InSites Blog

On June 16th, the Dutch Market Research Association MOA organised the Dutch Market Research Awards at the Zandvoort beach near Amsterdam in a truly stunning setting. And after two successful award ceremonies in 2008 and 2009, it’s now safe to speak of a great Dutch market research tradition!

With no less than 19 colleagues, InSites Consulting was well present and while we fully enjoyed the bubbles, cocktails, live music and great summer-style food, we were utterly nervous – with a good reason! InSites Consulting made it on this year’s short list of market research agency of the year. During the award ceremony the tension among the colleagues raised to new heights: will we make it? First there was a big hand for the winner of the SPSS Feedback Innovation Award: Wakoopa . Wakoopa’s Robert Gaal (@robertgaal) collected the well deserved price: their way of data collection allows market researchers to analyze online behavior in a truly new and innovative way. Other award winners include Peter Mulder and ASR Nederland’s Saskia Goedhart. The entire list of winners and the judge’s comments can be found here (in Dutch language only).

And while the sun was already setting in the sea, finally came the moment to announce the Research Agency of the year 2010: five companies made it on the short list, including InSites Consulting. Ferro and Mare already made it on the short list last year and while all agencies scored very high on the jury’s check list, this year’s award was for Mare.

The jury’s statement mentioned how all nominees

“… have an outward look: focusing on taking research forward to a future no one can ignore. A future in which research will play an active, creative and insights generating role with a multitude of methods and tools. Indeed, a role of exceeding ambitions and being at the forefront of the research industry….”

This year’s winner was Mare and we like to take this opportunity to once again congratulate them with this well deserved price.

At InSites Consulting we realize that it takes losers to have a winner and while we feel we’ve exceeded on the judges requirements, the Dutch InSites organization may have been too new and too young to be this year’s winner. We realize how we’re in the midst of a new year in which we hope to grow at an even faster speed, continuing to take research forward and enlightening our clients and the fellow researchers.

Thank you MOA: we are already looking forward to next year’s award ceremony!

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.’

Compared to the first two quarters in 2009, InSites Consulting has grown spectacularly with over 50% during the first half of 2010 as a result of opening new offices in the Netherlands, UK and Switzerland. A Paris office is scheduled to be opened by the end of 2010.

In order to further support our growth objectives, we have recruited 4 very experienced and complementary profiles. The new arrivals bring a wide and deep marketing and research experience from their previous experiences at a range of global multinationals in Europe.

Lisa Ohlin has joined the UK team as Research Director. She reflects the strongly international outlook of InSites Consulting – a true European, having lived in five countries, she speaks six languages. Lisa has an impressive track spending more than 12 years in FMCG, both in Food & Drink and Home & Personal Care. At Unilever she spent eight years in various European Marketing and Innovation roles and recently she was Global Head of Insight at Cadbury.

Ashley Smith brings experience of innovative research methods thanks to many years spent in the electronics and durables sector at Philips, where he was Director Consumer & Marketing Intelligence. His expertise includes value proposition creation, innovation and brand management, and he has been involved in customer advocacy initiatives. As a Research Director, Ashley will be involved in taking innovation research forward at the Belgian office.

Emiel van Wegen joins the Dutch office as Research Director, bringing nine years of research experience spent at Synovate. Emiel’s background fits perfectly with InSites Consulting’s knowledge of using the web for consumer insight, marketing and innovation research. During his time at Synovate, he was involved with managing its online panel and online research tools, while his time at Fortis and GMI gave him experience of online market research and product development.

Isabelle Stevens joins the Belgian office of InSites Consulting as Research Manager. She reinforces the unique link InSites Consulting has always kept between academic rigour and practical experience. Holding a PhD in Communication Sciences, she is not only involved in marketing communication courses at the University of Ghent and teaching applied social statistics, but she has also managed research projects for NATO and the world’s largest brewer Anheuser-Bush InBev.

