IIEX Themes

AI & Primary Data
Collection

AI improves data collection and fights fraud

AI-enabled tools can improve sample quality in primary research, such as finding more of the right targets for your research, evaluating survey quality, and preventing fraud. However, bad actors can also use it to create fake surveys and defraud you of incentive money. It's important to keep on top of opportunities and risks as they evolve.

AI Analytics

Best practices for applying AI to analyses

AI-enabled approaches can analyze data quickly, empower more staff to conduct analysis, and draw insights from massive data sets. Making the best use of it requires matching the right approaches to the kind of data (and analysts) you have and understanding the advantages and risks for what you want to achieve.

AI Ethics &
Governance

How far to push, how much to limit

ChatGPT has captured the imaginations of insights professionals with its promise of faster insights based on a vast amount of data available to anyone. Still, some are concerned about a range of ethical issues, from massive job loss to IP theft, and doubts about its accuracy, lack of transparency, and other potentially hard-to-assess shortcomings. Nations and international unions have moved to establish regulations and guidelines for AI, and some businesses have, too. As the world grapples with tools such as ChatGPT, it's important to know about consensus best practices as well as exceptional cases.

Automation & DIY
Research

Improved performance, expanded capabilities

Research automation can save time and cost, but it can also be a black box. DIY tools enable anyone to conduct research, but how far do they go in enabling the novice to conduct credible research that produces valuable insights that stand up to scrutiny? As DIY tools evolve, they may be closing these gaps as well as providing increased performance and new capabilities.

Behavioral Economics

When what you predict customers will do doesn't match reality

When regular people make decisions that aren't predicted by their models, thought leaders like to call them "irrational." However, if you accept what people do in the real world as facts, behavioral economics can explain why they make those decisions and how to encourage them to make ones more favorable to your interests.

Biometrics &
Emotional Response

Potentially under-utilized measures that are direct and unbiased

Biometrics provide unbiased, direct measures of emotional response. Methods such as eye tracking, galvanic skin response (GSR), and heart rate variability (HRV) can be used in a variety of contexts, such as a central location or via a wearable. While the typical top-of-mind applications may involve advertising, packaging, or shelf layouts, there may be more applications that you are missing out on.

The Case for Insights

Make the business case for investing in insights

Businesses have a bottomless appetite for insights, but they also want them to be faster and cheaper. A wealth of passive and unstructured data enable analytics teams to meet these demands, placing great pressure on insights groups to justify the cost and time it takes to conduct primary research. Insights managers need to know how to quantify the value of the insights they deliver so they can make the strongest business case possible.

Customer & User
Experience

New methods enable a key competitive advantage

In an age when product features are easy to duplicate, delivering superior experiences throughout the customer journey, while using products, and during customer service win customers. As research, marketing, and sales converge in the digital realm and beyond, you need the tools to pivot quickly to provide the best experience possible. Advances in VR, AI, and other research capabilities continue to help insights professionals press these advantages.

Data Fusion & Conflict

How to get all sources moving in the same direction

In an era with many potential data sources available and many people acting as their own analysts, data silos and competing interpretations of reality plague businesses and threaten primary research-based insights. What can be done to get everyone on the same page?

Digital
Transformation

Digitalization continues - how is it transforming insights?

Digital technology continues to transform business processes, and insights, research, and analysis are no exceptions. However, digital transformation may not benefit all processes equally. For insights, it's important to know whether primary research is keeping up with other processes such as Big Data and web analytics.

Empathetic
Marketing

See the world as your target customers see it

It's only human to try to convince others of something based on arguments that make sense to you, but it's not humane (or effective). Even if you know your target market to be culturally or ethnically homogeneous, socially homogeneous, or uniform in some other ways, individuals always have different frames of reference for the world that influence their perceptions and the decisions they make based on them. Empathetic marketing helps you to navigate these differences by viewing the world from their perspective, understanding what messages resonate with them and what approaches reach them.

Ethical Issues

How far to push, how much to limit

As demand for sample meets dwindling participation and increased fraud, researchers are looking to identify new target participants and verify the identities of those who currently participate. These factors create pressure to push the boundaries on data privacy and take other ethically questionable risks. At the same time, the ChatGPT tidal wave has raised not just ethical questions, but regulatory actions by governments and lawsuits from authors, media giants, and others who have had their works used without their consent. Ethical issues are under a microscope like never before, and knowing where boundaries are being set can help you avoid missteps as well as realize opportunities.

Mining Unstructured
Data

A complement to primary research

You may already have large amounts of data collected from your market such as GPS, purchases, or usage. Analyzing this data can provide valuable insights that you can't find from primary research. However, it's not a substitute for primary research, so it is important to know the opportunities presented by unstructured data as well as the limitations.

Neuroscience & Neuromarketing

Potentially under-utilized measures that are direct and unbiased

Neuroscience methods enable unbiased, direct measurements of responses to marketing stimuli, and tools exist that enable remote DIY research. Neuromarketing capitalizes on knowledge of how to impact the brain in ways that are favorable to the decisions you want your target market to make. While the typical top-of-mind applications may involve advertising, packaging, or shelf layouts, there may be more applications that you are missing out on.

Sample Quality &
Access

How to deal with diminishing sample quality and participation

Several trends make it increasingly difficult to find good quality participants for primary research. Researchers demand more precise targets and more of them. Potential participants are increasingly unavailable, too available, or just fatigued. Yet, some researchers are innovating ways to meet these challenges.

Social Media
Research

It's out there - best practices

to bring it in Social media sharing continues to grow, both in terms of users and in content shared. It can be a rich source of all sorts of insights, but the variety of platforms and types of media shared make it challenging to collect and analyze. Limitations are well-known, but innovators are building on that knowledge to address them to make the resulting insights supportable and actionable.

Socializing Research Insights

Ensure insights get seen, understood, applied, and funded

It can be hard work just to produce meaningful insights, but it can also be challenging to get people to listen to them, understand them, apply them, and then fund the next round of insights work. Significant barriers exist, and it's increasingly difficult to get on stakeholders' agendas or position your insights favorably relative to potentially conflicting insights from others in your organization. As these challenges grow, new tools, strategies, and best practices emerge to meet them.