Jeffrey Henning’s #MRX Top 10: Channeling ESOMAR, Open Ends, and Research Automation

 

By Jeffrey Henning

Of the 3,975 unique links shared on the Twitter #MRX hashtag over the past two weeks, here are 10 of the most retweeted…

1. ESOMAR TV: Broadcasting 19-21 September – Can’t make it to New Orleans for the annual ESOMAR Congress? Don’t want to wait for me to liveblog some of the sessions? Then tune into three channels of ESOMAR TV to watch the main tracks as well as interviews and breaking news.
2. Ignoring Customer Comments: A Disturbing Trend – Tom H.C. Anderson of OdinText shares a survey of over 200 market researchers: 30% exclude options for open-ended comments because they don’t want to deal with coding and analysis of such comments; 42% confess to including open-ended comments they don’t plan to use.  
3. Everything You Wanted to Know About Automation & MR – But Were Afraid to Ask – Two key points from this free report from NewMR & GreenBook (sponsored by ZappiStore): the fundamental good news – “Automation will result in more research being conducted, and a growth in evidence-based decision making, at a lower cost per project”; the fundamental bad news – “We predict 40-60% of existing market research jobs will disappear over the next five to ten years. Roughly 20-30% new research jobs will be created.” A must read.
4. The Silent Rise and Blossoming of Qualitative Research – Edward Appleton of Happy Thinking People looks at qualitative researchers’ embrace of digital techniques and integration of quantitative methods.
5. The Impact of Automating Market Research – This Raconteur article follows up on the NewMR/GreenBook research into automation with the following advice: automate or become antiquated.
6. Three Ways to Use Digital Data to Guide Your Brand – Millward Brown has introduced a tracker that integrates attitudinal surveys, search data, and social data to provide trackers to brands that previously couldn’t afford them.
7. ESOMAR Events & Awards – The fall ESOMAR calendar includes: the Annual Congress in NOLA September 18; Marketing Intelligence and then Global Qual and then Big Data World, all in Berlin in November; and local events including meetings in Guatemala and Brazil in September.
8. Use Big Data to Create Value for Customers, Not Just Target Them – Writing in Harvard Business Review, Niraj Dawar says that every organization should ask itself three questions about using big data: “What types of information will help my customers reduce their costs or risks? What type of information is currently widely dispersed, but would yield new insight if aggregated? Is there diversity and variance among my customers such that they will benefit from aggregating others’ data with theirs?”
9. The Smartest SaaS Questions on Quora – Cascade Insights curates top Quora answers to questions from Software-as-a-Service businesses, and outlines how market research can help SaaS businesses grow, penetrate the enterprise, choose distribution channels, select the KPIs to monitor, and understand why customers leave.
10. The State of Predictive Analytics [Infographic] – Econsultancy and Red Eye have a a new report based on a survey of 400 digital marketers and ecommerce pros…

 

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. We also exclude any of my own articles from the list.