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Over the last two days, I attended the SPSS Directions Conference in Rome (IT). As a speaker, I was invited to bring a case study on using text analytics on social media data and eager to learn what others were doing on this domain. Moreover, since SPSS was recently acquired by IBM, I was curious to see what the future would bring. So I headed to Rome…

SPSS is typically associated with number crunching. One theme that however kept on coming back was the importance of qualitative and contextual data. I was truly amazed by the number of speakers on text analytics. With about 80-90% of company data that are unstructured, it is no surprise that this analysis technology is taking up. Especially in the area of customer satisfaction research, more and more people are using open questions in surveys to explain the “why” behind the numbers. The usage of text in predictive analytics is augmenting and so far, text seems to add quite a lot in the predictive power of models.

Many presentations also stressed the importance of the context in data collection. People are less rational than we often assume. In order to predict behavior, we have therefore to make more use of data collected at the heat of the moment. Particularly interesting was the speech of Ravi Dhar, Director of Yale center for customer insights. With some vivid examples, he stressed the importance of integrating context variables in your survey. For example, in a study with P&G (the measurement of the most effective communication for washing powder). The results revealed that on TV, it is better to the cleanness of your laundry whereas on the shopping floor ‘colors’ were a more decisive element.

A final session that drew my attention was organized by Mark Jeffries on soft skills. Many statisticians prefer to stick to the safe environment of their computer. However, we also need to sell projects and present the results of studies in an impactful way. Here are some tips & tricks to make this process more smooth:

• Whenever you get a business card, do not immediately put it away. It is the story of the person in front of you. Instead make a remark about it. Everybody likes to hear about oneself.
• If you want to get a ‘yes’, start already nodding with your head when you are asking the favor. There is a big chance that the other person will mirror your behavior and you will get what you want.
• In networking events, have a look at the feet of the person you are talking to. If his feet point too much in the other direction than where you are standing, he probably finds the conversation boring.
• The power of three: make sure that you always mention 3 reasons if you want to make a point. People have a tendency to believe you more.

It was the first time that I attended the SPSS conference and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised by its content. It seems that quantitative analysis is embracing qualitative data. At InSites Consulting, we believe in the fusion of methods and I can only consider it as a positive signal that companies like SPSS and IBM place this so high on the agenda.

However the industry needs to take even more steps. I wonder why there were no presentations where text analytics was applied on data from qualitative research. It seems that concepts like research communities, online discussion groups, blog research have not yet penetrated in this audience. Secondly, I appeared to be the only speaker who really showed how to embrace text analytics for nethnography. People were enthusiastic about the topic and I received the IBM- SPSS Insight Award 2010 for my submission. I hope this might inspire other researchers for next year’s conference! More information on the award will follow soon.

Two weeks ago Tom De Ruyck & I attended The Next Web conference in Amsterdam (NL), a conference inviting thought leaders and Internet entrepreneurs from all around the world to share their views on the future of the web.

On the first day Tom was invited for a Pecha Kucha presentation about brands & emotions, entitled ‘The Time is Now’:

The Next Web: Tom De Ruyck Pecha Kucha presentation – The Time is NOW! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.

During the conference, we saw several other insightful presentations making clear that context is indeed the new king.

1. The context of data: Joe Stump, CTO of SimpleGeo, on the combination of ‘location’ & ‘real time’.

We are collectively producing massive amounts of data on the Web: according to Joe Stump data is currently following Moore’s law. Moreover, more and more data is shared in real time.

This data-explosion makes it hard to find really ‘relevant data’: ‘As the production of data increases, its inherent value decreases’. Hence context becomes crucial: knowing where, when & by whom the data is produced is vital. ‘Content is no longer king, context is king’

Location information is the first logical step in adding meta-layers of information to raw data. Foursquare and Gowalla are doing a great job, but according to Joe Stump we need to take it forward, we are just at the front-end: ‘We need to move beyond the ‘check-in’ which is just a broadcast of presence. We need to start building a cohesive experience on top of that.’

