The Future Place Blog

Google show Philip Larkin was right about sex

In 1974 UK poet Philip Larkin published "This Be The Verse" which contained the poem Annus Mirablis, with the oft quoted first verse:

    Sexual intercourse began
    In nineteen sixty-three
    (which was rather late for me) -
    Between the end of the Chatterley ban
    And the Beatles' first LP.

Putting the word Sex into Google Ngram shows how the frequency of the word in books scanned by Google, for the period 1900 to 2000 tool off in the mid-sixties.

Marriage was added as a reference point.

We are bad at guessing what will make us happy - see why

Below are two great TED videos which illustrate that the pursuit of happiness is more counter-intuitive than you might expect.

In the first one Barry Schwartz talks about how the more choices we have the less happy we are.

In the second Dan Gilbert shows how bad and good events do not result in different outcomes, in terms of happiness, watch out for the comparison between winning the lottery and becoming a paraplegic. 

 

 

For me, one of the interesting things that is that both presentations expose some of the fundamental problems of Western capitalist society. Like me, neither of the presenters seems to have a better system to offer, but they are aware that the current system stinks.

Some thoughts on the future of NewMR.org

This post is quick update on various things happening at NewMR.org and our plans for the immediate future.

Events
We are looking to have an online event most months, with sessions for different time-zones, these allow topics to be covered in depth and to achieve subject focus. This means at any one moment we tend to be involved in two events, the planning of one and the implementation of the other. At the moment the two current events are:

Ethnography, an online event that will take place on May 25^th, you can find out more and register at the NewMR.org website.

New Approaches to Presenting Data – Calls for synopses still open! This event will be held on June 23^rd and will look for the best thinking in how to present data and is likely to produce some contentious recommendations, you can find out more and register at the NewMR.org Website.

Future Events, we are looking for suggestions for future subject events and we are looking forward to releasing more information about this year’s Festival of NewMR shortly.

Funding
NewMR has been playing with a number of innovations with respect to covering its costs. The two most interesting ones are the donate model for events and the Dutch Auction for sponsorship – both have proved to be useful and interesting.

The donate model is organized so that attendees to the Virtual Events are asked to pay what they think it is worth. This has resulted in a very wide range of payments. Some people have attended for free, but hopefully they will soon start to see the value, whilst others have been happy to pay, with some being very generous.

The Dutch Auction is used to arrive at a price for the sponsorship of an event. The initial price is announced and after a period of time, if the package has not been bought, the price starts to reduce by £100 a day. We have run this system twice and twice Brian Singh at Zinc Research has bought the package at a point presumably felt was optimum. We will continue to experiment with this for the topic events.

Funding and the Festival of NewMR
The Festival is much more expensive to produce than the events, so the funding arrangements will be more complex, and we will be looking for sponsors and a slightly more structured way of charging for tickets.

 

Is social media just an old person’s thing?

For the last few years the trend seems to have been to assume that young people are driving the social media change and the old folk (people over 21) need to get with the programme or be left behind, e.g. Eric Qualman’s Socialnomics. But that perception may be beginning to unravel, perhaps social media is mainly an older person’s thing?

The first indication that there may be a major age difference in social media was Twitter, as the popularity of Twitter grew so did the realisation that most of the users were older, well over 21. Even today, Twitter remains much less popular with the under 21s.

I have recently been looking into the uses universities could make of social media and it has become very clear that whilst there are opportunities, there are two major hurdles.

1)      In terms of popular social media platforms like Facebook (nearly all the students have a Facebook page), most of the students wanted a clear demarcation between social and academic life.

2)      Most of the leading edge of social media, such as FourSquare, Quora, and Wikis are much less popular with young people.

As an example of the difference, and as a result of doing the research into the use universities could make of social media, I conducted a one-off non-representative study. I joined Foursquare as did my 19 year-old undergraduate son. My son has 466 friends on Facebook, but only two of his friends were already on Foursquare. I have fewer friends, 428 in total, but 38 of them were already on Foursquare – not representative, but exactly in line with what I have been hearing during my research. [Quick update, my 20 year old undergraduate son just did the same exercise, he has 434 Facebook friends, and just 5 of them were on FourSquare.]

Talking to young people I get the impression that: they are using Facebook (for fun), they are messaging, and they are texting, but in most other areas of social media 18-21 year olds appear to be using less social media and to be less keen on social media than 28-31 year old professionals, and less than 38-41 year olds professionals. Perhaps they are having too much fun to be checking in, collaborating, and co-creating.

 

Using Twitter to Filter your Information Flow

Many non-users of Twitter say that one of the reasons they don’t use it is because they do not have the time. But, used properly Twitter can reduce the time you spend watching the news, reading newspapers/magazines/journals, and following blogs and news feeds.

