Www.greenbook.org/PDFs/GRIT-S11-Full.pdf. Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research. Research Firms on the Future of Research Technology. Interview with Brian Singh of Zinc Research. Brian Singh is the Managing Director of Zinc Research, an interesting research company based in Calgary in Canada, the sponsors of the NewMR ‘Listening is the New Asking’ event being held on March 8. For more information about the event click HERE This interview was conducted as part of the build-up to the ‘Listening is the New Asking’ event, but the interview ranges over a much wider area, giving some insight into Brian’s perspectives on life and research. Many years ago a British politician called Denis Healy said that all good politicians have a good hinterland, I think that is also true of good market researchers and if you listen to the interview below you will appreciate what a wide and varied hinterland Brian has and perhaps begin to understand how it might help inform the research he conducts.
Trends And Challenges In Social Market Research. Has an inflammatory tweet about your brand ever caused a panic in your company’s executive ranks? Has your market research department ever attempted to put into context how representative that one tweet might (or might not) be of your total market? For many companies we work with, the answer to the first question is yes. The answer to the second question is more likely to be “I don’t know.” Well, the time has come for market researchers to understand the implications of social technologies for their role. After many months of talking up my social market research report on this blog, via Twitter, and with many vendors and clients, my report is now Web live!
It’s aptly entitled “How Can Market Researchers Get Social?” , as this was the core question I began asking myself at the very end of last year when I kicked off this project. And we’ve identified three main trends in how market researchers are using social technologies right now: To MROC Or Not To MROC -- That's The Question. I was offline for two days this week, and during that time a lively debate had started on the term MROC (market research online community) and the definition of what an MROC is. Jeffrey Henning from Vovici wrote a blog post in which he presented a segmentation that positions different types of communities in a matrix graphic, based on open versus closed and long term versus short term. In our opinion, this is actually a useful segmentation of different types of online qualitative research techniques that could be categorized as different ways of doing social MR.
However, each of these examples is on different parts of the spectrum of what a community is. From a research standpoint, community bonds strengthen as engagement from the research participants and commitment from the researcher increase. That’s as far as I’ll go in a blog entry on defining what a community is. We’re interested to see what others in the space have to say on this hot topic. Will Web 2.0 Transform Market Research? MROC = Market-Research Online Community. The Death Of Market Research. Hopefully this title got your attention. Why, you may ask, am I writing about the death of the very industry that I’ve staked my profession (and my paycheck) on? Well, as the saying goes, with every door that closes, a new one opens, and there is a new door opening for market research. I’m kicking off a new Forrester Big Idea report on the future of the MR function at client-side companies.
As the name implies, this initial report will lay out Forrester’s overall thinking on where MR is headed, and it will serve as a basis for a new stream of research our team will be tackling over the next 12 to 24 months. The market research role is changing rapidly. So market researchers are struggling to reclaim their relevance in a time when data is a commodity, insights are power, and disparate sources of information are producing different versions of the truth. This report, and the research that follows it, will take a good look at what the insights department of the future will look like. MR Lessons Learned From Gap’s Logo Misfire. Last week Gap unveiled a new logo on its Web properties, including its Facebook page. This move immediately unleashed a fury of traffic and comments on Facebook, Twitter, and design blogs, with sentiment ranging from “hideous” to “who cares?” In reaction to the momentum behind the negative comments, it didn’t take long for Gap to backpedal, first by trying to hold a competition to crowdsource a new logo.
This drew even more ire from the design community, and — as my colleague Doug Williams writes — was exactly the wrong way to go about a crowdsourcing project. So, at the end of the day, Gap scrapped it all and restored its old logo to its Facebook page, its eCommerce site, etc. This is a fascinating story on so many levels, and overall it demonstrates some serious misjudgment of how the logo and Gap’s strategy for rolling it out would be received by the company’s followers and the social media world in general. Online Research Communities by Type.