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.

***

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.

***

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.

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, a market research podcast. I am your host, Michael Howard, head of marketing at Infotools. Today, we are joined by Emmanuel Probst, the Global Lead, Brand Thought-Leadership at Ipsos. He is an adjunct professor at the University of California. 

In this episode, we talked about:

- We talked about how brands need to transform in order to stay relevant and thrive.

- You mentioned gave us some insight into what compelled you to write the book.

- We had a look at Brand purpose and what market researchers can do to help in this regard.

- We discussed what’s led consumers to switching off most of the marketing and advertising of today, with some ideas on how to rectify this.

- You shared some reasoning behind why you looked at both large and small brands, to highlight what each to learn from each other.

- You gave us some great insight into what assemblage is and why it’s so important for market research teams.

- We talked about anti-heroes, saviors, and villains in regards to building brand relevance.

- The mood shifted a little as we reflected on what brands can do to help consumers who never felt more lonely.

- And lastly, we looked at what happens to brands if organizations kept building them like birds continually evolve and build nests. 

We hope you enjoy the show.

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast, we were joined by Idil Cakim, Senior Vice President, Head of Research and Insights at Audacy.

In this episode, we talked about...

- The rise in popularity of audio in today’s society, including how it has helped change the media landscape of today as it has become somewhat of a ritual for consumers.

- Idil gave us an overview of both her impressive career in insights, as well as the work Audacy is doing, which includes engaging with over 200 million people each month!

- As part of the conversation around consumer audio rituals, Idil gave some perspectives into one study they carried out, with some fascinating behavioral insights around that to which we’re listening.

- Two of the big findings from their quant, ethno, and IDI research was that 74% percent of respondents set time aside for listening to audio, in the various forms it comes. And the other finding being some of the ways brands can improve ad effectiveness and authenticity in these channels.

- One of these particular ways of better reaching consumers is understanding the 11 specific moments that consumers are most engaged with their audio consumption, and tying in relevant, contextualized messaging for these moments.

- And finally, Idil gave some insight into what is next for the world of Audio.

Feel free to check out the study we talked about on this episode at www.audacyinc.com.

We hope you enjoy the show.

We had Paul Neto, the Co-founder and CMO of Measure Protocol on the show to discuss some of the really interesting things that Measure Protocol are doing in the market research and insights space, including some recent findings from their platform Retro, which recently picked up an MRS award. 

Paul highlighted how most companies have big data gaps in their consumer data collection strategies, and gave some background as to why this has happened.

Some of which included the inability to collect certain data due to things like privacy legislation, lockdown by big tech players like Google and Apple on access to consumer data, and general consumer skepticism on sharing data.

Paul reminded us how some of the existing practices in traditional data collection methodologies such as VPNs, IDFAs, fingerprinting and browser cookies will soon be obsolete. 

We also talked about how new approaches that provide access to new forms of behavioral data across once-inaccessible platforms in a low friction and cost-effective manner will rise in popularity.

Paul shared the results of a recent report that rounds up some of this data that shows some surprising results on how people are spending time on their phones. 

And lastly, we discussed what such findings mean for businesses and market research teams too.

Thanks for listening to this episode of 'Now that's Significant,' a market research podcast hosted by Michael Howard, Head of Marketing at Infotools. Joining him is Lauren Cheatham, a behavioral scientist and principal quantitative researcher at Roblox.

Lauren shares her journey from being a professional equestrian to a leading figure in market research, discussing the challenges and significance of getting stakeholder buy-in for research endeavors.

Key points of discussion

1. The Journey to Market Research: Lauren narrates her unconventional path from equestrian pursuits to discovering a passion for research during her master's degree at Northwestern University, which eventually led to a PhD at Stanford.

2. Stakeholder Buy-In: A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the importance of getting buy-in from cross-functional teams and stakeholders. Lauren emphasizes relationship building and understanding the organizational dynamics to effectively integrate research insights into business strategies.

3. Skepticism in Research: The conversation delves into the skepticism surrounding market research, especially in tech companies where data science dominates. Lauren highlights the need to demonstrate the rigor and unique value of qualitative and quantitative research to overcome this skepticism.

4. Framework for Gaining Support: Lauren outlines her framework for gaining stakeholder support, which includes building personal relationships, making difficult stakeholders allies, and educating teams about the importance and nuances of research.

5. Future of Research: The episode concludes with Lauren expressing optimism for the future of research, emphasizing the importance of understanding consumer behavior and leveraging technological advancements to enhance research productivity.

Reflecting on Lauren's insights, how can organizations better integrate market research into their strategic decision-making processes to ensure that consumer insights are at the forefront?

If you find value in this discussion, be sure to listen to our other episodes for more expert insights on market research.

***

Infotools Harmoni is a specialist 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.

