The New New, Old New & Old Old at Research 2010
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sat, Mar 27, 2010
This week the Advertising Research Foundation and the Market Research Society each ran competing annual conferences, in New York City and London respectively. As a longtime resident of Boston, which has had its disputes with both host cities (Red Sox vs. Yankees, Minutemen vs. Redcoats), this was a tough choice. But since our last loss to the Redcoats was longer ago than our last loss to the Yankees, it was off to London.
The Research 2010 conference had a lot of new new and old new but not much old old.
New new techniques included discussions of bots for research purposes by John Griffiths and Brainjuicer. I, for one, welcome our new robot research overlords: no doubt they will be using lifelogging as a research technique and neuroscience MR as well.
To help understand the spread of the new new, there was much discussion of buzz. Tom Ewing talked about how memes spawn and swim in social media currents (using the "25 Things about Me" meme from Facebook as one example). Dr. Alex Bentley of Durham University discussed a framework for how ideas spread through society. And David Penn of Conquest Research and Orlando Wood of Brainjuicer discussed how emotions affect the contagiousness of ads.
Ray Poynter provided a taxonomy of new new and old new research techniques, while even leaving room to fit in the undiscovered new. His summary of his upcoming book The Handbook of Online and Social Media Research: The New Rules and Tools for Market Research makes it a must-read for anyone interested in where the industry is going. It promises to be the most important market-research book published this year.
In the category of the old new, there was much talk of online communities and co-creation. Doron Meyassed of Promise Communities talked about four ways that communities change the innovation process, in each case taking traditional market researchers out of their comfort zones. Blogging the presentations, Tim Macer wants to make sure that researchers do treat communities as something new and not just panels on steroids. A lively co-creation session talked about ways of "making things better and making better things" and was less about whether it was a good idea or not but how to use it successfully.
While the sessions didn't focus much on the old old, one of the big offline discussions sprang from Ray's offhand comment in another session that surveys would be gone in 20 years, a comment he later qualified in a blog post (No Surveys in 20 Years?). As a delegate of the old old (an unusual role for me), I of course blogged a defense of why surveys will be here in 20 years. My Ideas Rush presentation at the conference was on the need to optimize rather than maximize response rates, comparing panelists to chickens in a coop and survey responses to golden eggs (see Treating responses right).
(Apologies to the #qrweb and #rethink10 conferences for not covering them in this week's roundup, but it is hard enough to assimilate and digest a conference I've attended, let alone ones I have only read about in blogs and tweets.)
Next year I suggest ARF and MRS meet in the middle with a mega-conference. Bermuda would split the distance nicely!