Now that's Significant – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Welcome to this latest episode of Now that's Significant, which just happens to be a significant episode in and of itself - especially after a long absence from the [digital] airwaves.

John Bird discusses the impact that WIRe is making in the market research industry, joined by WIRe's Executive Director, Jessica Sage.

John also mentions a worthy quick-fire Giving Tuesday campaign he is helping launch, where Infotools is matching donations for one day only, up to $5,000.

So, if you want to give and support the amazing work that WIRe is doing, let's help them make an even bigger impact.

Donate here - Friends of WIRe | Women in Research

Welcome to Now that's Significant, a market research podcast hosted by Michael Howard, the Head of Marketing at Infotools. This week, Dr. Anastasia Kārklīna Gabriel, an award-winning author and cultural theorist, joins the show to discuss the role of culture within marketing and her new book "Cultural Intelligence for Marketers."

Key points of discussion:

1. Cultural intelligence defined: Anastasia defines cultural intelligence as the practice of understanding culture and its trajectory to assess a brand’s role and opportunities within the cultural landscape. She stresses the importance of integrating cultural insight into marketing strategies to ensure inclusivity and resonance with diverse audiences.

2. Bridging academia and business: Anastasia shares her journey from academia to industry, underscoring the gap between academic cultural studies and its application in marketing. Her work aims to bridge this divide, providing marketers tools to understand and navigate cultural dynamics effectively.

3. Performative inclusion and missteps: The conversation covers common errors brands make, such as oversimplifying target audiences and neglecting cultural contexts. Anastasia explains how brands can avoid performative activism by thoroughly understanding the cultural nuances of their audiences.

4. Forces framework: Anastasia discusses her book’s "Forces Framework," which includes elements like culture, communication, critical consciousness, and community. This framework guides marketers in integrating cultural understanding into effective communication strategies.

5. Impact of fear in marketing: Anastasia argues that fear of missteps in cultural marketing, while understandable, should not paralyze brands from engaging meaningfully with cultural issues. Embracing this fear can drive brands to practice cultural intelligence more rigorously and authentically.

How can your organization better understand and integrate cultural intelligence into its marketing strategies to ensure meaningful and inclusive consumer engagement?

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Now that's Significant. If you enjoyed the discussion and want to hear more, please subscribe, share it with your colleagues, and leave a review. Check out our other episodes for more insights into consumer intelligence and market research.

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Infotools Harmoni is a fit-for-purpose market research analysis, visualization, and reporting platform that gives the world’s leading brands the tools they need to better understand their consumers, customers, organization, and market.

www.infotools.com

Established in 1990, we work with some of the world’s top brands around the world, including Coca-Cola, Orange, Samsung, and Mondelēz.

Our powerful cloud-based platform, Harmoni, is purpose-built for market research. From data processing to investigation, dashboards to collaboration, Harmoni is a true "data-to-decision-making" solution for in-house corporate insights teams and agencies.

While we don't facilitate market research surveys, provide sample, or collect data, we make it easy for market researchers to find and share compelling insights that go over-and-above what stakeholders want, inspiring them to act decisively.

One of the most powerful features of Harmoni is Discover, a time-tested, time-saving, and investigative approach to data analysis. Using automated analyses to reveal patterns and trends, Discover minimizes potential research bias by removing the need for requesting and manually analyzing scores of cumbersome crosstabs – often seeing what you can’t.

Discover helps you easily find what differentiates groups that matter to you, uncover what makes them unique, and deliver data points that are interesting, relevant, and statistically significant, plus see things others can’t. Add to all this an impending GenAI feature, and you have an extremely powerful, future-proofed tool.

This episode of Now that's Significant features host Michael Howard, Head of Marketing at Infotools and Jo Secher, a freelance researcher.

Amidst the rise of misinformation (in this case that which is more unintentional than intentional), Jo joined the show to discuss the challenges of interpreting quantitative data and the role of researchers in distinguishing fact from fiction.

