What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – March 2, 2016

By Jeffrey Henning

1. The Data Digest: Is Love in the Air for Your Brand? – Anjali Lai of Forrester has synthesized data from qualitative research, surveys, social listening, and behavior tracking to identify that health-conscious consumers take actions and have attitudes that are distinct from other consumers in many areas outside of exercise and nutrition.
2. The Gender Split in #MRX Conferences: 2016 Edition – Annie Pettit grades research conferences on the proportion of female presenters and panel members. Not one has a majority of women, which means that all have a majority of men. (Reminds me of my favorite Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote: “I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”) Thanks to Annie for raising the question!
3. The Impact of Survey Duration on Completion Rates among Millennial Respondents – Dan Coates and his team at Ypulse have found that Millennial respondents are abandoning online surveys earlier than before, exiting surveys at the 13-minute mark on average. Are when they take it on a smartphone they’re 10% more likely to abandon the survey.
4. Research Automation Comes of Age with BrainJuicer/ZappiStore Partnership – BrainJuicer demonstrates one path of innovation for research agencies: package proprietary methodologies for self-service automation, as they’ve done in their recent partnership with ZappiStore.
5. Survey Respondents: The Polar Ice Caps of Market Research – Lisa Wilding-Brown of Innovate MR also emphasizes the need to design surveys for mobile and emphasizes the importance of designing surveys skillfully with the respondent in mind. “We must remember that sample are actually people.”
6. Market Research Needs to Copy Copy Copy! – Mark Earls, author of Copy Copy Copy, argues for the need to adapt other research inventions for your own organization. “We know from our experiences as self-confessed innovation fans that having the idea is easy bit – getting it to work, productizing and monetizing it is where the value really lies.”
7. Clearing the Fog on Neuroscience – Elissa Moses of Ipsos points out that just as our “mental committee” is often engaged in a tug of war between the nonconscious and conscious to make purchasing decisions, a good research team will pull on both ends of the rope with behavioral/neuromarketing approaches and traditional survey research to make good product decisions.
8. How Automation Will Change the Role of Young Researchers – Helene Protopapas at Nielsen examines the impact that expanding automation from tasks to processes will have on our roles and careers.
9. 12 Criteria You Should Consider When Looking for a Text or Social Analytics Provider – Seth Grimes of Alta Plana gives you a dozen items to use to compare and contrast solutions for analyzing tweets, status updates, chats, emails, reviews and more.
10. The 10 Best Free Data Visualization Tools – Chris Martin of FlexMR looks at a range of solutions that will you inspire and tell visual stories with your research results.