John and the team will shortly be attending IIR's Front End of Innovation (FEI) Conference in Boston (click here for the web site) where P&G's AG Lafley (co-author of the recent 'The Game-Changer - how you can drive revenue and profil growth with innovation' - click here for Amazon reviews) is giving the keynote.

Yemil Martinez, IIR's director of new media marketing, has done a great job assembling online resources in advance of the conference, including a conference blog and a LinkedIn group. Useful links that Yemil has emailed the group about include the following:

“Why Service Innovation? Why Now? - What Every Business Should Know” A web seminar presented by Jeneanne Rae, co-founder of Peer Insight focused on business research, consulting and leadership development services to corporate and institutional clients. Business Week magazine named Jeneanne Rae one of its “Magnificent Seven Innovation Gurus” and “Best Leaders of the Year” in 2005 based on this work.

Here is the presentation that Jim went through about segmentation. It provides a great background to the types of segmentation that can be done and also some slides which can easily be added into proposals.

Approaches to Segmentation.zip

The sessions, dates (checked in the diary but please let me know if the speaker is not available), and who they will be run by are:

S        Insights Generation – using Creatives, FamCam, Raw Stimulus (WG) / Thursday 13th March

S        Workshops – how to run them, breaking the ice etc (JK) / Thursday 27th March

S        Segmentation Types – understanding the market before launching a new product (JR/OW) / Thursday 10th April

S        Conjoint & Mapping Techniques – how we can use Warwick’s expertise (Warwick) / Thursday 8th May

S        Ad Testing – what are the key points we need to know about the competition (TBC) / Thursday 5th June

S        STMs – the BrainJuicer approach (OW) / Thursday 3rd July

The sessions will be at lunch in the London office (1-2 but the presentation will probably be about 20 minutes with lots of time for questions and discussion) with food provided

Charlotte

Quite a mixed bag in terms of the areas covered, but 'online communities' was definitely the most popular.

George Terhanian - President, Harris Interactive, Europe - gave the keynote in which he questioned the representativeness of online research, given the make up of online panels, and queeried the 'wisdom of crowds', claiming that the oft-quoted US presidential election predictions from the Iowa Electronic Market, were in fact no more reliable than the opinion polls. In response to the former point, Ray Poynter asked whether Terhanian really still considered telephone research still to be the gold standard - even in countries like Finland where only 50% of the population has a landline. And in response to Terhanian's second point, re the IEM, Pete Comley questioned the validity of the 7-day moving average re-basing which had been used to produce the results cited by Terhanian.

Ozge Odman Schmid - R&D Product Research Manager for Global Hair Styling Business at P&G - and Mike Waite of MarketTools co-presented on lessons learned from running 'Hairsay' - a community for 200 'hair-involved' consumers. The community has been running for about 18 months and their key observations were as follows:

1. Value to P&G: 'news from the marketplace'; 'having a finger on the pulse'; 'having a platform to continuously share and develop upstream ideas'; 'stimulus for innovation'; not 'screening' per se, but sometimes a reality check.

2. Participation: most topics attracted 20-30 participants - a 'hot topic' would be one involving 40 or more. One comment per week was the norm for members.

3. Incentives: 'less than CommuniSpace' (said to be $5-10 per month) and more 'intrinsic' (including prizes of new hair care products).

4. Moderation: entirely moderated by MarketTools who police for 'negative comments' and 'bad language' (but noted that it was important to preserve authenticity). MarketTools tag entries themselves, rather than allowing members to do this.

5. Recruitment: by MarketTools from their global panel - 'early adopters' and 'beauty junkies' from 12 different countries. 200 limit set to protect P&G's IP (internal policy).

6. Results: weekly topline summary, plus a more detailed monthly learnings summary. (Both speakers emphasized the importance of team get-togethers.)

7. Launch process: one month to design; pilot with 20 members used to seed content; 4-6 week warm-up period to show members how to contribute; 2.5 months to become fully operational.

When asked whether the community had resulted directly in the development of any new products, Ozge said that community had 'generated 5-10 concepts' that had been progressed to screening.

EuLin Goh, a market research executive at British Airways, spoke about the community they had created with Virtual Surveys. 198 members had signed up, drawn from BA's Executive Club. 106 posted at least once, while 41 had posted more than 10 times. 47% of the members were 'lurkers'. 41% of the threads had been started by the members themselves, who accounted for 90% of all posts (compared with 7% from the moderators and 1% from BA.)

