The overarching theme of the ESOMAR Asia Pacific conference in Macao last week was celebration, celebration across a number of areas.
Celebrating impact
Research is only valuable if it inspires action. Rebecca Lim, the head of the Singapore International Foundation, discussed the formation of the Our Better World (OBW) campaign seven years ago and the research that improved it. OBW recruited Kantar to research the national psyche and motivation behind charitable giving in five Asian countries. The research has led to better storytelling that in turn has driven increases in donations and rates of volunteering for the causes OBW profiles. This case study had won the ESOMAR Foundation’s Making a Difference competition.
The best paper award went to “The Real Story Ends in Landfill” by Crawford Hollingworth. Too often in the past, natural disasters in the Pacific motivated Australians to donate clothing and other materials. In reality, these materials are costly to distribute and overwhelm distribution networks. But donors, for a wide range of cognitive biases explored in the paper, have preferred to send goods instead of cash. Four messages were tested to find the one that would change behavior: emphasizing that unsolicited goods typically ended up in landfills convinced the most donors that they should give cash instead.
Celebrating humanity
Ashley Woods of Google Asia Pacific and Matthew Beal of Kantar TNS won the conference award for best presentation. They discussed a framework for “measuring the impact of wide-scale interventions seeking to enact socio-economic change.” In their case, it was for Google’s Internet Saathi program, which empowers millions of women across rural India by providing training on using a smartphone, training that has led to greater rates of entrepreneurship.
Celebrating technological innovations
Anne-Marie Moir of the firm Consumer Behaviour in Melbourne created a minimal viable concept that used an AI-powered voice bot to ask an open-ended question, extract key data from the answer, and then ask a meaningful follow-up question. Contrasted to what was gathered from intercept surveys, feedback was richer and more natural.
Soumya Kanti Sarkar of Absolutdata of India discussed how market research is too often perishable, with a limited shelf life. Many organizations have little or no infrastructure for disseminating and maintaining past research. For Almarai, the world’s largest vertically integrated dairy company, Absolutdata built a system using IBM Watson as its AI engine. They mapped the client’s entire knowledge database – including years of custom reports, syndicated reports, and a decade of sales/ops/finance data – with Watson then providing a natural-language interface to this data. The system provides Almarai “with a holistic view of firm-wide knowledge, moving research from perishable to ageless, from chaotic to curated, from silos to seamless access.”
Celebrating the future of Market Research
Ray Poynter shared ten conclusions from two ESOMAR reports, Global Market Research 2018 and Global Prices Study 2018. Both reports are free to ESOMAR members. He extrapolated that 50% of the global spend in the research industry in 2019 is new techniques rather than traditional quant and qual, up from 46% in 2017.
Clearly, there was much to celebrate at Asia Pacific 2019 this year!
Jeffrey Henning, PRC is the executive director of the Market Research Institute International. At ESOMAR APAC, the UGA and MRII introduced their tenth Principles Express course, “Introduction to Market Research and the Research Process.”