Ray Poynter joined us on this episode of Now That's Significant to talk about the good and bad choices that market research teams can make in the coming year, and how they need to embrace change in order to get ahead.

In the show...

We talked about the overarching themes and trends facing the insights industry over the next year or two.

Ray shared with us several particular challenges that the industry will need to grapple in 2023.

We talked about what organizations can do to hold on to their best people.

We discussed the insights professional’s role in helping its organization grapple with high inflation.

We touched on data quality initiatives

We looked some key initiatives on improving DEI

Ray talked about how market research and insights teams can leverage technology to help them deliver better outcomes for their organizations.

We explored what the agency/buyer relationship might look like in 2023.

And finally, we discussed the split of traditional v new methodologies in the market research world.

Enjoy the episode.

In this episode of Now that’s Significant, a market research podcast, Michael Howard, the head of marketing at Infotools discusses how market research and insights technology is most successful when it is invisible. 

- I discussed how market research and insights technology is most successful when it is invisible.

- What happens when market research and insights technology is visible?

- What kinds of technology there are across the end-to-end processes of the market research industry.

- The conundrum facing insights teams – do you go all-in-one or fit-for-purpose?

- What success looks like when market research and insights technology is invisible

- The role agencies play in making market research and insights tech invisible

- Considerations to make if you are looking into new market research technology

Enjoy the show

In this episode of Now that's Significant, we were joined by market research and insights technologist, Mike Stevens, from Insights Platforms. 

We discussed:

> The subject of ResTech, otherwise known as market research and insights technology, and how it is the new normal for insights professionals.

> ResTech is a term that has been floating around for a while now, Mike gave us a good understanding of what it is and where it sits in our daily lives.

> The challenge insights functions have in choosing either ERP/all-in-one generic software or fit-for-purpose, market research-specific technology.

> We touched on who is buying ResTech and how this compares to selecting agencies, briefly touching on the skills gaps that non-research users have.

> We dived into the buying journey and behavior for different types of market research data, which included reasons why ResTech buyers may 'fall out' of the sales process.

> Mike discussed how agencies fit into the world of ResTech, and also what the future holds in this space.

We hope you enjoy the show.

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast, we were joined by Professor Michael Brereton, a leader in the global marketing research industry. Michael retired from Maritz Research after eleven years as its President and CEO, then subsequently joined the faculty of Michigan State University’s Eli Broad Graduate School of Management. He is an Executive in Residence and teaches Marketing Strategy in the Master of Science in Marketing Research Program.

We dived into Michael's rich commercial/academic experience to discuss what skillsets are required by tomorrow's leaders of the insights industry.

We talked about how tomorrow’s leaders in the insights space need different skills in order to serve their organizations with meaningful market and consumer intelligence. 

We looked at how the double-digit growth the insights and analytics market experienced in 2021, which included examining the differences between traditional processes and ResTech. Digital data analytics in its current trajectory could soon be the largest aspect of our industry.

Michael shared six trends that he’s identified concerning the response to change our sector is facing.

We discussed how one of the overarching themes arising from these trends is the decentralization of insights, decision makers having the ability to dive into the data if they want.

We covered the hard and soft skills that Michael has seen as being particularly desirable when it comes to recruitment, which then flowed into what roles of the future could look like too.

Finally, we looked at the different skill sets that are required by insights professionals of the future, and how Michigan State University is helping its students prepare for whatever tomorrow brings.

Master’s in Marketing Research – Eli Broad College of Business | Michigan State University (msu.edu)

Enjoy the show

On this episode of Now that’s significant, a Market Research Podcast, Andrea Mitlag, Client Engagement Manager at Infotools talks to Simon Banks, an international keynote speaker and author, podcaster on creativity, innovation and design and a recovering professional artist. They explore the subject of curiosity and how we can develop and harness its potential.

The covered:

What curiosity is and how we can harness its benefits when we use Traveller’s eyes, always looking at the world as if it was the first time we were seeing it.

We were reminded how 95% of the people that Simon has engaged with through his extensive coaching and consulting engagements believe that they are not creative, they cannot utilize the power of curiosity, which we now know is not true.

They discussed how curiosity may or may not be something that we are born with, and how there are ways we can develop it.

Simon and Andrea talked about the need for us to slow down in order for us to let our curiosity run its course, especially when it comes to generating insights.

They looked at the role of technology in scaling our curiosity.

And the discussion finished on what brands have to gain when they establish that culture of curiosity.

Here are Simon's details if you want to reach out to him.

·        Web: www.simonbanks.com.au

·        Pod: www.occupationalphilosophers.com

·        Book: https://www.simonbanks.com.au/book-a-thousand-little-light-bulbs/

·        LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonbanksvisualfunk

We're also very thankful to Feedspot for the inclusion on their list of top 30 market research podcasts. Check out all the others who are helping further the cause of our fantastic industry here: https://blog.feedspot.com/market_research_podcasts/

Enjoy the show.

