What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – January 5, 2016

 

By Jeffrey Henning

Of the 4,995 unique links shared on the Twitter #MRX hashtag over the past two weeks, here are 10 of the most retweeted…

1. ISIS and the Refugee Crisis: What the World Thinks Should Be Done – After the Paris attacks in November, Ipsos Mori conducted surveys that revealed mixed feelings about military intervention in Islamic State-controlled territories and about what should be done with the refugees from countries affected by ISIS militants.
2. Escape Helmet: How Virtual Reality Will Grow in 2016 – Weren’t we all supposed to have VR helmets so that we could pretend we had flying cars in 2016?! VR is still foreign to most, despite almost everyone having heard of it. A Touchstone Research and Greenlight VR survey showed that barely a third of those that took the survey had actually tried Virtual Reality but more than half were likely to purchase a VR device.
3. 61 More Predictions for 2016 by Research Industry Thought Leaders – Lenny Murphy brings together part two of GreenBook’s 116 industry predictions of 2016. One of my favorite quotes is from Mark Earls, of Herd Consultancy: “This must be the year of ‘&’, not ‘either/or’. Too much of our conversation as an innovation community is around ‘the end/death of…’; too many new approaches are pitched as ‘disruptive’ replacements for current practices, rather than complementary additions. TV didn’t kill radio or newspapers – [it] added to what already existed.”
4. 55 Predictions for 2016 by Research Industry Thought Leaders – The sequel beat out the original, making this “A New Hope” to “Empire Strikes Back”. Listen to Lenny: “What Can be Automated Will Be Automated:The research process can be broken down into a few big phases: Design, Sampling, Data Collection, Analysis and Reporting. Most (and in some cases all) of the labor can now be automated by basic AI systems, and that will only increase. I don’t envision a near future where humans are irrelevant to the insights process, but I do think in 2016 more and more companies will leverage AI and automation to create massive cost and speed efficiency across most types of research, further disrupting the traditional model and forcing researchers to add ‘human value’ elsewhere in the chain.”
5. MRII Online Courses – The Marketing Research Institute International has educated over 8,000 researchers from 104 countries through its three online courses: the Principles of Market Research, the Principles of Mobile Market Research, and the Principles of Pharmaceutical Market Research.
6. Shopper Insights vs. Consumer Insights – The Difference – C.J. Acosta of InfoScout compares and contrasts shopper insights to consumer insights for experience, focus, and push or pull on the product.
7. Innovation & Market Research: A Balance between Risk and Reward – Dorota Rewinska of Flex MR weighs the risks and rewards of innovation research. “The risk is that customers may find out about the innovation before the business wants them to; the reward is having a better understanding of how to tailor innovation to the target audience.”
8. Exploring Alternative Materials for Spectacle Frames – Euromonitor International’s Anna Cheng looks at the niche market of eco-friendly eyewear made of non-traditional materials such as wood, bamboo, and even vinyl records (!), and what is required to make such products successful.
9. Why Are Digital Ads So Annoying? – Nigel Hollis of MillwardBrown reviews research into consumer attitudes towards ads in general, and digital ads in particular. “AdReaction Video suggests that it is the lack of control over advertising in an environment where the user expects control.”
10. 2016: The Year When VR Goes from Virtual to Reality – Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC believes investment from Facebook, HTC and Sony will help make 2016 the Year of VR.

 

Note: This list is ordered by the relative measure of each link’s influence in the first week it debuted in the weekly Top 5. A link’s influence is a tally of the influence of each Twitter user who shared the link and tagged it #MRX, ignoring retweets from closely related accounts. Only links with a research angle are considered.