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CEO Series
March 21, 2014
Tom Ewing gives his take on the MRS Impact 2014 event and lists his key takeaways.
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Editor’s Note: Tom Ewing is one of my favorite bloggers; his erudite and no BS persona always ensures a provocative and entertaining read. Since I couldn’t attend this week’s MRS conference myself, there was no one better to be our “eyes & ears” at the conference and ensure that we got the best possible take on the event. It sounds like it was a great conference that really delivered on the title of “Impact”. You can find more coverage here.
For the record, GreenBook and MRS have a very friendly relationship and are looking for even more ways to collaborate in the future. While I appreciate Tom’s comparison of MRS and IIeX at the end of his post, increasingly we’re looking at working with trade associations to help them leverage the types of things we uncover at IIeX and incorporate them into their own unique value proposition for their events. No one event or even media platform can be all things to all people, and although we’re pleased folks find value in what we are doing here and that it is influencing others, our goal is to help the industry as a whole grow and prosper, including our trade organization partners.
In an ever-more crowded conference schedule, it’s more important than ever to stand out. Over the years, the MRS’ annual conference has found various ways of doing that. In the less globalized industry of the 1990s, simply being the UK’s biggest research event was difference enough, and the conference got a reputation for being a little bit staid, with most of the real action taking place in the hotel bar.
That all changed in the mid-00s, when new organizing blood, and pressure from a body calling itself the Research Liberation Front, pushed the conference towards a more radical agenda. It became known for big multi-disciplinary ideas, highly creative session formats, and an eclectic choice of keynote speakers. Robotics would sit side by side with semiotics, book clubs fought for audience with pecha kucha, and you’d finish off with a keynote from the likes of comedian Armando Iannucci or socialist icon Tony Benn.
The only question – and it was a legitimate question – was “what does all this have to do with research?” For every attendee who let the MRS spark their imagination, another felt a lack of practical applications. So these days, under CEO Jane Frost, the MRS takes a third way – the slogan is now “evidence matters”, and the mind-expanding keynotes and far-out workshops are now balanced with an emphasis on really solid case studies.
So at the 2014 conference this week – called Impact 2014 – we had Cadbury’s talking about the ROI of Facebook content marketing, Waitrose extolling customer closeness sessions, eBay singing the praises of its segmentation, Greenpeace using psychology to make its Facebook page more inviting, and several smaller UK businesses – like an independent whiskey distillery – showing how research had paid off for them. As a set of examples of the real value of research, it’s hard to beat.
But, weirdly, the old question still lingers – case study heavy sessions are obviously about research, but they aren’t always relevant to the day-to-day work we do. You’re looking for the insight that will move you from celebration to transformation – something to inspire change in the way you do research.
So with that in mind, here were the best tips and ideas I personally took away from the conference.
So those were my take-aways. A quick look over them should tell you that the MRS remains a conference with distinct and individual strengths. It’s not afraid to be intellectual, and it’s not afraid to challenge or to entertain. It also has a strong tradition of panels that deal with political issues and with the material lives of ordinary people – a legacy of the UK’s important social research sector. And it has a good grasp of psychology too – this was the first conference I’ve been to where a session on behavioral economics could assume everyone already knew what System 1 and 2 were!
But it’s also lacking in some areas – particularly in the kind of things GreenBook covers. The MRS has never been great on mobile research, but having come fresh from IIEX in Amsterdam it was startling how little discussion there was of technology in general, and the new entrants to the industry that it’s creating. Individual companies and developments can be overhyped – there’s only so many times a game can change – but industry shifts are real. Even though most presentations were very strong, there was a rather cosy feel to Impact 2014, a sense that one can ignore the winds of change by settling down with a well made case study and a thoughtful cup of tea. If the MRS could combine what it already does so well – its solid examples, its intellectual curiosity, and its grounding in consumer reality – with some tech adrenalin, it might well be unmissable.
Thanks to Joseph Clift from WARC for his notes which let me write up the ESRO presentation.
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The views, opinions, data, and methodologies expressed above are those of the contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect or represent the official policies, positions, or beliefs of Greenbook.
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