In this episode of Now that's Significant, we were joined by Anne Brown, Chief Executive Officer and Principal of Gazelle Global Research Services, a Market Research global sample and operations company. Her extensive international data collection, data processing and management experience brings a high level of practical knowledge to both clients and staff. Her lengthy livelihood in custom research has enabled her to build a set of comprehensive skills she utilizes to help guide projects in a wide range of industries.

Through the episode, we talked about the need for the insights community to significantly raise the levels of respondent experience we're currently providing the world. This is not just from any one company or individual, but across the board.

Anne shared some of the reasons why experience levels are where they are and some potential options for improvement.

We looked into some of the reasons why it's been so hard to offer better experiences, plus what happens when we get it right.

And lastly, we were reminded of the progress we have actually made, and how grateful we should be of those taking proactive measures to making our industry better. After all, we all know the benefit and necessity of what we do. That's why it's so important we all lift our game.

Enjoy the show.

On this latest episode of Now that's Significant, we were joined by we’re joined by Ethan Kellough, Co-Founder and Chief Product Technology Officer at Highlight, an Agile In-Home Usage Testing Platform that is making it fast and easy to conduct research with physical products.

On this episode, we discussed the gulf between physical and digital product teams.

How the pace of innovation in the software industry quickly outpaced the physical product industry

The physical product industry is full of waste and is ripe for optimization

The lessons that the software industry has learned over the past 20 years can be directly applied to physical product research

You shared three lessons that physical product researchers can implement right away

• The best data is the data that most closely reflects reality
• Invalidate, don’t validate 
• Size research effort proportional to the risk of being wrong

We also discussed how the physical product research space changed in COVID and how in the next decade you’re hoping to see more agility come in at all stages of physical product research

Hope you enjoy the episode.

On this episode of Now that’s significant, a Market Research Podcast, we were joined by Nancy Hernon, CEO and Co-founder of G3 Translate, a translation agency dedicated to cultural relevancy and inclusion giving a voice to the consumer in a time where linguistic and cultural norms are ever-changing. 

We discussed how one size doesn't fit all in market research, and the critical role of international survey design in today's insights world.

We covered:

• Culturally relevant survey design.
• Knowing and understanding your respondents and how they want to be spoken to.
• Dos and Don'ts of survey design for international surveys.
• Ensuring the survey design itself works for all markets, not only linguistically but technically.
• Examples of what can happen when international survey design isn't used.
• The future of translation in market research and the role of AI.

Enjoy the show

In this episode of Now that’s Significant, we were joined by Marion Elliott, Director of Client Solutions at the Schlesinger Group.

Marion’s experience in the market research field began in software and technology, she now works to help clients employ ResTech solutions to future-proof their insights practice.

An avid follower of the latest trends and innovations, Marion is enthusiastic about market research technology and insights. Since 2018, she has served as the lead on WIRe’s “WIRe in Color” initiative, which seeks to strengthen the connections among—and raise the visibility of—women of color in market research.

On this episode, we discussed Marion’s work in the ResTech space, as well as her invaluable contribution to WIRe in Color across the industry.

We talked about the work that WIRe in Color is doing. The leadership and mentor programs, etc., which are helping people to find their place and their belonging in the industry.

We touched on performative diversity as well, which is about making sure that companies just aren't checking boxes when it comes to DEI, but actually putting in things that will give longevity to these initiatives as well.

We covered off how far we've come, especially considering what many have and still do go through in their lives.

And we also went into ResTech and the role that that plays and in market research but also and diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. Marion shared with us what she is really excited about when it comes to the innovation that’s hitting the market, some of which includes platforms that are bringing together multiple methodologies.

We hope you enjoy the show.

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast, we have a new guest host in John Bird, EVP of Client Development at Infotools.

John is joined by two inspiring insights professionals - Sherri Dansby and Damon Jones, founding members of the Insights Association's IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access) Council. Sherri, Damon, and the IDEA Council are working to fulfill a mission to deliver measurement, education, and standards of excellence to address the lack of representation in the insights profession and the populations it researches. 

Sherri and Damon we’re excited to share what the IDEA Council has accomplished since its inception in 2020. They talk about our “IDEAtor” fellowship program for young professionals, Equity Toolkit, and our “research on research” efforts to understand the current state of inclusion and diversity (aka DEI) in the industry and how to improve the execution of market research studies.

They provide some good advice for insights professionals regarding what they can do to bolster their IDEA efforts.

At Infotools, we know the value of providing organizations with representative insights. And with every improvement done before survey data is collected, i.e. who we hire, who strategizes. who designs, what is asked, who asks, how it is asked, who shapes, etc., the better we all will be as a result.

