Author: Vivek Banerji, Founder of Insight Dojo
I’ve been meaning to write this blog ever since I got back from Nice, but it’s taken a while to read (and reread!) many of the papers. I began writing this to make sense of the rich content shared at the conference. It’s been a slow deliberative process – a system 2 blog! Before getting into the specific highlights, one general observation was that the insights and methods discussed had high relevance across industries. It was good to see such cross-pollination - an indicator of the innovativeness and good health of the insights industry as represented in the ESOMAR Congress. I would urge you to read as many original papers as possible because any blog can only provide a partial and subjective view. There are many insightful nuggets hidden in the details that one can pick up only when one reads the full papers. It’s also worth mentioning that I have not covered each and every paper. The five main themes for me are given below.
Please click on the headings of the themes give below to read the highlights of the papers that informed my view.
There were interesting practical applications of new knowledge on how our minds work - predominantly from the fields of cognitive neuroscience and behavioural economics. In particular, there was an emphasis on understanding and measuring the role of emotions in decision-making. There were examples showcasing technologies that measured visceral responses (e.g., EEG, biometric measurement, eye tracking) to better understand emotions. Currently, many of the examples are predominantly in the area of advertising testing. I hope we get to see applications in the future that address a wider range of business questions.
2. Think about age differently
Marketers continue to use age as a basis for segmenting consumers despite knowing that it isn’t a good predictor of either needs or behaviour. This has been driven primarily driven by the ease of identifying and targeting consumers. This Congress had many papers that presented a deeper and more insightful perspective on age, e.g, How can "perceived age" vs. chronological age be deconstructed? These perspectives might help marketers take a fresh look at how to segment their markets.
3. Seek inspiration outside the mainstream
In general there was greater cross-pollination across many fields with inclusion of new knowledge areas. I’ve been a passionate advocate for polymathy in our industry, and introduced a new practitioner profile called “Pragmatic Polymath” to our pool of talented specialists and generalists in ESOMAR Qualitative 2008 in Istanbul. You can download the article from the link ESOMAR Qualitative 2008 Do we need pragmatic polymaths to boost the qualitative research industry or find a shorter version in the September 2009 issue of Research world. So I was pleased to see this development.
Another source of inspiration was looking at consumers who were more eclectic and outside mainstream consumer groups.
4. Stay focused on business objectives to reduce complexity
Big data surrounds us, and there are many new technologies available. We are an industry that loves information and technology, and are excited about all that is available. However, one message that I heard was the importance of good old fashioned focus on business objectives and problem solving to cut through the complexity for developing meaningful insights. This theme surfaced in many papers.
5. Make insights live longer within organisations
Many presentations recognised the need to embed insights by engaging stakeholders to a much greater extent. There were great examples of co-creation. Our aspiration, as described in our paper, is to create a culture where insights become implicit knowledge and guide everyday decisions by executives across functions and levels.
Overall, this was a fantastic conference, and inspiring at many levels. You can purchase all the papers from the link given below:
ESOMAR Congress 2014 "What Inspires" Papers
I'm looking forward to next year's congress in Dublin. Slán !
