By Annie Pettit,
The warm fuzzy from attending the national conference in your home country simply can’t be beat. I just returned from Canada’s MRIA conference, this year held in Montreal, and was not disappointed. My notebook ended up with more than 7 lightbulbs but I’m sure you’ll enjoy these:
- Don’t do what you love: This counter-intuitive career advice comes to us from Ray Poynter of Vision Critical. If you’re just beginning your career, find a good, solid career in which to apply the thing you love. For instance, if you love politics, don’t become a politician because there will always be someone else who is much better at it than you. Become a researcher who then specializes in politics, and you have a much greater chance of standing out in the crowd. You will be the go-to person, the star of that show.
- Loyalty isn’t logical: Many researchers struggle to define brand loyalty. Does it mean you never purchase a competitive brand? What about 8 out of 10 of the last purchases? Once again, Ray Poynter is right on the money. Brand loyalty is what we do when, against all logic, we still purchase a brand. When it costs more, is less convenient to find, and isn’t quite the colour you you would normally get, you still buy it. That’s brand loyalty.
- Follow those eyes: Many of us have seen the research showing that people love to look at faces in ads. But do you want your viewers staring at the face in the ad or staring at the product in the ad? Diana Lucaci, from True Impact, used neuroscience techniques to demonstrate that people will follow the gaze of a face in an ad. Thus, to take full advantage of this natural human bias, make sure the face your ad is looking towards the product.
- AND not OR: In the People as Proxy panel, we heard a statement that applies to pretty much everything in market research. I am a quant researcher who loves well-designed, clearly written, fun questionnaires. I haven’t run a focus group in over ten years. But research is not about questionnaires OR focus groups. It’s questionnaires AND focus groups. Focus groups AND eye-tracking. Eye-tracking AND big data. Let’s stop putting up virtual walls and start building doors and windows.
- Think first, choose slides second: Thierry Bransi of Metro Richelieu Inc, reminded me why automation is not always a good thing. Remember the good old days when you had to calculate statistics by hand after checking the formula in a textbook? Ok, maybe not. But, given the extraordinary amount of time that took, researchers had to think carefully about exactly which tests were necessary so as to use their time most efficiently. Nowadays, we dump an entire dataset into tabulation software and it spits out 5000 tests and 500 slides. We choose the 20 prettiest ones and call it a report. We would be much better off if we took the thinking process of old and combined it with the automated of new.
- The world isn’t monadic: Who doesn’t love an awesome Test Control design! Well, Michael Edwards from Dig Insights doesn’t. When was the last time you went into a store that had white walls, white floors, and two items on a white shelf? Or when the single thing differentiating two competing websites was the background colour. We need to conduct more research with greater external validity, ideally real-world, observational testing. We know that people behave differently in the lab and when they know they’re being watched. Let’s get out of the lab and into better generalizability.
- Customer centricity is the new black: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the need for speed as told by Michael Dorr of Hotspex. With decreasing attention spans and increasing competition for that attention, reaching consumers is more difficult than ever. Businesses will only thrive by building a consumer connection with a truly personal experience that can’t be met in any other way. I don’t care if Krispy Kreme puts an ad on the Buzzfeed website or uses my given name in a personalized email campaign. I do care that their mobile app will alert me when a nearby donut shop has just pulled donuts out of the fryer.
Annie Pettit, PhD, CMRP, FMRIA is VP Data Awesomeness at Research Now, and Chief Research Officer at Peanut Labs. Annie is a research methodologist who specializes in data quality, sampling, and survey design, and is an invited speaker at marketing research conferences around the world. She won the MRIA Award of Outstanding Merit in 2014, Best Methodological Paper at ESOMAR in 2013, and the 2011 AMA David K. Hardin Award. She was named a Fellow of the MRIA at the 2016 MRIA national conference. She tweets and blogs as @LoveStats.
