It’s been a week since The Market Research Technology Event ended and come last Wednesday evening I was officially in data overload. It’s taken me the past week to sort through my notes and give some deeper thought to the information presented. Overall I found the conference to be future looking; however it was not as eye opening or disruptive in thinking as what I heard at last year’s conference. Perhaps the unfamiliar ideas are becoming more mainstream?

Having now gone through my notes I did want to give an update to the 5 areas I had highlighted pre-conference. Here’s my take on what was presented:

• Use of mobile in gathering market data
  • This was a big topic of focus; several companies shared their mobile research data along with the pros and cons of mobile as a viable research methodology.
  • I didn’t hear anything new related to mobile, there were simply more companies trying mobile on for size.
  • From my perspective, mobile has not been implemented as a methodology. Companies simply took traditional survey tools (streamlined them a bit) and pushed them to a mobile device for answering. I don’t see this as mobile market research. Some companies are getting closer to truly implementing mobile and did share their learnings. More on that in another post.

• Big data – managing the overload
  • There seems to be no end to the data deluge, just expect it to grow
  • No real insights were given on how to manage TMD (too much data), if you have an answer I’m all ears.
  • There was a session on advanced computing for information visualization and analysis. Now I’m all for data visualization and creating a means of displaying data (lots of data) so people can quickly and easily get the point. That’s not what occurred in this session. It was cool and very future looking but so specialized and currently high level that the normal data shocked person walking around your city is not going to get anywhere near this visualization or analysis.

• Gaming as a means of gathering data
  • This was interesting and surprising… I knew/believed gaming was a great way to engage and gain feedback. What I didn’t know were the statistics showing the positive impact of gaming. I found some of the behavioral stats a bit hard to believe but it’s easy to see the opportunity that exists in utilizing gaming to gain market intelligence.
  • Visit www.janemcgonigal.com for the rest of the story…

• Social media and crowdsourcing in market research
  • The social aspects of market research were touched upon in several of the presentations and while interesting it was hard to apply to actually doing research on a daily basis.
  • Social media is a natural crowdsourcing tool and a great place to data mine – the difficulty is truly understanding the learnings you mine and acting on them in a timely manner.
  • In this very time compressed world in which we live, accessing market insights where people are actively engaged (i.e. Facebook, Twitter) will increasingly be your channel to their feedback.

• Growth and adoption of real time data
  • This was by far my area of interest – how do we get real time data, do we need it, does it really exist?
  • Real time was touched upon in various ways during the conversations on mobile – what better way to access real time input than via a person’s mobile device?
  • I was surprised (last year and this year) by the resistance to mobile and the idea of data being real time. We live in an instant gratification world so how could real time not be an option?
  • Google Consumer Surveys was perhaps a rude awakening for some? I happen to think of them as a very SmartCrowd and was interested to hear their presentation – if this didn’t confirm the value of real time not sure what would. (Again in the interest of full disclosure, InCrowd provides real time data in the healthcare space)
  • Micro surveys deliver data that is just as reliable as data gathered by traditional market research – so why wait for data?