmasforward you can subscribe to the results of the study. Click on one of the presents under the Christmas tree, it’s our Christmas gift to you…

Professional stress is highest among the age groups of 35-44 and 55 to 69 years old. The moment one retires is a crucial one in life, leaving people with a lot of spare time. For physical and mental reasons, social interaction is important to lead a long and healthy life.

Tom De Ruyck, Senior Consultant InSites Consulting explains “Participants indicate that having enough social contact is key to living a long and healthy life. In our interviews with 55+ individuals it was mentioned frequently that the moment you retire is a crucial one. Especially the years before are determinant in the sense that your career needs to have a happy end.”

These results are based on secondary research conducted on the InSites Health Study and an analysis of different types of online social media targeted on 55+ individuals. In a second phase, a quantitative study and qualitative study were conducted amongst 55+ individuals, using user created brainstorms, online in-depth and duo interviews.

Read the full article online

At the 2009 ESOMAR Congress, ESOMAR cooperated with John Kearon of BrainJuicer to produce interviews with industry thought leaders to discuss the future of Market Research and attracting talent to our industry. One of the interviewees was Tom De Ruyck, Senior ForwaR&D Lab Consultant at InSites Consulting.

In this mini-documentary he asks participant’s at ESOMAR’s 2010 Congress their vision on research in the year 2019.

In this interview he speaks with participant’s at ESOMAR’s 2009 Congress about stimulating and training young recruits in the market research industry.

At the Stichting Marketing Conference 2009, we conducted several interviews with marketers on their first marketing books, first learnings, current marketing trends and their advice for young marketers.

In cooperation with Pub Magazine we interviewed marketers from Saatchi & Saatchi, VAR, UBA, Studio 100, Sanoma Magazines, etc.

On March 9, 2010 Tom De Ruyck & Niels Schillewaert will be presenting the Ultimate Twitter Study at the Mobile Research Conference 2010 in London, UK.

InSites Consulting conducted the largest study ever on why and how people are using Twitter. To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question! and what the ‘Twittersphere’ can bring to market research.

Interested in joining the conference, register now online!

On December 11th, I attended the Marketing Winter Camp, a marketing conference organized by the Marketing group at the Catholic University in Leuven (KUL). The program consisted of an entire day of presentations, with a good mix of Belgian and international speakers.

Some of the work presented had a very academic bent, but one talk stood out in particular as being interesting from both an academic and applied perspective.

Professor Michel Pham, of the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University, gave a very interesting presentation about his research into the psychological state of relaxation and how this relates to consumption behavior.

Professor Pham’s work consists of experiments comparing consumption behaviors after a relaxation manipulation, in which participants are put into a relaxed state of mind, with those same behaviors following a control condition. Using several different relaxation manipulations, Dr. Pham’s research shows that participants are willing to pay more for items, and feel that these same items are worth more, when they are in a relaxed state of mind. These effects appear to be independent of any sense of positive feelings that relaxation might arouse.

Dr. Pham’s research suggests that this effect is at least in part due to the fact that relaxation is associated with a broader, more abstract thinking style. And that this abstract thinking style in turn triggers a more abstract representation of a product’s value.

As Dr. Pham pointed out during his talk, marketers seem to have an intuitive understanding of these basic processes. Luxury goods, which are by nature quite expensive, are often promoted in ways that emphasize their relaxing benefits, and/or paired with images associated with relaxation.

There are a number of possible real-world applications for these research findings. For example, if retail shops can stimulate a feeling of relaxation in consumers, particularly at the point of sale, they could conceivably be able to charge a higher price for the products they sell. Dr. Pham also speculated that it could be easier to convince individuals that a particular product is luxurious in the setting of a calm and relaxing environment (e.g. if car dealerships are able to create a feeling of relaxation in their customers, they might be able to obtain a higher price for the cars they sell).

On the whole, I greatly enjoyed the conference. Some talks were more geared purely towards academics, but on the whole there was a great deal that even the most applied and business-oriented market researcher could appreciate.

