Technology Driven Market Research: Your Place for Ground-breaking Tools

The Technology Driven Market Research Event is uniting research industry leaders with their big-brand counterparts as they share the ground-breaking tools and technologies being used to enable "in the moment" research to better understand consumer behavior.

Visit the webpage to find out more about this year’s conference.

Speakers include:
Market Research Industry Leaders:
• Dr. A.K. Pradeep, Chief Executive Officer, NeuroFocus, Inc.
• Chris Hobson, Chief Operating Officer, TXTEagle
• Damon Ragusa, President & CEO, Thinkvine
• David Dalka, Business Strategy Expert
• Frank Della Rosa, Managing Director, Symphonetic Insight
• Greg Heist, Vice President, Research Innovation & Technology, Gongos Research

Big-Brand Co-Presenters:
• Charlie Rader, Digital Insights Tools Leader, Procter & Gamble
• David Bernstein, CustomResearch Manager, Sam's Club
• Jeff Esposito, Public Relations Manager, VistaPrint
• Lisa Kim, Consumer Insights, Product Innovation Team, Samsung Electronics
• Olga Patel, Associate Director, Nestle

It's an exciting time to be a researcher as these technologies open the door to a whole new world of research opportunity. Download the brochure to find out more about the speakers and presenters at this year’s conference.

Join us this May 2-3, 2011; in Chicago at the Technology Driven Market Research Event as we discuss, explore and debate the latest technologies and the resulting impact they are having on the market research industry. As a reader of The Market Research Event Blog, we’re offering you an exclusive discount of 15% off the standard price when using discount code TDMR11Blog. Register here. If you have any questions about this event, feel free to contact Jennifer Pereira at jpereira@iirusa.com.

CALL FOR PRESENTERS: The Market Research Event 2011

CALL FOR PRESENTERS:

The Market Research Event 2011
November 7-9, 2011

From: Krista Vazquez
Re: The Market Research Event 2011
Event Date: November 7-9, 2011
Location: The Peabody Orlando, Orlando, Florida

Submissions due by Friday, February 18, 2011

NOTE: Presenters are accepted on a rolling basis so early submissions are encouraged.

About TMRE
The Market Research Event is all about the business value of market research. With more than 125 sessions and 150 speakers, it is by far the most comprehensive market research conference in the world. Multiple tracks and symposia allow participants to truly customize their experience based on their unique learning goals. New for 2011: More global perspectives promise to showcase the most valuable case studies and industry innovation from around the world.

Presenter Qualifications
TMRE is seeking client side executives to join the speaker faculty. Speakers can come from any department within the organization. Content must be original and not have already been presented at this or any other industry conference.

The Audience
In 2010, TMRE drew close to 1000 participants with more than 60% representing client side companies from all major industries including: CPG, Media & Entertainment, Finance & Insurance, Travel & Tourism, Durable Goods, Pharmaceutical & Healthcare, Retail, Energy & Utilities, Telecommunications, Technology, & Automotive and more.

Attendees have backgrounds in market research, consumer insights, marketing, intelligence, brand insights, marketing analytics, R&D, product development, innovation, customer experience, strategic planning, shopper insights, advertising and customer experience among other related areas.

Suggested Topic Areas
1. Social Media & Market Research
2. Shopper Insights
3. Consumer Trends
4. Segmentation
5. Biometrics & Neuroscience
6. Mobile Research
7. Ad & Media Research
8. MR Leadership & Strategy
9. Marketing & Brand Insights
10. Insight driven Innovation & Product Development
11. Business to Business Research
12. Data Analytics & Measurement
13. Innovation in Tools & Techniques
14. Strategic Global Expansion
15. BRIC

We are also happy to consider topics not listed here that you feel would add value and be appropriate for the audience.

Submission Guidelines Past Speakers of 2010 Those who wish to be considered for the TMRE speaker faculty should send the following via email to Krista Vazquez, Conference Director at kvazquez@iirusa.com no later than Friday, February 18, 2011:
1. Bio of proposed speaker
2. Benefit oriented title of session
3. Summary of session (no more than 150 words)
4. Full contact details for speaker including name, title, company, email, phone and mail

If your submission is selected, portions of your bio and summary will be used to promote your participation. In an effort to ensure the utmost quality, all final presentations will be subject to review by our content review board one month prior to the event.

Past Speakers from 2010
Bill Hoffman, SVP, Consumer Insights Best Buy, Susan Wagner, VP, Global Strategic Insights, Johnson & Johnson, Stan Turek, VP Customer Strategy & Shopper Insights, PepsiCo, Dan Zigmond, Technical Lead & Manager, Ad Quality & Pricing Group, Google TV, Joel Aach, VP Consumer Insights, Darden Restaurants, Mike Katz, Princial User Experience Researcher, eBay, Troy Stevenson, VP, Client Loyalty & Consumer Insight, Barry Blyn, VP, Consumer Insights, ESPN

Benefits to speakers
Each speaker receives the following:
1. Free pass to the event including access to all pre-conference symposia and workshops
2. Continental breakfast and lunch
3. Admittance to exclusive speaker networking activities
4. Unique discount code entitling anyone who uses it to 20% off the standard conference rate

Special notices to market research firms, vendors and solutions providers
This call is limited to client side presenters. If you are a vendor, consultant, solution provider, or technology provider and would like to speak at TMRE, please contact Jon Saxe at jsaxe@iirusa.com or 646-895-7467 or Sarene Yablonsky at syablonsky@iirusa.com or 646-895-7474.

