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Transforming Research, Step 1: Integrating Insights

Yesterday's ARF Industry Leader Forum "Transforming Research: Are You Listening?" had many great insights which I'll blog over the next hours and days. The first big theme was integrating insights: taking data from various sources and interpreting them together to get a more coherent picture of the consumer and the market.

In one of the first morning sessions, General Mills' VP Consumer Insights, Gayle Fuguitt, described the evolution she is leading her group through: from consumer research, to consumer insights and ultimately to "integrated insights". I really like this idea. Research should be shedding light on consumer wants, needs, motivations, and influences. It shouldn't matter whether the data comes from a traditional survey, social media analysis or, as talked about in a later panel, search terms, web analytics, or TV set top box data or any other source. If it helps a brand gain a better insight into its audience, "market research" should be all over it.

The flip side of this is the statement: "We already have more data than we know what to do with." I heard this in the workshop I conducted in the afternoon and is a complaint I often hear from Cymfony prospects and clients.

Plenty of data, but a dearth of insights. Many attendees believe that if instead of viewing these reports individually they were viewed in a more integrated fashion, there would be greater insights and the value of this research would increase dramatically.

This was music to my ears! (Disclosure: here comes a plug!) Last month I led a webinar with my TNS colleage Jeni Chapman. We used a variety of data and research techniques to gain a better understanding of the booming HDTV marketing. We found that looking at market share, brand equity, brand awareness and social media discussions provided a much richer understanding of the dynamics driving the market than any one or two of the sources alone. ARF members can view the recording of the webcast in the My ARF section of the website.

Other idea/questions/issues struck me and I'll try to address those in posts over the next few days: cutting the fat, questioning the data, what to do with the data that doesn't fit, and what skills are needed.

Posted by Jim Nail on October 30, 2008 at 04:58 PM | Email this post Permalink
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Comments

Interesting news, thanks for posting
Ivan, web-impress.com

Posted by: Ivan, Web-Impress | Nov 14, 2008 3:58:23 AM

Hi Jim--
The meeting was really successful thanks to you and jeni adding to the chemistry. all agreed that we must embrace the full listening spectrum, dropping filters as a culture but learning to separate noise from signal is not a well developed skill yet among researchers. My favorite part was when Joel Benenson, obama's pollster talked about how norms were meaningless to the situation he was in so he had to reinvent research!

Posted by: Joel Rubinson | Oct 31, 2008 8:39:24 PM

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