Here are some links discussed in the episode:

“The Evolution of Demographic Questions”, a position paper on how to ask demographic questions on Gender, Sexual Orientation, and Race and Ethnicity. https://bit.ly/IDEA_Qs.

https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/idea-council

Enjoy the show.

In this episode of Now that's Significant, host Michael Howard, Head of Marketing at Infotools, is joined by Lisa Miller, President of Lisa W Miller and Associates and author of 'The Business of Joy.' The discussion revolves around the concept of joy as a vital component for economic and business growth, particularly in challenging times like the pandemic.

Lisa shares her journey of exploring joy through consumer insights and how it can drive both personal and professional success.

Key takeaways from this episode

1. Joy as an Economic Driver: Lisa highlights that joy is not just a feel-good factor but a powerful economic driver. When joy surpasses fear, it can propel economic recovery and business success.

2. Evolving Consumer Insights: Over her 30-year career, Lisa has learned to adapt her approach to consumer insights, emphasizing the need to stay innovative and sharp in understanding consumer behavior.

3. Impact of the Pandemic on Joy: During the pandemic, Lisa conducted ongoing surveys to track levels of joy versus fear. Her data revealed that joy significantly impacts economic activity and recovery rates.

4. Human Connection in Business: The book and Lisa's research stress the importance of fostering human connections in both personal and professional settings to enhance workplace culture and innovation.

5. Joy in Business Strategy: Lisa argues that incorporating joy into business strategies can help companies adapt to the new normal by reminding consumers why they love certain brands and encouraging customer engagement.

Tune in on major podcast platforms to stay informed about the latest trends and strategies in consumer insights.

***

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 thing

In this edition of Now that’s Significant, a market research podcast, Michael Howard, the head of marketing at Infotools, is both guest and host.

The show covers the rising preference we're noticing of stakeholders and decision-makers getting their hands on the data to actually become data driven, They've realised the value in being able to dig in deeper to the data, interrogate it, challenge it, in order to arrive at the most valuable of insights.

It's why we're championing those who, to use a sports analogy, would rather play than watch from the stands. 

Why do this? Well, when your insights function is working well, you’ve got everyone playing the game who needs to be, and you’re making decisions that help lift the overall performance of your team on the pitch, you’ll start winning more often. And when this happens, you’ll start seeing more people want to watch from the stands - be this your customers, prospects, and potential employees. And when your prospects like what they see, they’ll sooner or later become fans. And we all know what happens at that point. 

Hope you enjoy the show.

On this latest episode, David Paull, founder of Dialsmith, a pioneer in instant and continuous moment-to-moment feedback software, joins us to talk about the crucial steps required for landing the perfect messaging.

On the show, we talk about:

- How effective messaging, that brings about a desired outcome, follows a storytelling framework that anyone can learn and deploy

- David described how effective messaging is achieved by covering off four key things – personas, cognitive bias, a storytelling framework, then testing and refinement.

- We discussed when brands get this right, barriers to purchasing are eliminated because customers are drawn to brands that are connected with their needs and wants.

- And David closed with a few examples of brands that are getting messaging right, which included Zoomcare, Liquid Death, and Gong.

Enjoy the show

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, Horst Feldhaeuser, Group Services Director at Infotools was joined by Jason Buchanan, Managing Director at the Global Market Research Agency Verve.

Jason has a rich history in the insights sector, founding the Research Now APAC chapter and steering SSI’s APAC business to greener grass. Jason has a passion for exploring how the world works, the know-how for making it better, a deep understanding of consumers, and even has a degree in neuroscience.

Horst and Jason discussed:

> How 12 year olds next door could be completing MR surveys to buy electric scooters (and you may not even know it). This behaviour is likely more widespread than we think it is (or accept it to be). To put this into persona talk, Fabricated Frank sure does answer a lot of surveys.

> Automatic fraudster detection and checks aren’t good enough anymore. There is more that's needed to be done in order to clean up this issue.

> There is a significant need for panel and field suppliers to truly verify the identity of people.

> The market research space really needs to care about this – not just pretend we do.

> On top of compensation, the industry really needs to focus on survey experience (SX), in order to recapture the stature and reputation that has been lost by the industry over the past decade or so.

> And of course, that having something that you are passionate about outside your professional career and even outside your comfort zone, whether that’s a side hustle, a hobby or something that truly challenges you – often makes you a better professional.

Enjoy the show.

Bryan Smith, the BHT Data Solutions Director for Ipsos Global, joins us on Now that's Significant to discuss what market researchers want, what they really, really want. But it's more than that - it's what insights teams really need. And for most teams, when it comes to market research data, Bryan Smith argues that they don't actually need dashboards.