A Cool Research Methodology That I Predict You Will Use

Written by: Roxana Strohmenger, Forrester Research


As my colleagues in our team can attest, I get giddy when I talk about all the cool, emerging, and innovative methods that market research professionals can use — whether it be how biometric techniques helped the Campbell Soup Company understand how consumers respond to marketing and advertising in order to redesign its soup-can logo, or when Nokia used mobile research methods as a way to understand what emotional constructs influence a consumer’s “love and admiration” for a brand. All in all, it is great to see technology starting to make a significant impact on how we collect richer insights about consumers.

To help market research professionals understand what innovative research techniques are out there, I am launching a report series this year that will cover some of these innovative methods. To kick off the series, I have focused on prediction markets. Why? Because I see this extremely underutilized method as a valuable tool in the long, expensive, and arduous process of product and concept testing.

Companies are faced with the following daunting facts:

• - Over 25,000 new consumer products skus are introduced annually in North America with only half of these new product launches considered successful at launch.
• - For every seven product ideas that are created, typically only one succeeds in the market.
• - An estimated 46% of all resources allocated to product development and commercialization is spent on products that are cancelled or that fail to yield an adequate financial return.

Despite all the time and money spent discovering and flushing out new product ideas, there really is no way, using methods like monadic testing, to predict whether the product is going to succeed in the marketplace. But, what if there is a way to predict the future and determine which ideas or products will succeed or fail? I posit that using a prediction market methodology can accomplish this task.

A prediction market is a speculative market that harnesses the power of the “wisdom of the crowds” for the purpose of making predictions. This concept was addressed in James Surowiecki’s 2004 book entitled The Wisdom of Crowds, where he presented numerous case examples of how a diverse group of independently thinking individuals is able to make decisions and predictions better than individuals in isolation or even than experts. The beauty of this method is that it is not relying on asking individuals to make predictions about what they will do in the future but rather what they think other people will do. Research has shown that we are unreliable witnesses to our own motivations. However, as social animals, we are actually very good at noticing what other people are doing, sensing why they might be doing it, and predicting what they will do. Therefore, a crowd can successfully predict the future and ― for a market research professional’s purposes ― can predict which products will do well and which will fail in the marketplace.

Prediction markets have typically been used during the discovery stage, when market researchers are ascertaining which ideas should continue on for extensive research and development. Rather than spending significant amounts of time and money on a target population using monadic testing for each idea put forward, researchers instead use prediction markets to quickly and inexpensively determine which idea is predicted to be the winning concept and then run that concept through the product development life cycle. When comparing against findings from monadic testing, companies that have used prediction markets have repeatedly found that the results are exactly the same in terms of what is deemed the winning concept. And instead of taking several weeks and paying significant amounts of money for these studies, they have reduced the research process down to several days and reduced their costs by the order of 50%. This is definitely a methodology that should become a staple of any market research professional’s tool kit.

Stay tuned for my report, which will focus on the appropriate time to use prediction markets, how to incorporate them into your traditional research mix, and which vendors can help. And, please drop me a line― or in the comments, of course ― if you’d like to give me your take on using prediction markets or any other type of innovative research method.

Also, if you are like me and want to hear more about using innovative research methods, take a look at this conference: Technology Driven Market Research Event. The theme for the conference is “Capture insights in real time; Measure meaningful chatter; and Showcase breakthrough methodologies.” As a guest blogger for this event, I look forward to hearing great case examples on exactly how companies have used these ground-breaking tools and technologies and, most importantly, how they have incorporated these new techniques with their traditional research methods. Be on the lookout on my blog and Twitter account where I will be providing a summary and my perspective on the key takeaways from some of the presentations.

This blog is co-posted with Forrester's For Market Researcher Professionals Blog.

The Market Research Event Presents...The Technology Driven Market Research Event

The producers of The Market Research Event invite you to join the next generation of revolutionary speakers and remarkable tools in market research.

The Technology Driven Market Research Event focuses on presenting ground-breaking tools and technologies that are being used NOW and those on the horizon. Hear from the leaders in the market research industry as they share how these technologies are enabling "in the moment" research to more clearly understand consumer behavior.

Featured sessions:
Avatar 3D Comes to the Store Aisle
- Dr. A.K. Pradeep, Chief Executive Officer, Neurofocus, Inc.

Twitter as a Research Tool?
- Scott Centurino, CEO, Crimson Hexagon & Colin Moffett, Senior Vice President, Social Impact Strategies, Weber Shandwick Digital Communications

The Future of Market Research in 2015
- Merrill Dubrow, President & CEO, M/A/R/C Research

The State of the Industry
- Leonard Murphy, CEO, BrandScan 360

Visit the webpage to find out more about this event:
http://bit.ly/hKeBg4

Download the brochure for the full agenda and session descriptions:
http://bit.ly/hcgmcY