InSites Blog

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

Innovations come about in several ways. The innovation process is often powered by technology. In other cases, marketers have sufficient knowledge and intuition to independently create new products. Occasionally, a good innovation is created by accident. Today’s active and empowered consumer is however prepared to innovate in cooperation with brands. Co-creation is the joint creation of innovations by customer and producer with the goal of better meeting customer needs. This is why co-creation is a very valuable, even necessary, supplement within the innovation process.

My Starbucks Idea is a good example of how co-creation based on consumer conversations can support the innovation process of a brand. The platform allows consumers to help think about new products. The ideas are shared with others who can vote for, and discuss, them. Platforms like these provide an open and honest opinion by the target group and demonstrate that the company values the opinions of customers. They do however remain marketing tools. The platform is open to anyone (as far as confidentiality permits) and it remains difficult to assess whether all suggestions should be examined. Companies also often underestimate the workload of such an initiative. Some consumers expect that precisely their idea will enter the market, and do not understand why they get no response, sometimes becoming quite upset. Support is needed in situations like these and this requires resources. The question, therefore, is how to apply ‘reverse engineering’ on My Starbucks Idea and translate it into a systematic and objective market research process of co-creation for innovation. This requires a specific approach with regard to target group and market research process.

Target group
Not every consumer is suitable for co-creation. This is nothing new in itself. Eric von Hippel already formulated the idea of leading edge users back in the 80s. Lead users have the same needs as the rest of the market, but much earlier than anyone else. These users are very interested in finding a solution to their needs. For innovation research, we can best approach consumers who are among the first within a specific product category to try new products and are willing to take a risk doing so. Based on theories from social psychology, the co-creation process of InSites Consulting adds a dimension to the innovation process: social independence versus interpersonal influence. We therefore approach two target groups:

• The socially independent innovators. These customers form their own opinion about an innovation based on their own personal experience, regardless of what is popular in their social context. In evaluating an innovation these consumers mainly consider the functional operation of a product; the social impact they achieve with it is secondary.
• The social influencers (influentials). This group of consumers view innovations from their immediate social environment. Influentials are regarded by their environment as a form of creative experts who easily see the benefits of innovations. Consequently, they are often asked for their opinion about certain innovations and the mainstream market follows them in terms of adoption behaviour. They enjoy being creative with products, they find it important that others approve the innovations they use and proactively talk about innovations. They are more concerned with the concrete benefits of an innovation than the technical features.

Process/method
In terms of research method, co-creation requires a different approach than traditional research. The methods must meet the intrinsic motivation and interest of consumers in a contemporary way. They include tools that allow participants to design and adapt ideas in a concrete manner.

To begin with, the right profiles are recruited: only innovators and influencers are considered. The first group are given access to a closed online platform where they generate ideas on an individual basis. All participants are regarded as “innovation-developers” here. The objective is to search for innovation in a targeted manner with a small group based on previously validated insights.

The second phase is one of cross-pollination. Innovators can evaluate the concept ideas of others, comment on them and in turn be inspired further.
During the third phase, the influentials discuss the ideas generated from a social point of view. They refine the concepts with the purpose of making the innovative concepts relevant, memorable and interesting. The influentials are instructed to adapt the ideas in such a way as to be memorable: they must be simple, credible, unexpected and concrete and contain sufficient emotion for people to talk about them with others. Concepts are also proposed as an endpoint from the perspective of the customer and innovators and influentials have tools available to adapt or tag concepts, or load audio-visual material.

Traditional qualitative techniques are intertwined with ethnographic observation methods and creative exercises throughout all phases to provide context and inspiration. All participants are given a clear briefing on what is and what is not sought as well as insights into previous research. It is of great importance that the end customer actively participates in the research conversation and provides feedback. This increases the involvement of participants and gives a face to the initiators. Our experience shows that such an approach truly works. Recognition is more important to consumers than a financial reward: managing the conversation for innovation is what keeps them going.