For market research this implies that we will need to include more data-sources in the near future in order to get a profound 360 degree view on consumers.

Read the article in Wired to get inspired by what McLaren is already doing in this area.

2. The contextual framework: Robert Cailliau, Belgian scientist & one of the founders of the WWW, on the history & future of the World Wide Web.

Just like Joe Stump, Rober Cailliau, referred to the huge expansion of the web, increasing on a scale of X to the power X, rising faster than any exponential function, a scale never seen before in nature.

It was actually quite exciting to listen live to one of the founders of the World Wide Web. Robert Cailliau developed the Web together with Sir Tim Berners Lee at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, now 21 years ago.

And with the age of 21 come certain responsibilities. In his speech Robert Cailliau stated that it’s time to think about the way we are dealing with personal data, especially in the social scene on the Web.

‘The Internet has given us a lot of freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility, and we haven’t worked that much on this part.’

For market research this implies that we also have the responsibility to think about the way we are dealing with peoples data. BAQMaR recently started a discussion on this subject as a part of its 10 challenges for the research industry.

3. The human context: Mark Earls, author of The Herd, with an interesting talk on human behavior.

During his presentation, Mark Earls shared 3 interesting viewpoints that form the foundations of the ‘social scene’ on the Web:

• Everything is social: absolute individual human behavior is very scarce; almost all human actions are basically ‘reactions’ on other people in our environment.
• Copying rules: since the day we are born we try to copy everything we see around us. It’s hence more correct to rename our species to the Homo mimicus (as opposed to “sapiens” – the wise one).
• Sailing on social soup: ‘abnormal’ behavior is not really appreciated in our society. People tend to conform and sail on the social soup that is surrounding them.

For market research this implies that methods like Ethnography & Community research are an important add-on to the toolbox of market researchers in order to fully grasp the ‘social context’ in which consumer behavior & consumer decisions are taking place.

It’s clear by now that this conference is not only a place for the pizza-eating IT guys, beautiful PR ladies and business men in white suits, but that it’s also the place to be for next gen market researchers who really care about the future of our industry. Hopefully we can meet up at the Next Web conference 2011!

Connect with us on Twitter via @matsjombo & @tomderuyck to share your thoughts.

The answer to the question above could be found (albeit between the lines) at the Research Inspiration Run, a joint event by BAQMaR and Febelmar. Below, you will find the 6 core competences of the market researcher of the future, like I experienced them at this fine event.

The market researcher of the future is lightning-fast. That is what the format of the Research Inspiration Run taught me. 10 presentations, 10 slides, 5 minutes. Zoefff, and it’s over!

The market researcher of the future is relevant. Jo Caudron, coining the term “relevance marketing” put the marketer back with his feet on the ground: don’t go tossing messages towards your consumer, but be there with a message when consumers have a need. Proxies for relevance can be location (Foursquare, Gowalla, Feest.je anyone?) and time of the day for instance. Maybe the researcher of tomorrow needs to focus his researching efforts on finding the sweet spots of relevance, and provide marketers with possibilities to become more relevant towards their consumers. And maybe the market researcher of the future will as such become more relevant himself? Because, in the words of Bart Baesens, data mining models should do more than only perform well in the statistical sense… They should be relevant! They should focus on giving valuable insights once again, something to guide decisions. Market researchers should focus on finding “the one number that needs to go up”, dixit Gerd Callewaert. When there is no correlation between metrics like for instance ad recall and actual purchase, who gives a damn?

The market researcher of the future is a careful data cruncher. As Dirk Milbou said, data is the new oil… And we need Light Sweet Crude oil in order to get the engine running! When simple models generally perform well, the largest increase in performance comes from data quality. On the other hand, when data is oil, privacy is its currency. In an era of free flowing information, privacy is an issue that will always be at the back of the people’s minds… And thus it should be at the front of the market researchers’ mind!