1. Misinterpretation of Quantitative Data: Jo highlights how quantitative data is often misinterpreted by staff in non-research roles, which can lead to significant errors in decision-making.

2. The Rise of Misinformation: The conversation explores the increasing difficulty in distinguishing fact from fiction and the responsibility researchers have in acting as credible fact-checkers.

3. Professional Ethics in Research: Jo emphasizes the importance of maintaining ethical standards in research to preserve trust in the market research profession.

4. Understanding Probabilistic Data: The discussion covers the need for researchers to communicate the inherent uncertainties in data to avoid misinterpretation by stakeholders.

5. Examples of Misinterpreted Data: Jo shares real-world examples where data misinterpretation led to strategic errors, underlining the importance of presenting data in an accessible manner.

Question of the episode that you can consider… How can your organization improve its processes to ensure that data insights are accurately interpreted and effectively communicated to decision-makers?

Thank you for tuning into this episode of 'Now that's Significant.' If you found this discussion valuable, please share it with others, subscribe to the podcast, and leave a review. Listen to our other episodes for more insights into market research.

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Infotools Harmoni is a fit-for-purpose market research analysis, visualization, and reporting platform that gives the world’s leading brands the tools they need to better understand their consumers, customers, organization, and market.

www.infotools.com

Established in 1990, we work with some of the world’s top brands around the world, including Coca-Cola, Orange, Samsung, and Mondelēz.

Our powerful cloud-based platform, Harmoni, is purpose-built for market research. From data processing to investigation, dashboards to collaboration, Harmoni is a true "data-to-decision-making" solution for in-house corporate insights teams and agencies.

While we don't facilitate market research surveys, provide sample, or collect data, we make it easy for market researchers to find and share compelling insights that go over-and-above what stakeholders want, inspiring them to act decisively.

One of the most powerful features of Harmoni is Discover, a time-tested, time-saving, and investigative approach to data analysis. Using automated analyses to reveal patterns and trends, Discover minimizes potential research bias by removing the need for requesting and manually analyzing scores of cumbersome crosstabs – often seeing what you can’t.

Discover helps you easily find what differentiates groups that matter to you, uncover what makes them unique, and deliver data points that are interesting, relevant, and statistically significant, plus see things others can’t. Add to all this an impending GenAI feature, and you have an extremely powerful, future-proofed tool.

In this episode of Now that's Significant, we're joined by Alex Smith and Polly Milne from The Sustainability Group. They're going to be talking to us about how market research influences sustainability trends.

Check out their website for more details of the FuturePlus platform discussed during the episode. https://www.future-plus.co.uk

We hope you enjoy the show.

On this episode of Now that's Significant, we’re joined by Heather O’Shea, Chief Research Officer at Alter Agents, a full-service, strategic market research consultancy reimagining research in an era of shifting decision making. Heather is a passionate digital ad insights leader with over 16 years of experience in market research and consumer insights. She has held positions at media agencies, publishers, tech platforms and research companies.

How brands need to go back to basics with their approach to market research. Reasons for this included the evolution of consumer data landscape (GDPR, Apple’s app tracking transparency, demise of third-party cookies);

We’ve also seen decreasing viability of some of our existing media and advertising measurement techniques

She touched on how we've seen a reduction in ability to rely on direct response attribution measurement for decision-making.

Heather shared with us some thoughts on choosing the right mix of methodologies.

And more.

We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode of Now that's Significant, we were joined by David Boyle, Director at Audience Strategies, Chair of TMRE, and co-author of the upcoming book PROMPT, which explores the power of artificial intelligence and human expertise in the field of marketing.

Throughout the podcast, we discussed:

> Something amazing that happened in early December that should impact everyone in a really profound way. An AI called ChatGPT came along that changes everything about how we all work. It has the power to make almost everything we do better, quicker and clearer.

> The power of AI in marketing and how ChatGPT can help businesses generate ideas and content, streamline market research, and analyze data. 