90% of European internet users go online weekly to search for information. More than 4 out of 10 consumers search for information on brands and products via comparison, expert and user review sites. Meanwhile the web is the platform for a lively peer-to-peer economy, a third of European internet users have sold something to another user via online classified or auction sites.

These are some of the results of the MC DC report (Marketers & Consumers, Digital & Connected), conducted in 16 European countries. Click here to read the full article.

Want to find out more about the MC DC study? Visit http://mcdc.insites.eu or contact Veerle Van Hoecke (veerle.vanhoecke@insites.eu)

Yesterday evening MRS celebrated the best in the research industry at the Research Awards 2009 in London. InSites Consulting was nominated for 2 awards

• IJMR Collaborative Research Award for Join the research: participant-led open-ended questions by Annelies Verhaeghe, Niels Schillewaert & Tom De Ruyck
• Best Conference Presentation for the Pecha Kucha session of Niels Schillewaert.

Niels Schillewaert, Managing Partner at InSites Consulting was the lucky one to bring home the Best Conference Presentation Award 2009 for his Pecha Kuch session at the Research 2009 Conference.

What the judges said:

A riveting, bravura performance. Seamlessly supported by 20 brilliant slides, Niels took only 6 minutes 40 seconds to communicate his cogently argued view of ‘creative destruction’ as an inevitable, but exciting, future for Market Research. His presentation neatly encapsulated all the main themes of the 2009 Conference, including (quite masterly) storytelling.

Today Econsultancy announced its winners of the 2009 Innovation Awards. InSites Consulting is one of the lucky few to receive one of these awards, more specifically Innovation in Online Marketing Research or Customer Insight.

Our winning entry: Social media nethnography Click here for your free download.

We developed a new research paradigm called social media netnography that makes use of user-generated content on social media to answer a certain research question. The approach challenges the traditional research process in all phases. It helps marketers and researchers to enclose new quality information which is not easily available via traditional research. At the same time the methodology respects the research ecosystem because it does not demand the cooperation of research participants.

What the jury said: “This is how a great deal of research will be conducted in the future and a step change in the way that companies can get insight. Great use of user-generated content to answer questions in a way which makes invasive questions unnecessary.”

Want to find out more? Contact our ForwaR&D Lab team.

The Le Web conference in Paris is growing year after year. In a year of crisis they manage to gather 2300+ internet professionals and they lined up a big list of top level people from the most popular companies of the moment such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, …

This conference is about the future of the internet focusing on different topics such as mobile, community platforms … Besides building expertise in the topics as such, cfr our MCDC report, we also manage our own community of research participants.

For both this conference is a source of inspiration and networking.

The conference keynote was Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, and now active in starting up a mobile payment platform called Square. After outline how they started Twitter, Jack moved to a demo of this new payment system. The audience was tweeting about it like hell. And I should say, it looks impressive. A small square device is linked to mobile phone using the headphone input, you start a program and enter the amount you want to charge, you swap the card and just ask the other person to agree. The squares will be distributed, for free!

The chat on stage with the Microsoft guy seemed less interesting so I moved to the start-up competition room. There I saw 3 startups pitching Friendbinder, stribe.com and Tigerlily.

First one was not that inspiring, in short Friendbinder is an application that allows you to manage all your social media accounts in one account. Not fully clear how the business model will look like yet …

Stribe was interesting; they have developed a system that allows sites to easily integrate community features on their website. Visitors can join and start different sorts of communication with each other.

Tigerlily is a startup that is focusing on the Facebook fanpages. They allow you to change the look and feel completely in order to generate more leads … Looks nice!

After these pitchers I joined the panel discussion on mobile applications but was looking forward to see Ethan Beard, Director of the Facebook Developer Network. He gave some striking figures on the use of applications on Facebook. 500 000 apps have been developed and 250 million users are using apps already. 300 apps have 1 million+ users. With some cases he showed the success of Facebook connect and what it can do with your business.

Ryan Sarver, Twitter director of platform, was up next. Announcing some news for Twitter developers such as a conference http://chirp.twitter.com and a new developer community site. Again some cases showed the success of businesses using Twitter. The one I will have a look at is cotweet.com offering B2B solutions on managing your conversations on Twitter.