Five presenters competed to win the ESOMAR Corporate Youth Program award at the Annual Congress in New Orleans.
Enter the Experience Economy – Thomas Troch, InSites Consulting, USA – With only half of research projects prompting change, Thomas looked at different ways to present results: raw data is a commodity; a graphical report is a good; and an interactive workshop is a service, each providing greater differentiation. An InSites workshop included custom deliverables and tailored postcards to be sent three months later to remind attendees of the actions they planned to take. The next level would be to provide an experience: have attendees participate rather than just observe, host events emulating consumer behavior, or use unusual visualizations and emerging technologies (3D vision, rotating perspectives). All, of course, to complement the unique data surfaced by the research. Experiences can make insights more impactful.
The World of Short-Form Video for Post-Millennials – Nadine Bailey, Viacom International Media Networks, UK – The first newspaper emerged 100 years after the printing press, so reacting to new technology can take time. Music dominates online videos; in fact, these videos are the key way that post-Millennials consume new music, and they often leave it on in the background. Music dominates the most frequent search terms within YouTube, with gaming terms growing as people find they enjoy watching others play video games. Game videos offer humor and emotion. While search is used by 53% of video users, even more learn about videos from friends and family. While Millennials use Facebook and Twitter, younger people use Facebook, Snapchat and other services. As a result, short-form videos are becoming more important to marketers interested in reaching post-Millennial consumers.
Head or Heart: The Conflicts of Political Polling – Alexander Wheatley, Lightspeed, UK – Lightspeed surveyed 450 British voters about Brexit and predicted 52% would say leave. But this was just blind luck. Online polls had Remain and Leave neck and neck, while telephone polls favored Remain throughout 2016, perhaps because of social desirability bias. How people intended to vote is a sensitive question, it’s a self-observation, and it’s a behavior prediction: 58% of 272 polls published by the Financial Times got it wrong. Interviewing a panel of top predictors, 63% predicted Leave would win. Too often, though, emotion biases their prediction, especially the emotion around party identification. In the hope of removing self-observation bias, Lightspeed conducted a nationally representative poll asking people to predict the results: they also got it wrong. An implicit association test of the campaign logos slightly favored Remain. An IAT of the EU logo produced 60% Leave among those who hadn’t decided. Going forward, Lightspeed will test multiple methods that, taken together, can help predict the U.S. presidential election.
Moving from Consumer to Brand and Business Insights – Rachel Stern and Stephen Cooper, Brown-Forman Beverages, UK – A focus on both brand and business ensures relevance and impact in businesses seeking profitable growth. The audacious business goal was to triple sales of Jack Daniels within a specific national market. The insights department evaluated what would need to be true to achieve that level of growth: the market would need to improve infrastructure, expand head count by 100, change channel strategy, and change the consumer target. The process involved identifying consumer metrics, building scenario planning models, provided benchmarks to assessment, and testing scenarios. The approach supported overall alignment across all functions to work towards this growth target and to help secure increased investment to achieve this goal. Brand and business insight marry the two to transform the business and empower risk taking to achieve strategic goals.
The Game-changing Generation – SKIM, Netherlands – A team from SKIM discussed helping brands better target Millennials. In the research, consumers saw logos one at a time and swiped left or right depending on how they liked the brand (the rational aspect) and how fast they reacted (implicit or emotional aspect). They also tested text ads, ads with people, and ads with visual that communicate the main point. Millennials want to be connected, are open to disruptors, and are receptive to such visuals.
