It’s wrap-up day for The Market Research Event (TMRE). Here are a few highlights from a various sessions this week:
- Interesting quote on changing business dynamics from Doug Cottings, Executive Director Marketing Research & Analysis at UBS – “Financial markets are changing over the weekend, which never happened before.”
- We’ve talked about businesses going after your market share not always looking like your company. Karen Gryson, Director of Global Knowledge & Insight at The Coca-Cola Company provided a great confirmation of this when covering its extensive work on needs-based segmentation. She highlighted that Coca-Cola competes with candy, snack chips, and even cigarettes on a sensory needs basis.
- In our Monday session, a participant from a major CPG marketer asked what’s next in ideation and strategic thinking. I mentioned the IBM Jams approach that lets widely distributed groups exchange ideas. Technology is in place that enables theme analysis and prioritization within these broad discussions. On Tuesday, James Newswanger from IBM talked about IBM Jamming in a session on Corporate Reputation measurement. He identified two epiphanies from these experiences: the Internet can transform relationships between employees and the company, and the size of these online events breaks down intra-company silos.
- Kelley Styring, head of Insight Farm and author of “In Your Car: Road Trip through the American Automobile” did a great overview of the work for this upcoming book. Her approach is a very cool merging of qualitative research (and ethnography specifically), quantitative analysis, and ideation to identify enhancements that would make cars much more functional for how people use them. How else to generate ideas ranging from a food warmer (for cooking items in a sun-drenched car during the day) to a separate temperature protection module (to keep all the HBA and medical solutions we keep in cars cool and protected from spoilage).
These are just a few of the insights and idea starters. We’ll cover more in the future, along with an update to the ongoing series on what poor presenters should stop doing.
