What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – Best of 2013

By Jeffrey Henning

Of the approximately 20,000 links shared in the past year by the #MRX community, here are the Top 10 links for the year.

1. Evolution of Insight – Vision Critical has the most viral research meme of the year, with an interactive cityscape that takes you from 1890 to the future, highlighting key research milestones along the way.
2. The 12th Edition Of The GreenBook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) Report Is Now Available – GreenBook released its latest incarnation of its regular survey of research suppliers and clients. In this wave, 1,375 respondents completed the online survey: 84% from the supplier side, 16% from the client side. Expect even more in January’s followup report.
3. I’m Not Your Consumer: How Research Misses the Human Behind the Demographic – Douglas Van Praet of Deutsch L.A. fires back at the research industry’s emphasis on consumers over people and rationality over emotional engagement and reveals the method behind the Volkswagen “Smiles” campaign (“It’s not the miles, it’s how you live them”).
4. Harris Interactive to Be Acquired by Nielsen – Writing for Research, Bronwen Morgan discusses Nielsen’s purchase intent – for Harris.
5. UPDATED: The Top 25 Unmet Needs Of Insights Clients – Lenny Murphy highlights the top unmet needs of clients of consumer insights organization that were identified as part of the Insight Innovation Challenge.
6. Protecting the Science – Writing in Research, Ray Poynter of Vision Critical outlines 10 key principles to guard quantitative research against pseudoscience and unsubstantiated claims. His main points: “estimates and predictions need probability ranges, a large sample is still only a sample, and people are usually unaware of their own decision hierarchy.”
7. 10 Things I Hate About You, by Mr. R. E. Spondent – A formerly anonymous research client with the nom de plume of Angry MR Client has created another anonymous persona, this one named Mr. R. E. Spondent. How much he hates your surveys might make you… D. Spondent.
8. How P&G Presents Data to Decision-Makers – Writing for Harvard Business Review, Tom Davenport of the Harvard Business School, shares a case study of Procter & Gamble’s standardization on visual tools across the company.
9. 20 Signs You’re a Market Researcher – Adam Rossow of iModerate shares 20 things that might indicate you’re in research.
10. 10. Forget Big Data, Think Mid Data – Tom H.C. Anderson has prepared an interesting analysis of the Return On Investment of different types of data analysis, from projects with “small data” (sample sizes under 100,000) to Big Data to what he calls “mid data” (a “sweet spot” for ROI for smaller Big Data datasets).

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