Results
Based on the methodology described, InSites Consulting has conducted extensive co-creation projects for Heinz, Kraft and Friesland Campina. That experience has led to the following conclusions:

1. Innovators and influentials are easy to identify for different product categories.
2. Both groups generate more and richer innovative ideas than the average consumer.
3. Besides a reality check, innovators generate other ideas than those developed using other methods (e.g. internally in the company).
4. The ideas developed by innovators are more relevant for the market after they have been reviewed and adapted by influentials.
5. The influentials assess innovations differently and identify innovations that are not recognised by the average consumer, but which do in fact have potential in the market.

Want to find out more about co-creation? Contact one of our experts: Tom De Ruyck, Tom Goderis or Prof. Dr. Niels Schillewaert

This article is also available in Marketing Driven (attachment of Pub Magazine – edition 24/06/10)

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!

As an InSites employee & new joiner of the InSites Health team, I was very curious to see our Health knowledge & experience summarized in the InSites Health Smartees.

‘Never skip breakfast’ is one of the basic health commandments, so we started the workshop with a sumptuous breakfast! The other guests and I were fully ready for the start of a highly efficient workshop!

• The patient can no longer be ignored – 43% of patients look for online health info every month

There’s a lot of movement in the world of Health. Some evolutions are less impactful from a market research perspective, but others are ‘incontournables’. One of them is the way in which patients are stepping forward and are engaging a lot more in conversations about their health (offline & online), which is a true revolution in the Health sector and is deeply changing the relations between the HCP, the patient & the pharmaceutical company.
The first way to anticipate this new situation is to monitor and to know ‘your tools’ as a Health Conversation Manager. My colleague Magali Geens, InSites Consulting Health Director, gave us a view on the 2010 Health Study: Social Media Use in Health. The audience, renowned people in (European) health care marketing, was especially excited about the results because this year the data were extended from Europe to the rest of the world.

• Do not fear – but learn from patient conversations & act!

Health marketers learned how they should engage in the conversation with the empowered patient: track search behavior on Google, find out whether competitors already use ‘sponsored links’ (e.g. no pharma company has yet bought a ‘link’ for the Dutch term ‘hoofdpijn’ (‘headache’ in English)), read conversations about treatments, side effects etc. between patients on communities, social networks…
I think the most important thing I learned was that pharma companies do not need to be afraid of online patient conversations – on the contrary, it is an opportunity for them to learn from these conversations and think of ways to optimize the HCP-patient-pharmacy relation within the given context.
Some more arguments: conversations are more often positive than negative; patients are very open to be activated online by the HCP & the broader industry (e.g. 48% is interested in a doctor who can be consulted online!)

• The answer is out there… Tapping into the conversations of connected patients and caregivers

After a refreshing break, Prof. Dr. Niels Schillewaert taught us how to answer health-related questions without asking questions to patients… You could literally ‘sense’ the enthusiasm of the audience upon encountering the added value of social media nethnography on the basis of two cases in Health Research. The presentation clearly inspired people as there were a lot of questions about how to do it in practice and for which business goals it is relevant (e.g. brand analysis, online marketing, evaluating ad impacts…)
One slide of the presentation highly enlightened me: the summary of the advantages of social media nethnography. In short: there is a reduced interview bias (no single question is asked to patients), really new insights (new questions pop up based on answers found), the answers are surrounded by a ‘rich’ context (patient language, spontaneous answers in the ‘heat of the moment’), emotions are measured and you can go back in time…

• How to forecast prescription behavior of HCPs

Within the continuously innovating market research industry, we may not forget that as a research agency, we still massively conduct ‘traditional’ online quantitative research.
Sarah Mertens from AstraZeneca presented us the research design and learnings of a pan-European Physician study. The goal was to quantify current prescription behavior and future switch intention among specialists of a product x and to understand drivers & barriers to switch from current treatments to product a.
I learned here that close cooperation between the client & the research agency was very important for the success of the study. In order to have a 100% solid & valid design, some smart elements were built-in (e.g. reliability of measurement was double checked: self-reported prescription behavior was almost an exact match of the up-to-date available prescription data).

At the reception afterwards, all attendees were fully engaged in conversations about patient conversations and I … I was really proud to be part of the Health Team of InSites Consulting!

Interested in the presentations?

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!

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?

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.

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!