The market researcher of the future is in touch with the new generation. There is a lost generation of marketers, like Nicole Berx said, who urgently need to get in touch with all new marketing tools that are available. Benoît Vancauwenberghe & Steffen Vander Mynsbrugge understood this, and took it quite literally. They promoted the idea that sometimes, you have to give a bunch of youngsters the opportunity to reinvent your profession. In their case, that’s advertising, but why not market research too? Personally, I’m convinced that there are youngsters out there that are skilled enough to run market research projects in a whole new fashion. Let’s get in touch with them!

The market researcher of the future provides experiences. Experience marketing is not only applicable to coffee, like Joke Van Der Heyden illustrated. Also market researchers need to give their consumers, (the marketer) an experience, in order to get their message across. Percentages won’t do, stories will. Furthermore, when we ask questions to our participants, why can’t we find ways to gift-wrap it like an experience? There must be better ways to ask questions than 5-point likert scales, people!

Last but not least, the market researcher of the future is a visionary. Someone who dares to predict what is coming, who looks at what is coming tomorrow to be inspired in his work today, as Timothy Desmet put it. Someone who can fearlessly state that he knows what the digital natives are up to, like Brice Blévennec. In the end, it comes down to one thing for the market researcher of the future: he’ll have to find an answer to the question that Niels Schillewaert answered for himself:

What would I do if I would run the market research industry?

On April 27-28-29, Amsterdam (NL) welcomes speakers and companies from Europe and the US to discuss the future of the web at The Next Web Conference.

Tom De Ruyck (Senior R&D Manager) and Dado Van Peteghem (Senior Research Consultant) visited this conference in 2009 and are now eager to attend again.

Tom was invited today as one of the speakers for the Pecha Kucha presentations on Tuesday April 27. He will be presenting The time is NOW.

Want to find out more about the conference? Visit http://thenextweb.com.

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 Park Plaza, London was the setting for the 2010 MRS conference; “a festival of ideas, innovation, and inspiration”. There can be no doubt that all three of these were achieved through the clever mix of speakers from within and without the Research industry.

The first guest to take the chair was Academy Award nominee Armando Ianucci. Research magazine’s editor Marc Brenner successfully demonstrated his qual interview techniques, managing to persuade the “hardman of politicial satire” to admit that he did ask people what they thought of his work before finalising it; even if it was just family and friends. Armando, had you broadened the sample, you never know, you might have won that Oscar for the nevertheless excellent “In the loop”. Thus the scene was set for frequent, and frankly not unexpected, digressions to the upcoming UK election, including numerous references to the industry’s infamous blunder in 1992.

Social media and communities, of course, remained a central thread for the proceedings, with an array of job titles thrust forward, aimed at demonstrating an agency’s ability to tap into this exponentially growing data stream. Social Media Knowledge Leader was a personal favourite. Doron Meyassad (Promise Communities) presented a paper discussing the opportunity for communities to allow large companies to rejuvenate their innovation pipeline through iterative co-creation. This was inspiring for any researcher who shares the view that long-term agency-client partnerships are the future of research. A witty client-side presentation by Darren Cornish (Axa) followed, concerning his change of focus from a technically minded Operations Director to becoming a social media advocate. His vision helped develop an internal community that successfully raised employee satisfaction and improved products resulting in greater sales revenue. Case studies such as these provide clear justification for the swift move of social media research up the value chain. In these times of media revolution we have the opportunity to ensure market research is used beyond the marketing department; we must take it. On this very theme, InSites’ Annelies Verhaeghe presented a rousing limerick extolling the virtues of genuinely listening to customers using observational research.

Alongside such visions of the future of research and how we can harness the digital consumer, there were numerous opportunities for researchers of all levels to hone their craft by listening to the experiences of industry experts, as well as those with more diverse backgrounds. Valuably, not all skills discussions were related to the process of research. Aptly named ‘Hothouses’, held in a steaming, packed seminar room included a talk by Executive Coach Paul Vittles outlining the necessity to step back from one’s work and focus on wider issues such as colleague satisfaction.

