Kantar's Profiles Blog

The internet is ablaze with the Spotify and T-Swizzle drama. It’s being discussed at the water cooler and in client meetings. So what is my opinion? Not sure, so I decided to do a little reading and form one. Firstly my disclosures are that I, like many 30 somethings have a 17 year old self inside that is alive and well; I love the new Taylor Swift Album. I am also a frequent Spotify user, recently having become a premium member and paying the $10 per month.

In previous years, I attended Research and Results in Munich as a guest. This year, I was happy to present The Art of Bonsai Survey Design, one of many award winning papers from Jon Puleston, for Lightspeed GMI. The free entrance makes it possible for every market researcher to gain information and industry insights at Research & Results. And, every year it becomes more international, not just the exhibitors -- some lectures were presented in English with the option to wear a headphone and listen in German.

Of the many great sessions at this fall’s TMRE, one that stands out (aside from Lightspeed GMI’s!) was led by Cynthia Soledad from Whirlpool.

Beyond just technology companies, more businesses today are focusing their attention on the creation of new products and services that promote greater access for people with disabilities. From the University of Washington to Apple, Google and Microsoft, a new phenomenon has emerged that goes beyond innovations like speech recognition systems, hearing aids, power wheelchairs and cars that drive themselves, to include other practical and desirable offerings, e.g., accessible packaging designs for commodity products, accessible websites and applications, adaptive yoga classes and adaptive dentistry.

Last week, Forbes reported that Halloween spending in the US is expected to be around $11.3 billion this year. With that kind of skin in the zombie game, we decided to turn to the Lightspeed GMI Mobile Panel for a pulse check on what tricks (and treats) consumers have up their sleeves for Halloween 2014.

According to change management theory (Burke, 2014) the nature of change can be either evolutionary or revolutionary. Evolutionary change consists of incremental changes and doesn’t necessarily change the whole structure or system. Revolutionary change is more radical and is often described as a jolt to the entire system.

Technology has considerably evolved – breeding a new type of consumer. Smartphones now dominate web browsing and social media enables consumers to openly voice opinions. Lightspeed GMI built its mobile offering on the same state-of-the-art platform used to conduct online surveys, resulting in one integrated solution for various data collection methodologies. With huge growth in the people accessing the Internet via mobile devices, there are more opportunities to capture information about purchasing behaviors and activities in real-time. Here is snapshot of the digital consumer across the Asia-Pacific region.

Attending the recent Market Research in the Mobile World Conference in trendy and unseasonably warm Berlin, where the latest global innovations in mobile research and technology are shared and elaborated on, it became obvious why our presentation and following panel discussion regarding Consumer Mobile Privacy and Security Concerns was so timely. Two days of compelling results and demonstrations from cutting edge applications and research utilizing data collected both passively and actively from consumers’ computers, televisions, mobile devices, wearables, and eye-tracking technologies can leave a marketing researcher ecstatic over the boundless future possibilities for insight and learnings. The arrival of the smartphone in 2007 has positively accelerated the research opportunities available today by leveraging this personal hub of information to access a myriad of information.

At the recent ARF Roundtable on Multicultural Market Research, one topic of conversation was demonstrating the value of multicultural insights to clients. Panel member Esther Franklin observed that if you took a photo of high-level budget holders at the Fortune 500 and compared it to a photo of Millennials, you’d have a very different looking picture (there are notable exceptions of course, but for the most part we recognize that leadership in corporate America tends to be white and male). The question was, is this a hurdle to making a case to these companies about the value of multicultural research?

A dozen years ago, while working for Nielsen, I had the good fortune to work on the development of a service with YAHOO! Inc. that helped improve ad targeting on its main website. This was a very successful early Big Data research service that used purchase panel data in conjunction with YAHOO! surfing behavior. The surfing activity of a group defined from Nielsen’s purchase data was then scored against all YAHOO! visitors to improve ad placement on the site. Additionally, Nielsen offered a test and control approach to assess the ROI of the campaign. This was an innovative research service that provided inputs that made marketing activities more efficient.