These are the result of the Research Transformations awards which I was asked to organise for a special session at the NewMR Festival. These awards were initiated to celebrate the things that have had (or are having!) the most transformative impact on market research. The awards have been judged by an esteemed panel of 30 leading research innovators and thought leaders from across the industry. The full list of judges is published below and I would like to thank them all for their time and active contributions to these awards.
This is the judging survey and if you would like to CAST YOUR OWN VOTES on these awards please do, and I hope to be able to publishing the results of this open vote in the future, it may be interesting to compare the open vote with those of the judging panel:
http://qsurvey.gmisurveys.com/dc/index.html?p=jwoYlg
The big ideas that are transforming how we think about market research
The first award is for the big ideas that are transforming how we think about market research. Over the few years a number of major ideas and theme have emerged that have shaped the way we think.
1. Listening rather than asking
The emergence of social media has opened up a whole new viewpoint on how to conduct research moving away from asking questions to listening to what people are saying. What is has spawned a whole new industry monitoring and measuring and analysing what we are saying when we are not asked questions by market researcher. Listening is becoming more important than asking.
2. The hidden decision making process of our brain
We are slowly learning more and more about how our brains work and we are finding out that the way we decide things and make decisions is a lot more complicated that we think and a lot of it happens outside of our consciousness. This thought is really transforming how many market researchers think about conducting research, no longer can we rely on simply asking questions we have look further.
3. Information can be beautiful
We in the market research agency can be labelled by the outside world an boring numbers people but the arrival of inforgraphics onto the scene and new story telling technique have started to make our industry a whole lot more sexy!
This is the full list of nominations....
Wisdom of the crowds: Discovering that groups can make intelligent decisions
Information can be beautiful: The idea that data can be sexy, and there are a lot more creative ways of presenting data than a bar chart
The hidden decision making process of our brain: Leaning that our concious mind is not always in control of our decisions
Herd thinking: Understanding the power of social influence
Co-creation: We can work together to create things
Gamification: Using gaming techniques to get respondents to think more effectively
Listening rather than asking: The idea of gaining incite from the mass of communicaton happening on the internet and using observation and means of conducting research
Big data: The emerging opportunity to consolidate information from all sources of sources to undertake super analysis
Thin slicing: The idea that you can generate a lot more incite than you think from very small data sources
The communitisation of market research: We are all sharing a lot more ideas & information with things like twitter, linkedin and blogs and this is "superscalling" our industry