One of the most insightful lessons reminded us researchers that we should practice more of what we preach – ironically provided by a journalist (Brian Cathcart), in collaboration with Neil Swann (SwanUpping). Five tenets of effective journalism were introduced, followed by their potential application to the market research environment. Despite ignoring 80% of them in this blog, I summarize the rules below and hope we can all learn from them in the future.

1. Get to the point: the punchline comes first and the background – why the man bit the dog – is woven in beneath
2. Humanise the message: think about people before policies – use case studies/typologies that allow the audience to relate
3. Hierarchy of information must be clear: Presentations must be client focused, not producer focused – each chart should do a small number of things very well, in a clear and logical order
4. Make every word count: The best words are plain words, short words – and few of them
5. Ration the numbers: where possible change numbers into pictures; 28% becomes just over one quarter

The Marriott Marquis at Times Square, New York was the setting for the annual ARF Re:Think2010 convention. Not completely recovered from the overwhelming and flashing stimuli outside (including the Naked Cowboy), I was mastered by a feeling of vertigo upon my entrance and first elevator ride. I immediately understood why this used to be called the “suicide hotel” and even more so why Marriott put artistic fences to protect people from themselves. Imagine an incident like this hits social media today and you are the marketing manager of Marriott who needs to manage the conversation!

Anyway, check-in and buckle-up for my main take-aways:

Traffic trends
comScore confirmed what we already knew: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter rule in social media. While Yahoo! is hanging in there, MSN seems to be losing heavily. And the future is for mobile. It will soon become more important for social networking than fixed access. According to Cisco, video will account for more than 60% of all mobile traffic in the near future. Ouch! That’s going to be painful for bandwidth.
Smartphone apps are also better conveyors of brand messages than any other push channel. Think about Carling’s pint app as the UK’s nr 1 iPhone application. I am sure it is going to be the subject of future research and case studies in Journal of Advertising Research and at ARF conventions.

Forget the click – you have to earn it!
Clicking is still used by many as the main effectiveness kpi for online ad campaigns – but that is the wrong approach, I could not agree with comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. Very few internet users actually click on an ad (according to comScore it is between 0,08 and 0,20% across campaigns and dropping– seems even high to me), but they may more easily engage in site visitation and/or brand search.

Indeed if you manage the conversation you will “earn your media” and can always blend it with traditional online media if you like, Nielsen confirms. Many practitioners are after success in earned media for obvious reasons. It is cheap, fast and holds a long term latency effect in that it spurs organic search. But that is easier said than done and unfortunately there is also a risk spurned media or sustained negativity when you screw up as a brand. The performance of your brand in earned media is a function of brand readiness, agility, advocacy and latency. Nielsen nicely combines this in a blended media score to assess a complete view of ad effectiveness – no thanks Nielsen you “earned” this one .

If you want to earn it and your brand is ready for it, Nielsen advises to offer free product trials and coupons. Yes, you read it right – coupons are back in vogue, but this time mobile, location based and linked into loyalty programs. I would say: add some more engagement and provide utility in general (which is more than coupons only) and then brand it. According to Meteor Solutions and Hill Holiday’s research, “earned media” can power the success of your campaign. It is an important driver for traffic but being on Facebook or Twitter is not enough. The effectiveness of your campaign is a function of what users do with your content rather than what you do with it. Social media are in fact more “social” than they are a medium. So if you want to succeed in social, be social – facilitate and join that conversation!

What does this mean for market research?
From the client side Coca Cola’s VP Marketing Strategy & Insights Stan Sthanunathan pointed a.o. to the fact that we need a different mindset and more innovative approaches. We have been doing too much “rear view” research. Bring it on!
Diane Hessan from Communispace took the researcher perspective with 8 rules for next-generation market research. The most thought provoking ones to me were:

• Go beyond the ad-hoc-ness of research : with the internet you do not need to say goodbye to consumers you can keep on going.
• Cutting edge technology or nice surveys combined with a poor research design, remains poor research.
• Never underestimate the power of n=1 : sometimes the insight is in just that one comment.
• Engagement trumps the sample size: who is in the sample is more important than how many.