The principle to using Twiter to reduce the time you spend sifting through media is to use it as a filter to the world. If you follow the right people and hash tags, anything that is worth reading is going to appear in the stream of tweets you follow, and the more important it is, the more often it will appear. The corollary being that if it wasn’t tweeted/retweeted then it was not really interesting/useful.

The key to using Twitter this way is to use a tool such as TweetDeck to follow different leads, for example key people, key hashtags, and key topics. I follow about 10 streams via TweetDeck and I probably look at TweetDeck for about 5 minutes every hour (every working/waking hour) which keeps me in touch with 90% of what I need to know. I have TweetDeck on my main pc, my netbook, and my iPhone so it is always there if I want it.

Last Friday I saw a presentation from Will Goodhand from BrainJuicer about their Digividuals project, and interestingly they were using Twitter as the ‘dashbord’ for their bots to report their findings. This is another  indication that Twitter (or something like it) could be the information filter of the future.

This method of using Twitter to reduce the effort required to stay on top of things is part of a project we are looking at called the Efficient Exec.

Do clients need surveys? Do they want market research?

Last year at the UK’s MRS Conference I suggested that there would not be any market research surveys in twenty years. Over the past year this topic seems to have been picked up by a wide range of speakers and most recently we have seen a number of clients, such as P&G criticising the research industry for being too wedded to surveys. However, I think the debate is too one dimensional and tends to avoid making the point that the problem is largely the fault of the research buyers.

My starting position is that nobody ‘wants’ to do market research, people want to have information about markets that will help them make better decisions (in the same way that nobody wants drills, they want holes in walls). Market research is what people do when there isn’t a better, cheaper, faster alternative. Similarly, within market research surveys should be what we do when there isn’t a better, cheaper, faster alternative.

 If we were to go back twenty years then the number of occasions where a representative, quantitative survey was the best answer to a problem was large. However, over the last twenty years, and particularly over the last ten, the world has moved on. For example, online access panels are not representative but they are cheaper and faster and have been deemed good enough. More recently listening research has begun to tap into customer conversations, DIY options are beginning to challenge supplier models, and online research communities (MROCs) are providing qualitative answers that often outperform quantitative (e.g. survey based) methods.

 I see a big divide opening up in research between things you can learn by just listening, e.g. through social media monitoring, and those that require questions (this second point could also be worded as those things that require conversations). I suspect that in the future, much of customer satisfaction research, along with some brand and advertising tracking, will be achieved via ‘listening’ and/or ‘automated tracking’ techniques (and by automated tracking I mean people allowing their phone, browsing record, credit cards, and social media conversations to be tracked by software). However, fields such as product innovation, concept testing, motivational research, and ad testing will require questions/conversations. Within the research that will require questions we will see a variety of techniques such as MROCs, community panels, purposeful conversations *, along with traditional questioning approaches such as focus groups, depth interviews, and of course surveys**.

Which brings me back to the growing chorus of people like P&G and Coca-Cola complaining that market researchers are too fixated on surveys. However, researchers are offering a wide variety of techniques, including qual, MROCs, ethnography, semiotics, predictive markets, social media listening and much more. Indeed, the whole NewMR revolution in techniques and approaches means that clients have never had such a range of techniques to choose from. However, clients continue to spend about 80% of their budget on surveys. If there is a problem with too much market research being based on surveys then surely the problem mostly lies with the research buyers who insist on buying surveys (and who keep asking for longer surveys and whose input usually makes surveys more boring and less relevant).

 

I put two markers in the text above to highlight specific points further

* purposeful conversations relates to seeding a conversation with something you want to know, just as I do when I post a question in the LinkedIn AMSRS discussion group. I think brands will make much greater use of this in the future, for example by monitoring social media and asking questions to clarify issues or taking initiatives (such as competitions) in order to elicit responses. Most of the time people are not talking about you or your brand and in order to learn from conversations brands will need to create topics, perhaps incentivising those discussions.

 ** Surveys will need to change. The 30 and 40 minute survey is (in the future) only going to be asked to professional respondents and will need to fit a research situation where the considered and well rewarded responses of a professional respondent are useful, which may include audit type surveys. However, I think that most surveys will become much more focused on open-ended responses. For example, a customer satisfaction study for a service may be reduced to three questions, a closed scale asking degree of satisfaction, followed by two open-ends, ‘What did you like?’ and ‘What didn’t you like?’ The advances in text analytics will soon allow these sorts of surveys, i.e. ones based on open-ended responses, to be processed.

 

Reviewing Earlier Posts

I was searching for something earlier today (looking for my post about No Surveys in Twenty Years from March 2010) and I had to go back through old blog posts to find it and several items caught my eye from previous Aprils. I enjoyed reviewing them and I hope you will too.

From April 2010
What is ethical market research?

Are MROCs essentially qual or quant, and does it matter?

How big will e-books be, how quickly?

From April 2009
The history and the challenge of Market Research (my post is just a link to Paul Schumann’s presentation, useful reference slides on the history of MR).

