Before I head off to my first conference of 2014, NetGain 8.0 in Toronto, I decided to look back on some of the great presentations I saw last year – presentations that stuck with me, and later had me referring back to my notes. Here’s my personal Top 10 research presentations from 2013.

  1. Grow Your Business by Focusing on Share of Wallet – Timothy Keiningham of Ipsos Loyalty shared an update on the Ipsos Wallet Allocation Rule method, which won the 2011 NGMR Innovation Award. You can turn your unpredictive NPS or CSAT data into solid findings by applying this methodology.
  2. Fast Fashion or Futurists – Robert Moran of the Brunswick Group presented at the GreenBook Insights Innovation Exchange in Philadelphia, arguing that research needs to “solve for acceleration — the acceleration in the rate of change in business, society and consumer demands.”
  3. Grid-Cheating Panelists on Trial – As part of the CASRO webinar series, Pete Cape, global knowledge director of SSI, discussed his ongoing research into respondents’ use of grids. For this study, Pete instrumented the survey to collect paradata, tracking the order in which items were clicked and the time spent per item.
  4. Five-star Rating for Films – Jon Puleston of GMI Interactive pointed out, in this NewMR presentation, that only 10% of IMDB film ratings use 1 or 2 stars. Meanwhile, 4 and 5 stars make up 60% of the ratings. Nor is this limited to films; this problem occurs in the distribution of answers to most 5-point Likert scale questions. Jon shares the results of his ongoing experiments into improving such ratings.
  5. Market Research as a Profit Center? It May Be Closer Than You Think – Kathryn Korostoff of Research Rockstar, presenting at Marketing Research Association’s Corporate Researchers Conference (CRC) in Dallas, asked “Can market research departments be profit centers (either by ‘selling’ internally or externally)? Should market research departments be profit centers?”
  6. Predictive Analytics for Market Researchers – Eric Siegel, Ph.D., founder of Predictive Analytics World and author of Predictive Analytics, kicked off the CRC with a great introduction to predictive analytics.
  7. Mobile Research Overcomes Fading Affect Bias – At the annual one-day conference of the New England chapter of the Marketing Research Association Wednesday, Amit Ghosh of the Forbes Consulting Group discussed the need for “in the moment” mobile market research. A key imperative driving mobile research is Fading Affect Bias, which tells us that memories of negative experiences fade over time, while memories of positive experiences do not.
  8. Benchmarking Emotional Reactions to Concept Tests – Josh Kamowitz and Brent Snider of BrainJuicer presented a webinar about moving concept tests beyond measuring consumers’ rational reactions to product concepts.
  9. Do Emotions in Advertising Drive Sales? – At the 2013 ESOMAR Annual Congress in Istanbul, Nick Langeveld and Rana El Kaliouby of Affectiva discussed their research with Mars into using facial coding to understand the relation between emotional ads and sales effectiveness. “Good ads solicit strong emotion: happiness, surprise, even crying a little,” said Nick. “But does that emotion translate into a sales event?”
  10. They Showed You What?! – “Please send us a photo of you placing your pad onto your panties.” No, that’s not some sick new fetish, but an honest and important research request from Proctor & Gamble for its Always line of feminine hygiene products. And a clear demonstration of the intimacy and comfort that research participants have with their smart phones. This presentation from Sion Agami, a research fellow at P&G, and Rick West, of Field Agent, at the Insights Innovation Exchange in Philadelphia was literally unforgettable.

 

Now, off to find out what the 2014 market research conferences have in store!

Author Notes:

Jeffrey Henning

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Jeffrey Henning, IPC is a professionally certified researcher and has personally conducted over 1,400 survey research projects. Jeffrey is a member of the Insights Association and the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers. In 2012, he was the inaugural winner of the MRA’s Impact award, which “recognizes an industry professional, team or organization that has demonstrated tremendous vision, leadership, and innovation, within the past year, that has led to advances in the marketing research profession.” In 2022, the Insights Association named him an IPC Laureate. Before founding Researchscape in 2012, Jeffrey co-founded Perseus Development Corporation in 1993, which introduced the first web-survey software, and Vovici in 2006, which pioneered the enterprise-feedback management category. A 35-year veteran of the research industry, he began his career as an industry analyst for an Inc. 500 research firm.