Ultimately, dashboards are a means to an end, they should never be table stakes. Bryan and Geoff discuss how dashboards are often a way to give people access to consumer data. When this is working well, organizations can make decisions in much shorter time frames, which is paradigm-breaking for most who haven't embraced modern processes and technologies.

Enjoy the show.

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, we were joined by CEO and founder of Relative Insight, Ben Hookway. Ben came on the talk about the possibilities and value that is sitting in our owned, qualitative text data.

Rather than analyzing all data that is common between two people groups (generally 90-95%), Relative Insight scrupulously digs into all that is different between the two groups (normally 5-10%). This approach enabled the one law enforcement department to spot those bad actors who were posing as teenage girls.

Relative Insight then moved into the insights and market research world and is quickly becoming a force in its own right, helping insights teams understand different target audiences, knowing which ways to talk to them, and how one should even gather text for analytics in the first place, in order to get respondents to respond with meaning.

On this episode of Now that's Significant, we’re joined by not one but two guests who played and continue to play a key role in helping maintain high standards of practice in the market research space. The first is Annie Pettit, Chief Research Officer at E2E Research, and the second is Elissa Molloy, Director at ISO Audit Solutions.

In this episode, we discuss the international standards certification for market research ISO 20252.

Annie and Elissa provide a little background on their careers and involvement in producing and maintaining the standard.

The certification has specific annexes that organizations can be audited on, which are relevant to the role they play within the industry - from sampling methodologies to data management and processing requirements.

The certification is relevant for all parties, including in-house corporate insights teams, agencies, and software providers.

Elissa speaks to the benefits she has witnessed organizations realize after undertaking the changes required to meet the standards - a couple of the biggest of these being efficiency gains from avoiding re-work, as well as reducing risks of things going wrong with their research.

Enjoy the show.

John Geraci joins us on this episode of Now that's Significant to talk about the alarming problem of trust in market research polls. As the President of Crux Research, as well as a career heavily focused on polling, John brings a wealth of knowledge to the challenge of declining trust in polls.

Throughout the podcast, we talk about:

- What led to John writing his book Poll-arized: Why Americans don't trust the polls.

- There are serious data quality issues across all types of survey research – not just the election polls.

- One of the biggest contributors for this historically low trust is all stems from low response rates.

- The industry's investment in methodology and technology has largely not gone towards improving respondent trust and response.

- Our sector's tendency to focus almost exclusively on sampling errors, when there are many more consequential errors to consider.

- And, ironically, how lack of trust in polls could actually lead to an increase in voter turnout.

Enjoy the show.

This episode of Now that's Significant, Karine Pepin from 2CV joins us to discuss the value we could be missing out on by discarding incompletes too soon.

During the podcast, we discuss:

- How the market research industry is changing rapidly as a result of cultural shifts and innovation

- The demand for good survey participants far exceeds supply, as a result, survey conversion is more important than ever

- Our first line of defense is creating an engaging survey experience. Mind, you could still have hundreds of participants drop off even if the survey is short and engaging

- Keeping partial completes could help solve the participant crisis and speed up fieldwork. It’s not a straight forward decision. Like everything else it requires trade-offs

Hope you enjoy the show

We welcomed Lynn Pellicano on the podcast to talk about ways to improve our sample quality so we're spending less time cleaning it and more time analyzing it. In the podcast, we explored:

Sample quality has become endemic across the industry. You mentioned that B2B suffers from this the most, but obviously B2C prone to it as well. It is a significant issue. A number of things that haven't or aren't sufficient any more like the Double Opt In, self-selection, etc.

We really need to have buttoned up screeners to help us to weed out bad actors. Customer recruitment can help in this space too.

Phone interviewing and field studies are back, which is great, since it's fraud can't be scaled to the extent that 100% online can. This means there's a whole lot of new or not new, but existing collection tools that people can use to reach a broader section of society.

We talked about how some are cleaning up to 80% of the sample, which is quite scary to think about the value which they could be missing out on by doing such things incorrectly.

We discussed how we need to get our surveys shorter, be device agnostic with the with our collection tools and also use multiple recruitment methods to make sure we're not just focusing on over those representative, prolific online people.

We explored the use of technology in the recruitment phase, with the likes of geolocation, language, IP addresses to help keep people out of or confirm people before they enter using prescreen as well.

There's also improvements we can make in the design phase, using things such as refusals, questionnaire design, flaws, falsehoods, social desirability, people giving politically correct responses rather than the true opinions that we talked about briefly on the screening phase.

We looked into some things we can do in real time as well, such as developing consistent and efficient, accurate data checks, confirming knowledge respondents confirming attentive respondents, but not being too aggressive with it.

And then we looked at a few different things such as speeders, open interviews, straight lining, red hearings. You also talked about numeric outliers and contradictory and probable responses as well.