Spuriously accurate pessimism (reflections on why people should not show too many decimals in presentations)

From April 2008
The Barbarians Are At The Gate! (A review of the navel gazing about online panels and some predictions about social media research).

Insight into Facebook and UK Society (Some early insights into why we needed to pay attention to Facebook).

From April 2007
Identifying the lead (a post about how we need to find the key element in a story to create a good lead for the report)

Mobile only households (pointing out that even in early 2007 there was rapid growth in the number of homes without a landline and spelling out the implications for CATI).

The Future Place blog only started in June 2006, so I will not be reviewing 2006 for a couple more months.

 

My paper on discourse analysis

Over the past few months my attention has been increasingly drawn towards Discourse Analysis and its potential in the context of market research.

Last Friday at the Merlien Qualitative Research Conference in Malta I presented a paper titled “Using Discourse Analysis to Fuel Brand Strategies”. The paper is very much ‘work in progress’ but you are welcome to download a copy of the paper in its current form from SlideShare.

 

The Efficient Exec Webinar

One of our current projects is looking at how to unlock the benefits of social media for the Efficient Exec, a busy person who does not wish to become a social media fan. You can read a post about it HERE and below you can see the video of our first webinar on the topic (it is so beta the project was still called Busy Exec’s Guide – before we found that the name was already in use) - note the video is about 48 minutes long.

For those of you attending the MRSS Conference in Singapore you will be able to see the latest version of the material on the Efficient Exec presented by Sue York as part of her half-day workshop on social media.

What are your thoughts and suggestions on the Effective Exec project?

 

Are Europe and North America ignoring MR in Asia Pacific?

I have just returned from the ESOMAR APAC conference in Melbourne, a well organised, stimulating, well-attended conference. I have attended something like six of the last ten ESOMAR APAC’s and I have noted some interesting developments.

The first trend is the rise of China within the region. Most of us are aware of the statistics that point out that China is the rising economic giant, a combination of its population size and the speed of its economic growth, but experiencing the growing impact, confidence, and contributions of Chinese delegates at ESOMAR’s APAC Conferences brings this home in a very real way.  The common references to that powerful quartet the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) probably distracts our attention from the degree to which China might soon be outstripping everybody other the US (and will overtake the US in a growing number of key areas over the next four years). The other BRICs are all interesting, especially India, but I do not think that they are anything like as significant to the world as China.

The second trend is the growth in local (i.e. Asia/Pacific) innovation, sometimes focused on ideas developed from regional/unique perspectives, others reflecting the growing strength of the region. Ten years ago, most ideas in the region originated from North America and Europe. That pattern is changing. Ten years ago speakers from Europe and North America were almost automatically assumed to be relevant experts, now they are increasingly viewed sceptically, having to prove that what they have to say is relevant to Asia Pacific.

The third trend is the declining role and attendance of Europeans and North Americans at APAC Conferences, just at the time when the importance of Asia Pacific is set to grow rapidly. I make attending events in Asia Pacific a priority, not because I think I have information to take there from Europe, but because I want to learn from this dynamic and exciting arena.

However, not everything is rosy in the world of Asia Pacific Conferences. The two biggest  issues are cost and  the English language. The cost of attending an ESOMAR APAC Conference, especially in a location like Australia, is equivalent to the entire year’s salary for some researchers in the less wealthy countries in Asia Pacific, this makes it hard to get a broad base of attendees and makes it even harder to get young researchers to attend.

The second problem is the English language, which is both assists and impedes progress. The upside is that English is the common language of market research in Asia Pacific and facilitates common learning and discussion. However, English also confers a major advantage on native speakers, for example Australians, and this language skill is often overlaid on cultural  differences. The ‘typical’ ‘Anglos’ (e.g. North America, UK, Australia, New Zealand) are willing to engage in robust debate, advancing their claims, and taking criticisms as part of the process. Would-be speakers from some of the other cultures in Asia Pacific are less assertive, less happy with shouting about their own benefits, and less inured to criticism (note this is a generalisation, I believe it to be true of many speakers from Japan, but much less true of many of the presenters I am familiar with from India).

My feeling is that ESOMAR needs to find ways of tackling the cost issues, helping people from lower income situations to be able to attend. I also think that there needs to be a process of ensuring that a certain proportion of the speakers are not ‘Anglos’. Perhaps the answer to part of both of these issues might be a combination of technology (e.g. remote attendance) and organising local events which would act as feeder events, with the ‘winning’ presentation from a feeder event being funded to attend the main ESOMAR APAC event. I think that it would also help if ESOMAR APAC had a larger number of presentations, perhaps by adding an informal extra day to the Conference, with a much, much lower cost, perhaps building on the barcamp model?

Next year the ESOMAR event will be in Shanghai and I would suggest that anybody who wants to find out more about the fastest growing region and the next economic giant should be there.