The people from IBM and Converseon added a nice example from their end on how we need to mine and monitor the online conversation. Social media netnography based on text mining is for sure a trend for market researchers to follow. But, qualitative researchers do not panic: human analyses are absolutely essential!

Emotional branding
The view and findings on earned media and more connected forms of research, tie in nicely with Marc Gobe’s vision of how social media transform brands. If you want to successfully manage your brand today you need:

1. Real time insights for leadership – stop listening (we have been doing so for the last 30 years) but become part of the conversation
2. Build an eco-system for dialogue
3. Leverage the power of communities – and yes, you will lose control
4. Content is the new social currency – it is viral
5. Leverage the criticism into an opportunity

Oh, and as an aside: “your message has to be tweetable”.

The question still remains though: what makes your online campaign stand out?
Nigel Hollis from Millward Brown provided a nice and crisp analysis of it. First of all, technically none of the ads go really viral – as the pass through ratio is too low.
Nevertheless if there is variation, there are 4 important drivers:

• Awareness (correlation with nr views rv=0,4) – the brand as such offers the promise that the add will be viewed
• Buzz (rv=0,38) – the pass along potential of the add
• Celebrity (rv=0,31) – using celebs works also online
• Distinctiveness (rv=0,46) – people need to be convinced that it is worth watching

Ads with LEGS also overachieve in terms of viral viewing: Laugh out loud, Edgy, Gripping and Sexy.
In conclusion: have your ABCD right and let creativity rule! One of those ads that has it all together is the following: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE. Admit it you males, you did not like it in the beginning, felt kind of threatened but had a laugh at the end.

Yes, we are homo sapiens (“wise man”) but are much more emotional than we think we are! And that is maybe what I have missed the most as a theme at the conference – emotions for advertising and marketing.

Hope to be back next year with some research of our own!

If you want to check the tweet stream search for #rethink10 – there are quiet some interesting quotes and links.

Scandinavian countries are famous for their innovative and progressive ideas in the organization of their society. Wondering if they would make this reputation also true for market research, I headed to Stockholm where I attended the Scandinavian Marknadsundersökningens Dag.

My favorite presentation of the day was without doubt from Teo Härén, author of several books on creativity. According to Härén, the key to more creativity is breaking your patterns and this was clearly demonstrated in his speech: he decided to do the Q&A session in the middle of his presentation and challenged the public several times to find alternative solutions for a problem. Some concrete examples you can start with today are taking another way when driving to work or change the side of the bed you are used to sleep on.

I also enjoyed the presentation of Jonas Ydén, head of market research at Carlsberg Sweden who gave his vision on the role of market research in an organization. Market research should not only be applied to make tactical decisions on communication, pricing or packaging, but should also monitor uncovered consumer needs and translate them in new business. Because insights can be present in different reports and places throughout the organization, they made an internal knowledge platform to make the market intelligence easily available throughout the whole company. Ydén finished with some guidelines for market research agencies:

• Do not just present the results of the study. Share also other customer knowledge you have with your client
• Do not say that something is an insight if it is not. (An insight at Carlsberg is defined as a single discovery of something enlightening about consumers, shoppers or customers’ underlying needs and motivations that Carlsberg can address to create consumer value and competitive advantage)
• Tell a story during your presentations and please the eye!

Next to the local speakers, some international speakers were placed on the agenda (like myself speaking on social media netnography). Although it is hard to bring multivariate statistics in a entertaining way, I believe that Ray Poynter did a good job in explaining CBC and MaxDiff in a simple way. I was also triggered by the presentation of Anna Thomas who used a technique called creative conversations to investigate sexual health among teenagers in the UK.

