What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – August 4, 2015

 

1. Raconteur – Future of Market Research – This free publication, The Future of Market Research, features a range of articles (editorial and sponsored) on the state of research today. My favorite article was “Learning to expect the unexpected in business” by Charles Orton-Jones; great overview of the challenges of predictive analytics.
2. Census considers asking about race… by not using the term at all – The U.S. Census Bureau is continuing to iteratively redevelop its approach to asking about race and Hispanic origin. It will soon test a single question that asks what “categories” a person belongs to and then lists 8 categories and gives examples (e.g., “Asian: For example, Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, etc.”); the respondent can select all that apply.
3. 7 books every market researcher should read – Writing for Vision Critical, Ray Poynter highlights seven books we all should read. In addition to some conference favorites, he highlights up-and-coming titles to consider as well.
4. Microsoft’s Bing Pulse announces real-time market research solution for surveys, live content rating, and response groups of any size – Microsoft now offers its own self-service survey solution, geared especially for livestreamed web events and video tests.
5. Want Foresight from Insight? Part 2: An Interview with Gongos’ Greg Heist – Braden Kelley interviews Greg Heist about the need for better socialization of insights within companies. “Information wants to be free, right?  If you’re going to create true foresight, your information needs to be freed from traditional organizational silos so that it can benefit the entire organization.” Later, Greg points out, “Disruption is inherently non-linear, so embedding a way for decision makers to integrate non-linear thinking into company strategy is increasingly important.”
6. Global Smartphone Report: Four Key Trends – A new free report from GfK looks at the growth in smartphone sales around the world; 1.2 billion were sold in 2014, and 2015 Q1 sales were up 7% from the same quarter last year.
7. Keynote: Innovation, Technology and the Future of Marketing Research by Ashish Soni, USC Viterbi Engineering Startup Garage – Annie Pettit live-blogged the innovation keynote from the 2015 MRA Insights & Strategies Conference.
8. Digital Analytics | What’s really going on? – ESOMAR is promoting a new conference, RA:DAR (Research Analytics: Digital Advanced Research), which will be held at AOL headquarters in New York in October to discuss digital analytics.
9. The Memefication of Insights – Tom De Ruyck and Anouk Williems of InSites Consulting have long promoted the need for greater socialization of market research results within client organizations, to move from insights to action and to improve the MRX ROI. In this post, they provide examples of going beyond the traditional results presentation to experientially immerse employees of their clients in the viewpoint of the consumer.
10. Product/Market Fit & Why it matters to the market research world – The Garage Group looks at a concept from technology startups – how well a product actually fits with its target market – and uses social media monitoring to evaluate that fit for one of its clients.

Note: This list is ordered by the relative measure of each link’s influence in the first week it debuted in the weekly Top 5. A link’s influence is a tally of the influence of each Twitter user who shared the link and tagged it #MRX, ignoring retweets from closely related accounts. Only links with a research angle are considered.