A common theme to the top tweets in the Twitter #MRX market research community this week was opinion leaders challenging the industry. Of the 663 unique links shared by the community last week, here are 5 of the most retweeted:
- Questioning the Nature of Research – Brian Tarran, editor of Research magazine, interviews Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy Group UK. Brian writes:
For him, survey research is an inherently unreliable means of getting to the truth of consumer behaviour and emotions. It’s still “better than ignorance in many cases”, but he says questions must be asked about how research can be “significantly improved” given all we now know about the human brain, thanks to behavioural economics and neuromarketing…. “If you talk to academics, they are slightly baffled by the ratio of money spent on research versus the money spent on experimentation within marketing.”
- ‘Qualmonella’ & the Darker Side of “Consumer Insights” – Riffing on the ill-conceived girls tee that says “I’m too pretty to do homework”, Tom Ewing of Kantar calls it an instance of qualmonella: qualitative insights served up raw rather than fully baked.
- In Search of Horribly Low Response Rates – Annie Pettit of Research Now wonders if the pursuit of higher response rates comes at the expense of the quality of response. (That popping sound you hear is my head exploding! For my own take, see Optimize rather than Maximize Response Rates.)
- First large-scale surveys show how much consumers innovate… and how businesses are lagging behind – Yannig Roth shares some interesting data measuring consumer innovation and contrasts it to a National Science Foundation study of the rate of innovation within American businesses by industry.
- The Full List of Nominees for The Top New Market Research Blogs of 2012 – Need the thoughts of even more opinion leaders? Sean Copeland of Environics Research Group has compiled the most exhaustive list of research blogs yet, listing over 135 blogs.
Got some research opinions of your own to get off your chest? Tag them #MRX on Twitter.
Author Notes:
Jeffrey Henning