The Swedish market research day was definitely interesting. Although I did not discover any radical new ideas, I would definitely call them progressive in terms of market research. In a country that has about the same number of inhabitants as Belgium but a much larger spread, they managed to bring over 100 market researchers together for a full day of presentations. The openness and vividness where the participants were discussing research between sessions clearly showed the involvement of the whole market research community in taking research forward.

Getting up early is not my favorite start of the day, but for the WARC Conference on Advertising Performance I was happy to make an exception and that’s how I ended up in my car at 5.45 AM, heading to Lille Europe to take the Eurostar to London. Exactly 15 hours later, I was back where I started – home. But I brought some insights, inspiration and great stories back with me. If you keep an eye on InSites’ activities, you will sooner or later find out where the inspiration took us, but right now I already want to share some insights and some great stories.

Insights

• Emotions are the best predictor of advertising performance. The only problem is that there does not seem to be a consensus yet on how to measure emotions.
• Great advertising (and great marketing for that matter) requires a model of how humans work rather than a model of how advertising works. Fortunately, at InSites Consulting, we use both.
• Advertising always works. A report from Deutsche Bank revealed that any company that spends money on advertising & promotion, shows a better financial result compared to companies who don’t.
• Consistency in advertising works.
• If a viral movie has not gone euh… viral within 8 weeks, it will probably never do.

Stories

• During the first World War, British prime minister Kitchener was the first to use the power of advertising. The posters he used to recruit for the army might seem pretty straightforward now, but they had a tremendous impact. Kitchener expected to recruit 300.000 young men in 6 months. However, with the poster campaign he managed to recruit 750.000 young men in 3 weeks. Why? First of all, there was little or no other advertising at that time. But more importantly, there was a common need to defend the country – the message was relevant to the nation!
• In Korea, Turkey and Serbia, there is a countdown system that shows car drivers when the traffic lights will turn green. Because of this simple call for patience, the number of accidents due to ignoring red lights has decreased substantially. The Koreans were really thorough in testing this: they also experimented with a green signal to have drivers stop instead of a red light. Not very successful.
• Paul Graham had a great metaphor to convince his clients to use social media. Imagine you have a party coming up and you really want people to think you are a funny guy. So months in advance you start making this great billboard, with shiny colors, laughing faces and a clear message: “I am funny”. Now on the night of the party, you go stand in the middle of the room, holding up your billboard for an hour and then leaving home, excited to see the results of your post-test the day after. Wouldn’t you have a better chance to reach your objective if you work the room, go have a chat with people, tell some jokes and have a good time? Great story, but I am wondering if some advertisers might think: “I will put up a big screen in the room and play a hilarious commercial. That will do the trick.”
• Just adding “Drink Coca-Cola” instead of “Coca-Cola” on the Coke fridges all over the world, resulted in a sales increase of 20%. Apparently, it sometimes is that obvious.
• In the ‘90ies, Felix cat food was a rather new brand challenging market leader Whiskas. In one year, Felix only had one campaign that they kept running, consistently showing the same cartoon with the Felix cat (who is probably called Felix), while Whiskas launched 10 different campaigns, one for each innovation they launched. The ad spending of Felix was only half of the ad spending of Whiskas. Nevertheless, in that year, Felix became the new market leader and left Whiskas with a lot of things to think about. Consistency in advertising being one of them.

And to end with, a great quote from Sir Chris Powell, who has decades of experience in advertising: “Make it good in the first place, rather than measuring your failures.” It won’t surprise that we have some good solutions to help you with that

Tom De Ruyck (Senior R&D Manager) was one of the speakers at the Mobile Research Conference in London at the beginning of this week.  Tom presented the results of the InSites Ultimate Twitter Study, To tweet or not to tweet, that’s the question!

As a wrap-up of the conference Manfred Mareck of ESOMAR interviewed Tom, discussing the currents trends in mobile research. Check out the podcast online.

Want to find out more about the Mobile Research Conference, check Twitter #mrc2010 or contact Tom De Ruyck.