Wednesday at Congress has the potential to be a subdued affair, the morning after the gala dinner and the traditional after-party can sometimes lead to a few sore heads. But if there were a few delegates worse for wear this morning it was well hidden and ESOMAR has saved some of the best papers until last with the thread in the conference room, Emerging Approaches, looking at some of the new and exciting examples of research and the closing keynote, infographic specialist David McCandless of Information is Beautiful.
[expand title=” Emerging Approaches – Elias Veris, Betty Adamou and Erika Harriford-McLaren “]
Elias Veris
The rate of mobile device (phones, smartphones, tablets,…) is accelerating quickly. There are 5.2 billion cellphone subscriptions, and 3.4 billion cameraphones on this earth, and 90% of people always have their phone within arms-length. If a phone gets stolen, the theft gets reported within the hour on average, while that is about a day for a stolen wallet.
I guess most of us know how large the impact is of this new trend towards mobility, and quite a few of us have tried to apply it for research too.
What AJ Johnson of Ipsos MORI and Rolfe Swinton of Lumi Mobile argue in their speech, Developing second generation mobile research techniques, is that we’ve moved on to mobile research 2.0 right now. Where 1.0 is the classical online research approach applied to a smaller screen, 2.0 is really about the key benefits of the phone. They show a couple of case studies that are both entertaining for respondents and capitalise on the key benefits of phones: measurement in the moment, at the point of experience, rich data (photo & video) and tracking of contextual variables like location.
They also put down a vision on mobile 3.0, moving more towards observing and less to asking questions. Some key opportunities they see:
1. Tracking behavior on phone: capturing texts, calls, surfing behavior…
2. Reading emotional facial reactions to real-life environment with the frontcam of the phone
3. Biometric tracking added into mobile devices, capitalising on the quantified self movement
4. Passive listening via the microphone of the phone (tracking ads with audio signatures for instance)
While I agree that these are very interesting future possibilities, I see more in involving people better through the mobile channel. As the current 2.0 approach shows, people can get a fun and personal experience in helping brands making decisions, that is still closely tied into the natural environment. A behavioural tracking approach can complement this 2.0 way of doing things, but the key will still be consumer involvement and co-creation.
Betty Adamou
Jon Puleston at GMI has been part of the unsaid “market researchers who ‘know’ gamification” group for quite some time and it was great to see the fruits of his labour in his presentation, The Game Experiments.
Jon showed us how even simply wording questions differently can encourage respondents to answer more honestly, and more instinctively. Asking questions in this more colloquial fashion seems gives the survey a more common ‘voice’ which respondents can relate to. They also make answering questions (task) and turn them into something fun to do (quests). This makes respondents more engaged; “I would usually get bored and leave the survey half way through but this was fun”. So instead of wording a question like ‘name 5 brands you associate with food’ (for example) GMI’s recommendation is to perhaps ask ‘I bet you can’t name 5 brands in 1 minute associated with food’. By doing this you would have challenged the respondent and the respondent’s instinct (now in a hot state and watching the timer run out) is to rise to that challenge.
Jon and Deborah also spoke about adding ‘rules’ to the question which make it more game-like and give the survey a competitive feel. Another example which I am taking from their advice: “Tell us about an experience relating to brand X, but you can’t do X or Y.”
The Twitterati present at Congress seemed to have eagerly followed this talk as well. @iamrobertbain seemed refreshed that this gamification talk didn’t reference loud aesthetics saying that their “…approach to gamification is more about clever questions than bright colours and flashy tech”.
They did forewarn us at the end that with any new methodology it’s open to misuse and misinterpretation which is why those who do bandy around gamification need to be careful I that they fully educate their Clients on the variations of it and what it can be in it’s true form in terms of Research.
I have met with Jon previously and we discussed Gamification which is of course an area of interest for me too and it’s great to see his enthusiasm for the subject and the work they’ve done at GMI offer such good feedback from their respondents.
Erika Harriford McLaren
What can tobacco addiction teach us about consumer decision making? Was the question being asked by Feed Back Profile and Neurosketch of Colombia
The brain is the organ of destiny –and leads us to behave and understand what’s going on. As researchers we must remember that consumer’s choices can happen in a very fast and automatic manner and forecasting and reward are always involved in how we weight choices.
Smoking is a constricted choice that alters decisions, so the question this presentation covered was whether anti-tobacco advertising is effective? Using EEG, Facial expressions analysis and eye tracking… from the brain readings, it was found that smokers are not very convinced about it – and thus we may be wasting our time and funding on these projects.
In the end, it’s not so much how we think or feel about products but about how we regulate anxiety in our brains and we should be studying that. Remember, our point of reference is the brain. If it changes so do our decisions.
Elias Veris
We think less than we think we think. A phrase beautifully illustrated by Orlando Wood in his talk about behavioural economics, Behaving Economically with the truth, where he told us that the judgment of judges is mostly influenced not by the things they hear in the trial, but by the food breaks they have. Also, the wine we buy might be influenced by the music we hear in the supermarket; French music increases French wine purchases, and German music German wine.
Where he moved beyond the obvious in his speech, is when he started talking about a case they did where they incorporated principles from behavioural economics. They studied binge drinking (and judging by last night’s party, a lot of us have a keen interest in this topic) in UK bars, where they asked participants to observe their environment in different ways. Using detective personas, they primed people to look for different types of clues; in the social environment, in the local environment, individual factors,…
One striking example: when asking for a softdrink in a UK pub, you’ll most probably get the question “did you want gin or vodka with that”? Small nudges in the environment that easily trick you into drinking more alcohol than anticipated. The same kind of nudges can be used to discourage heavy drinking. What about encouraging people to sit down, so they don’t have to hold a cold heavy glass in their hands? They’ll drink slower. Or increasing the salience of softdrinks maybe?
It made me wonder again: what kinds of these small tricks are we unwillingly exposing our participants to? How much effect does this have on our data quality in the end?
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David McCandless, founder and creator of Information is Beautiful, was our final keynote of Congress 2011, and rather fittingly addressed data presentation and use of graphic design elements in order to build stories out of figures. We grabbed for a few minutes after to fire a few questions at him.
ESOMAR Congress 2011 is over. We went from communicating better with our clients, to having real impact on what they do. We learned about behavioural economics, and that respondent engagement can be boosted through gamification, which might also have an effect on data quality. We were stunned by how teams are motivated and how data can be visualised.
I for one, am inspired to get going again for another year of making market research better.
Everybody does his 2%, right? Except for the people at ESOMAR that I’ve seen running around like crazy persons in the last couple of days. They do their 200%, twice.
Hope to see you next year!
Elias