And lastly, we spent a moment imagining if we were to get everything right in the sample space, as improbable as it may be, and what would happen.

Enjoy the show.

We welcomed Jason Jacobson, Director of Consumer Insights at Woodside Homes to this episode of Now that's Significant.

On the show, we discussed:

- How less is more when it comes to consumer insights data as organizations and decision makers alike have far too much on their plates to be sifting through and trying to make sense of the fathoms and fathoms of data stored in lakes.

- We went on a trip down memory lane to explore Jason’s journey in the market research and insights world.

- We discussed how having less data can actually help insights teams and businesses to go deeper into the data and analyses.

- We briefly looked at the reason for the deluge of data we find ourselves in.

- We mentioned the importance of respecting the context of storing data in order to retain its full value, think respondent vs syndicated data.

- We talked about an alternative north star to quantity of data, which is action. There’s no point in having the best, most interesting insights in the world, if it’s just academic no change or success comes of it.

- And lastly we had a look into the crystal ball to see what’s instore for the insights sector.

Hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode of Now that’s Significant hosted by Michael Howard, Head of Marketing at Infotools, the discussion features Bob Fawson, founder and CEO of Data Quality Co-op. The episode delves into the challenges and opportunities within the data quality landscape of the consumer insights industry.

Bob shares his insights on promoting transparency and improving data quality, emphasizing the need for structural changes to restore trust between buyers, participants, and intermediaries in the market.

Key takeaways from this episode

1. Importance of Data Quality: Bob highlights the intractable challenges facing data quality in the industry, comparing it to a 'lemon market' where buyers and sellers struggle with trust. He emphasizes the need for a structured clearinghouse to ensure transparency and improve data quality across the board.

2. Role of a Clearinghouse: The Data Quality Co-op aims to act as an independent clearinghouse, similar to credit reporting agencies, providing a broader understanding of data quality and offering a platform for buyers and sellers to align expectations.

 3. Market Dynamics and Trust: The insights market is characterized as a two-sided ecosystem with inherent challenges in trust and collaboration. Bob discusses how better communication can break the cycle of competitive pressures and improve industry standards.

4. Optimism for the Future: Despite current challenges, Bob remains optimistic about the industry's ability to address data quality issues by learning from other sectors and implementing solutions that can change market dynamics positively.

5. Preparing for AI Demand: Bob stresses the importance of positioning the industry to meet the growing demand for high-quality first-party data, essential for training AI models, and ensuring that the data used is credible and reliable.

Want to explore other episodes of Now that’s Significant? Tune in on major podcast platforms and stay informed about the latest trends and strategies in consumer insights.

***

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 thing

In this episode of Now that’s Significant, a market research podcast, we welcome on the show Horst Feldhaeuser, Group Services Director at Infotools and Alyona Medelyan, CEO and co-founder of Thematic.

Horst and Alyona take the reins of this show, presenting their paper from the 2022 Research Association of New Zealand Conference: AI – friend of foe?

Their paper delves into a joint project they were involved in, using AI to find insights from online reviews of Coca-Cola, the world’s largest soft drinks manufacturer.

Enjoy the show

In this episode, we welcomed on the show Lisa Wilding-Brown, Chief Executive Officer at InnovateMR and one of the market research industry’s top minds on data quality.

During this podcast:

We ultimately talked about the never-relenting, always present challenge of data quality in the market research space. Lisa mentioned that even though this issue has grown and changed over time, it remains fundamentally the same: there will always be fraudsters looking to cash out on survey incentives.

We discussed how and why there’s no single or easy fix to this issue, and why that isn’t an excuse not to do something about it.

We discussed the size and impact that cyberfraud has in the world and on the market research sector, as well as where the fraud starts in the market research space, which the ad tech space was mentioned.

We even looked at what may cause some people to become cyberfraudsters.

And finally, we talked about some of the things organizations can do to mitigate, minimise, and prevent the impact of cyberfraud in our market research efforts, which will go a long way in increasing the quality of our data, the insights that can be generated from this data, and the actions that can be made as a result of those insights - which, if we have our customer centric hat on, will improve outcomes for our clients as well.

Enjoy the show.

The episode features CEO and Momma Bird of Little Bird Marketing - Priscilla McKinney.

Priscilla joined us on the show to talk about:

- The importance of understanding the context we’re in and the biases we bring to our market research projects, as these can influence the outcomes.

- The need for us to retain our humanity at each step of the market research journey so we respect everyone’s time and contribution, which will lead to greater long-term outcomes and insights. 

- The need of having different standards for both brands and the industry when it comes to qualitative and quantitative research.

- We looked into some of the key differences between reasons as to why we need to have different standards, as well as the role that brands and the industry play in shaping and adopting these standards.

- We explored some of the challenges that we face in achieving success in this area.

- And we finished on what success looks like for those in the profession when we get these best practices in place.