Pete Comley of Virtual Surveys, presented on the subject of the unsustainability of online panels and the idea that, in the US at least, we are at the point of 'peak panel' and that from now on panel membership (and quality) will fall. (No one is claiming that communities will replace online panels as sources of representative sample - and no one seems to have any ideas as to what will.)

The non-community-themed presentations included Orlando's 'FaceTrace' presentation which was very warmly received and provoked more questions than any other during the day.

Susi and Emma at the stand.

John engaged the 300+ audience members in some playful interactive research at the which was held in Covent Garden's Floral Hall. The theme of the research matched that of the conference - the aim being to show how little even top marketeers know about what's happening out there in the real world. The audience performed a bit better than the either Marketing Society members or the 1,000 'civilians' who had filled it in online - but not by much, and were aided by the fact that they had results of earlier questions fed back to them before having to answer later ones.

Some Conference highlights:

Venkat Venkatraman of Boston University of Management and INSEAD spoke about how business strategies need to change in a networked world. Businesses are becoming portfolios of capabilities and networks, rather than products - with relationships being of paramount importance. Monetisation is becoming indirect rather than direct, and modern customers are collective, inter-dependent, and active - no longer to be regarded as passive individuals who can be dealt with in isolation. Examples of where social networks are affecting business and media included:

• Hey! Nielsen - where TV views are invited to chat about the TV shows they're watching
• ESPN Conversations - where viewers chat online while watching sports events
• IconNicholson - 'social shopping' technology which allows you to try on clothing virtually in booths and send the results to your friends. Apparently it's a big hit at Bloomingdales

Venkat ventured the interesting idea that YouTube's commercial future lay in it's developing role as the world's largest test market.

Blake Chandlee, the newly appointed Commercial Director of Facebook UK (one of only 2 UK employees) said that Facebook see itself as a 'social utility' which is designed to help people manage their real world lives. Rather than creating content, the company sees itself as an environment in which developers can create applications that encourage 'social actions' e.g. the TripAdvisor app that lets you plot all the places you've ever visited and share that info with your friends. He spoke briefly on Facebook's 'advertising' model which is based on the idea of user telling each other what they have bought - he referred to this model as 'trusted referrals' or 'social advertising'.

Neil Campbell, the General Manager of Walkers, spoke about Walker's new Carbon footprint labelling. Walkers have reduced the amount of energy it takes to produce a packet of crisps by a third and the amount of water by half. Interestingly, the carbon footprint broke down as follows: 44% agricultural; 30% manufacturing; 15% packaging; 9% distribution; and 2% waste disposal. His rules for the new world were as follows:

1. How companies do things is as important as what they do.
2. There has to be substance to what you do - and this has to come from the top (i.e. it's got to be more than cosmetic).
3. Employees are really important - there is an internal multiplier effect: the more people you engage, the more ideas, the more people... etc.
4. Actions are what count - not words.

In September, John Kearon chaired the 2007 ESOMAR Congress in Berlin, which was generally held to have been one of the best ESOMAR events ever (not that we're at all partial ).

Here are some links and resources that you might find useful:

• An introduction to the Congress by ESOMAR here.
• John's Chairman's introduction to the conference 2007 ESOMAR COngress Introduction Editorial - final.doc.
• A piece on the history of market research here - with an intro by John (see the right of the page).

Here are some links to ESOMAR videocasts from Surinder at www.researchtalk.com:

• Gert Van Kuyck of Philips talking about the overwhelming need for a more authentic understanding of consumers, among both the research and marketing communities. He regards engagement and humility as key qualities for success. Link here.
• Lou Marinoff. Don’t ask us what these guys are talking about, it’s philosophy and way over our heads! Kidding aside, they chat about, among other things, using values from faiths such as Buddhism to build strong and compassionate brands with purpose, meaning, and integrity, essentially brands that can do good and be good. Link here.
• Tariq Krim has built the Netvibes web 2.0 personalized home page into one of the world’s most popular blog readers. Link here.

BrainJuicer has a stand at the Insight Show at Earl's Court on the 20th and 21st of November - come and say hi!

http://www.insightshow.co.uk/

The next roundtable will be on 'Research 2.0' at Margaret St from 6.30 pm onwards on Thursday, 6th December.

We'll be looking at the impact of 'Web 2.0' on market research, discussing social networks and thinking about how we will engage with consumers in the future.

Mark Earls - author of Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature (Amazon reviews) - will be our resident guru for the evening.

We hope to have a good mix of agencies, researchers and clients - let me know if there's someone you would like to invite.

 James