> We explored the importance of finding the right balance between automation and human creativity,

> We discussed explainability and what that means for market researchers in their use of AI tools like ChatGPT

> David shared with us some insights into what he learned from writing the book.

> And we looked ahead at some of the most exciting trends and developments in the field.

We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode of Now that's Significant, we're joined by Barbara Gassaway, Moderator and President of The Research Group. Barbara also owns Observation Baltimore, a focus group research & recruiting firm. Barbara has decades of experience in the market research industry. A differentiator appreciated by clients and colleagues is Barbara’s comprehensive understanding of strategic marketing principles along with current trends and practices in qualitative behavioral science.

In this episode, Barbara shares with us her perspective on the increase in qualitative research, as well as the deep need for recapturing empathy across our market research efforts. This point around empathy may not seem profound, especially considering today's customer-centric mindsets that have rightly pervaded organizations, but that doesn't make it any less important.

Barbara shared some wisdom for recent entrants into the market research qualitative space. And she also gave us a hint at what we might expect from her first and upcoming book.

Enjoy the show

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast, we were joined by Mario Carrasco, co-founder and principal of ThinkNow, a technology driven cultural insights agency. ThinkNow enables companies and government agencies to discover the cultural drivers that influence consumer decisions. They provide insight solutions to help organizations thrive in a changing demographic environment. During his twelve-year tenure at ThinkNow, Carrasco’s expert knowledge of multicultural consumers and his passion for unveiling the story behind the numbers is evident in his editorial contributions to Forbes, eMarketer, Quirk’s Magazine, Online MR Magazine, and MediaPost.

On the show:

We discussed some pretty big technology challenges that are facing us or the world and particularly as marketers as well.

The sunsetting of cookies, the rise of zero party data, which a lot of researchers are actually familiar with, with all of the surveys, etc., that they've been doing and the huge but the way that the US and a lot of the world is becoming increasingly multicultural.

We talked about how these two big trends are rising at the same time and now related. And so our practices do need to amend and adjust for that in order that we can properly understand the world around us.

We had a little look into ThinkNow. And also Mario's expertise in the world, particularly the multicultural research that he's been doing and how that is responding to a cookieless world.

We looked at audiences as well and had that can be a great tool for helping brands to understand and navigate the various audiences and their markets better as well. Being a digital product too, which is good for access, etc. too.

We also had to look at the importance of brand as well and how people are needing to incorporate and be mindful of multicultural research, and I guess our brands, our products, our lives will be all the richer for it as well as we understand the actual world around us, not the one that we think we're living in, if that makes sense.

We hope you enjoy the show

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, a market research podcast, we are joined by Febronia Ruocco, a Global Strategic Insights Director consultant, having worked for a number of notable companies and brands such as Cadbury, Diageo, Heineken, McDonalds, Mars, and Heinz.

She is incredibly passionate about empathic leadership of high performing teams and currently also a mentor for both Women in Research and the Durham University Leadership Academy. 

On the show, we discussed the vital role market research plays in turbulent times, and how dangerous knee-jerk reactions can be to economic slowdowns.

We looked at how market research has changed and is changing to help us better understand our world. 

We touched on the different types of turbulence and the market research tools to help us through each type. 

Febronia discussed how market research can help organizations set sound strategic foundations, as well as guide tactical programmes of work. 

And lastly, we covered how off a few easy wins that organizations can make to help them get through these times with greater confidence. 

We hope you enjoy the show.

In this latest episode of Now that’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast we’re joined by Kayte Hamilton, Founder of The Social Question. The Social Question is a new research agency that offers a fresh perspective on social media research, specifically their methodology, which includes partnering with Instagram influencers to act as Question Hosts with their followers.

During the show, we discussed:

- How influencers can evolve their value to organizations and are perfectly placed to become research moderators on social media.

- We looked at an engagement tool available to Influencers on Instagram

- Kayte shared how Influencers can be hired to host questions to their followers and communities.

- The differences between other social media research options compared to the service The Social Question offers.

We hope you enjoy the show.