Enjoy the show.

In this episode of Now that's Significant, we were joined by Karen Lynch, the new Head of Content at GreenBook.

Like Infotools, Karen has been in the research industry for 30 years, largely as a full-time qualitative researcher. She merged her two passions in joining GreenBook as Head of Content; her role is responsible for the overarching content strategy and influencing the editorial direction of GreenBook’s industry-leading blog, podcast and global events.

During the episode, we talked about:

- How mindfulness, networking, and taking the plunge are all key parts of building a meaningful career in the market research industry - or any industry for that matter.

- We looked at what it means for each of these three parts and how we can do better.

- We touched on the role of creative and lateral thinking in crafting a successful career in the insights sector.

- We looked at the role that GreenBook plays in the market research and insights industry.

- And we finished on what could be instore for us in the years to come.

Enjoy the show

In this episode of Now that's Significant, we’re joined by Aryn O’Donnell, Vice President of Corporate Services for Fieldwork Inc. During the show, we discussed the return of in-person market research, back after a long hiatus caused by the pandemic.

Topics covered in the episode include:

- What we've been missing out on over the last two and a half years

- The types of industries that are again embracing in-person research, which Fieldwork have a large focus on.

- The tactics and strategies Fieldwork used to overcome the hurdles of getting people back into the swing of in-person surveys, which touches on the evolution they witnessed of the data collection method.

- Aryn talked touched on fraud and the steps they take to minimize or remove it from their samples.

We hope you enjoy the show.

Fieldwork recruits respondents according to client specifications and host in-person, remote, or hybrid research sessions where clients uncover insights for brand and business impact.

In this episode of Now that's Significant, we were joined by Kim Short, Senior Vice President, Ipsos North America. Having worked in the industry since 1996, Kim has a passion for understanding what makes brands successful and how to drive their success to new heights with the support of communications that entertain, inform, and persuade.

We drew on her extensive experience in the industry to discuss the dreaded data shift, something many of us know a lot about after recent pandemic-ravaged years we've endured.

Throughout the episode, we discussed:

• Those dreaded data shifts and how insights teams and brands can help navigate after experiencing such a shift.
• We took time to understand what a data shift was, mentioned a few examples, including those that are internal and external shifts.
• We covered what to look for when trying to spot a data shift, especially when one has occurred but it's not reflected in your data.
• We looked at both what an organization should and shouldn’t do once they’ve spotted a shift in their data.
• And we touched on the role of technology in helping an insights team move forward with their longitudinal study.

Enjoy the show

In this episode of Now that's Significant, we were joined by Shira Horn, Executive Vice President at AMC Global, a boutique custom research firm that specializes in product launch, and all facets related to product success.

Today we talked about the critical role market research plays in helping organizations track and understand consumer behavior, especially in times of crisis.

We had an overview of the work in which AMC Global is currently engaged, including the primary research they facilitated with the help of OpinionRoute.

Shira shared some insight into the practices and methodologies they used in the study, and the reasons why they decided to make the findings of that study open to anyone who wants it.

We talked about some of the key findings from the study, such as tech adoption, beverage consumption, environmental impacts, corporate responsibility, and the gift that keeps on giving that is supply chain issues.

We touched on and shed some light on why it’s important to keep an eye on changes in consumer behavior.

And finally, we gazed into the crystal ball to see what could be instore for the market research sector in this post-pandemic world we are either in or at some unknown point in time will enter.

Enjoy the show

In this episode, we were joined by Johann Bittner from Loyalty Research Center to discuss the roll of market research in a post-cookie world.

During the show, we discussed:

- The evolution and impact of privacy in this digital age, and how organizations are needing to change both processes from a technology, a human, and a strategic perspective. 

- Life after the death of the cookie, what it’s like to operate as a marketer, as an organization when you can’t readily track who is coming to your website, ultimately, why that is a good thing too.

- We looked at what cookies are and how they were historically used.

- Johann gave us a rundown of the research and methodology LRC and Rep Data used to help organizations grapple with the shift to a cookieless operating environment, including some key findings from their research, such as AI to help put pieces of the puzzle together.

- We addressed some of the privacy concerns regarding this matter.

- Johann touched on what differentiates leaders from a technology adoption and usage perspective, in both B2B and B2C worlds.

- And, we dived into the role of primary research in this cookieless world, being able to use that research in parallel with other business data, to drive future decisions.

Enjoy the show.

In this episode of Now that's Significant, we spoke to Vignesh Krishnan, the Founder and CEO of Research Defender.

Vignesh shared some great insights into the state of fraud in the market research and insights sector. The way fraud has permeated throughout the entire world means insights teams need to be proactively investing in the quality of their market research and consumer data.