Kristof De Wulf, Managing Partner and in charge of sales management:

“We are extremely delighted to welcome heavy weight profiles such as Lisa, Ashley, Emiel and Isabelle. They will be instrumental in helping us achieve our objective of staying ahead of the game and of connecting more strongly with senior marketing management. All of them are very eager to take our organisation forward and to support us in obtaining our ambitious growth plan.”

This year, InSites Consulting has also been awarded with 4 important awards from AMA, ARF, AMMA and SPSS and is nominated for another three (ESOMAR and MOA).

As every year the AMA Marketing Research Council honors 4 individuals with the Marketing Research Emerging Leader Award. And this year Tom De Ruyck, Senior R&D Manager at InSites Consulting is one of the award winners. A great honor for Tom of course! The shortlist of winners also includes Tom Anderson (Anderson Analytics), Nick Harrington (Procter & Gamble) and Kristin Luck (Decipher).

Award criteria:

• Demonstrate commitment to the industry and advancement of Marketing Research
• Are passionate leaders who have a high potential for collaboration and succes.
• Are under 40 years of age at time of nomination (the award is also referred to as the 4 under 40)

The 4 Award winners are invited at the 2010 AMA Marketing Research Conference in Atlanta to share insight, inspiration and lessons learned on the road to success with the attendees. More information on the conference will be available at the AMA website.

Congratulations Tom!

MOA (Center for Marketing Intelligence & Research) announced its nominees for the MOAwards 2010 today. InSites Consulting is one of the 5 nominees for the Research Agency of the Year Award. A great nomination for InSites Consulting, but in particular for our Dutch office in Rotterdam.

This is what the judges said:

InSites Consulting obtained good scores all round. The company has a solid scientific background and offers good training. This fits with the dynamic staff policy that emerges from their contribution. But above all InSites is ambitious. This is reflected by their growth, but of course also and in particular by the impressive list of tools that the company offers. Other assets are the relations with the stake holders and the attention paid to sector codes.

Check out the other nominees online and sign up for the MOAwards Beachparty on June 16 (www.moaweb.nl).

InSites Consulting has been nominated for the AMMA Best Media Research Award 2010 with our Cool Brands Research: ‘Cool today, gone tomorrow‘.

In collaboration with MTV Networks Belgium, InSites polled the views of 1.500 young Belgians between the ages of 13 and 29. The findings from this survey not only identified the coolest brand but it was also able to demonstrate a direct link between the coolest factor of a brand, on the one hand, and the brand loyalty of young people towards this brand, on the other.

Find out more about the research results here or visit the AMMA Awards website to check the other nominees.

The ARF Great Mind Awards recognize and celebrate individuals who are making research great today. They are awarded for research innovation, rising stars, outstanding ARF member contributions and lifetime achievement within the industry.

Niels Schillewaert, Managing Partner at InSites Consulting has been nominated for an ARF Great Mind Award in the Innovation Category. Awards will be given out at the end of March during the ARF Annual Convention.

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!

At the ESOMAR Healthcare Conference at the beginning of this week, InSites Consulting was well represented with two speakers sessions. On Monday Annelies Verhaeghe, Senior R&D Manager and ESOMAR Young Researcher of the Year presented And they lived happily ever after…, her award-winning presentation on analysing user generated content on social media to increase the elderly’s quality of life.

Later that day Niels Schillewaert, Managing Partner co-presented Health 2.0 with Rudi Van Campenhout of UCB Pharma. The presentation illustrates how social media content can serve market research and the health care industry by means of a real-life case about epilepsy. A new research paradigm of social media research is developed and outlined. Having scraped over 39.000 unique online conversations, the natural language and sentiment of people towards the disease is demonstrated.

ESOMAR nominated InSites Consulting and UCB Pharma with the ESOMAR Excellence Award – Best Paper 2009/2010. Congratulations to our Health team and let’s keep our fingers crossed for the Award Ceremony.

The Swedish Market Research Society invited Annelies Verhaeghe at their Swedish Market Research Day on 11 March. Annelies will present her ESOMAR presentation on ‘Getting answers without asking questions’, the evaluation of a TV program based on social media.

For more information about the Swedish Market Research Day, click here or contact Annelies.