Focusing on inputs (rather than outputs) is the first piece step that the industry can take to limiting fraud, with such tools as digital fingerprinting, text analytics, etc.

We touched on the role that well-designed, shorter, and more engaging surveys plays in getting clearer, more accurate responses, not to mention better payouts.

The episode also dived into why we've seen a sharp increase in fraud lately, the potential for fraud in neuroscience, and false positives and false negatives.

Enjoy the show

Greg Stucky, Chief Research Officer at InsightsNow joins us on the show for a fascinating discussion around the pillars of successful innovation teams.

The key points included:

- The key driver that successful innovation teams use to launch and iterate products and services that resonate with the market, which ultimately comes down to focusing on the behavior that you’re wanting to nudge or disrupt. 

- Greg highlighted some of the frameworks his team uses to better predict behavior and help bring better understanding to their clients of their customers. 

- We looked at what makes InsightNow’s Implicit / Explicit testing approach, and the importance of knowing the percentages of how many people are either nudged or disrupted. 

- Greg touched on the science behind the innovation approach, specifically the implicit/explicit test. 

- And lastly, we explored some applications of the implicit/explicit test and work through their testing centre that Greg and the team are involved with at InsightsNow.

Happy listening.

This episode of Now that’s Significant, a market research podcast, welcomes Michelle Murphy Niedziela, PhD, a behavioral neuroscience expert, to discuss the potential and pitfalls of applying neuroscience to market research.

Michelle, who has worked with major brands like Johnson & Johnson and Mars Chocolate, emphasizes the importance of understanding both the benefits and limitations of consumer neuroscience to avoid falling prey to misleading claims and unrealistic expectations. 

Here are five key takeaways from the episode:

Neuroscience is not mind-reading: While neuroscience can provide valuable insights into brain processes, it cannot simply "read minds" or reveal hidden desires.

Beware of neuro-myths: Claims like "95% of decision-making is non-conscious" are often used to promote neuroscience tools but lack scientific validity.

Focus on the research question, not the tool: The choice of neuroscience technique should be driven by the specific research question, not the novelty or popularity of the tool.

Integrate neuroscience with other methods: Combining neuroscience with psychology, behavioral science, and traditional market research methods provides a more comprehensive understanding of consumer behavior.

Education is key to avoiding pitfalls: Investing in education and training for market research teams helps them ask the right questions, critically evaluate claims, and apply neuroscience tools effectively.

Tune in to this episode to gain a balanced perspective on the potential and limitations of consumer neuroscience and learn how to navigate this complex landscape effectively. Don't forget to check out other episodes of "Now That’s Significant" on all major podcast platforms!

***

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 thing

This episode of Now that's Significant is a partnership between the Research Association of New Zealand and Infotools, filmed to coincide and celebrate the ESOMAR International Market Research Day.

Geoff Lowe, Maria Tyrrell, and Murray Campbell discuss what the world would be like without market research, and in the process show the value and role it plays in our daily lives.

This episode uses the 3 of the 17 United Nations Sustainability goals, and explores how market research applies to each one.

Enjoy the show

This episode explores the topic of BI tools, and how they're not fit for purpose for extracting material business value out of market research data.

Host and guest, Michael Howard looks into the role of BI tools, and compares them with the external equivalent CI tools.

The episode covers:

> BI tools are an incredible asset to an organization and can deliver all sorts of insights that can help an organization, but, they simply can’t easily deliver the same kind of value to insights professionals that a fit-for-purpose consumer intelligence tool can.

> We dived into BI tools, exploring their rise and use in the business world, which included five reasons why BI tools aren’t fit-for-purpose for market research data.

> We touched on the workaround that broke the metaphorical camel’s back, digging into reasons why workarounds aren’t always the solution for market researchers.

> We looked at consumer intelligence tools and how they’re focused primarily on the consumer, the customer, the user. This covered CI tools being valuable in storing and processing data in a way that respects the statistical nuances of consumer and market research data.

> And we finished with the need to focus on desired outcomes then working backwards to see what path is best for your insights function to take.

Enjoy the show.

Bob Lederer, founder of RFL Communications and Chief Mentor and Partner at RSB Insights and Analytics, joins us on Now that's Significant to reflect on the journey the insights sector has undertaken so far, delving into his substantial experience in the industry.

In this episode, we cover:

> How market research and insights teams are exposed to far too many 'innovative' tech tools that aren’t put through adequate testing before being released into ways of working.

> A brief history tour of how the industry got to where we are, revisiting some important milestones along the way, such as the early adoption of the internet, which birthed online research, initial usage of mobile phones in market research.

> Innovation in and around the Millennium Bug, including what initially drove the major uptake of online research, plus the genesis of online communities.

> The positive and negative impact of VC and PE on innovation in the market research space.

> And some crystal ball time looking into the future of innovation within the sector.

Enjoy the show