Need for Innovation Trumps Politics at IIEX Europe Day 1

By Christina Luppi
March 4, 2016
A call for innovation in market research defined the first day of IIEX Europe on Thursday as hundreds of insights professionals gathered for the two-day conference at the Beurs van Berlage Conference Center in the center of Amsterdam.
But if the need for innovation and developing faster, more agile research methods was the most-mentioned subject, Donald Trump was a relatively close second.
The candidate for United States president was repeatedly referenced at Greenbook’s Insight Innovation eXchange, sometimes in humorous bafflement, but more often as an example of brands creating emotional connections.

During the morning’s plenary session, six market research thought leaders presented 20-minute, TED-style talks. BrainJuicer’s John Kearon, who urged insights professionals to embrace psychology and system-1 processing as well as technology in market research, noted that Trump is an example of a brand that has fame, feeling and fluency (an attribute that provides immediate recognition).
“Donald Trump is famous and he evokes feeling, love him or hate him.” Kearon said, adding tongue-in-cheek that, “his hair is also recognizable, giving him fluency.”
LRW President Jeff Reynolds, fifth of six speakers during the two-hour session in the main conference hall, explained how and why his more-than-40-year-old market research consultancy shifted across the organization to focus on innovation.
“Innovation is about how we apply technology and so many other things inside the organization,”Reynolds, said in his presentation in the morning plenary session. “We all must change. Or we die.”
Reynolds shared how losing revenue from a long-time client became an eye-opening moment for him and his team. The feedback prompted LRW leaders to encourage everyone in their organization to share new ideas and to help grow them. The group also embraced a start-up mentality where taking risks–and failing sometimes–is part of growing.
“In all of our business units, people are empowered to do things and make change,” Reynolds said.

While agile methods and fresh approaches to market research were lauded throughout the day, and rightfully so, two false dichotomies emerged.
Twitter suggested that we should focus less on precision and more on speed in market research. (First, is it really a surprise that an organization promoting fast, 140-character surface-level social interaction would favor speed over depth?) But second, even within fast-moving Twitter, there is a focus on precision and investment in techniques that allow users to more precisely communicate what they are trying to say (new features enabling users to add GIFs with ease as an example). This precision versus speed dichotomy is false. Using Sentient Prime implicit research technology as an example, we see major advances in both speed (true implicit studies are now designed and ready to be launched in under five minutes) and precision (true implicit studies provide much more precise insight on the drivers of behavior).
While it is important for researchers to evolve new methods, accuracy of the science and precision of insights do not have to be sacrificed in the name of a quick turn-around.
The second false dichotomy proposed during day one was that market researchers need to build business applications, and not run scientific experiments. These two activities are not mutually exclusive. In fact, market research approaches that lack scientific integrity won’t have business applicability for very long. The power of building market research products on the shoulders of sound science is demonstrated in the long term business impact of those methods.
As an example, consider the difference between a scientifically valid implicit study and one merely passing off response time to conscious questions as implicit. In the first case, you have a measure that increases the accuracy in predicting actual sales behavior, in the second you have a method that sounds exciting, but doesn’t significantly improve predictive accuracy because it’s measuring the same thing as other conscious measures. Which of these two techniques will have the bigger business impact? Certainly, the scientifically sound one will.
Some of IIeX’s newest innovation stories came during the Insight Innovation Competition when six finalists presented their start-up technologies and services models. The Insight Innovation Competition “helps entrepreneurs bring disruptive ideas to life while connecting brands to untapped sources of competitive advantage through deeper insights,” according to Greenbook‘s website. The competition invites innovators to submit ideas that can change marketing research. A panel of judges votes on the winner of a prize that includes $25,000, mentoring, and exposure to potential investors.
This years finalists include:

  • SayWhatNow App
  • AI-Driven Topic Analysis
  • Mobile Ethnography
  • Advanced Location Intelligence
  • The Insight Activation Studio
  • Heartbeat MR App

Representatives of each venture pitched their ideas in the main conference hall before a panel of judges that included Vijay Raj of Unilever, Tim Macer of meaning, Snorri Gudmundsson of Gage-Cannon Ltd. , Han de Groot of Metrix Lab, and Alex Johnson of Kantar. Winners of the competition will be announced Friday afternoon.
To demonstrate our online implicit research tool Sentient Prime, and to give further promotion of the Insight Innovation Competition finalists, Sentient has set up an implicit study to guage IIeX attendees’ perceptions of innovation for each of the finalists. The survey is available at http://sentientpri.me/IIeXPSCA, or by stopping at the Sentient booth.
In the afternoon, Sentient’s Dr. Cyrus McCandless and Clint Taylor led an hour-long workshop to demonstrate how market researchers can use online implicit research tool across devices with Sentient Prime. McCandless explained that implicit research measures the strength of cognitive associations, giving researchers great insight into the perceptual assets of brands.

“It used to take months to program a study like this to have a repeatable measure down to the millisecond,” McCandless said. “Now it can be done in minutes.”

After explaining the high level concepts of implicit research including the difference between system 1 and system 2 processing, the importance of priming, and what spreading activation is, McCandless  explained that Sentient Prime has been designed as a gamified tool that is very simple for survey respondents to use.

“We’re taking a meaningful source of data and attempting to make (the process of getting the data) more attractive to the respondent,” McCandless said.

IIEX attendees can also set up their own implicit study to test brand perception, creative concepts, or product packaging using try.sentientprime.com. On Friday, Sentient’s Joe Sauer will tackle a complex implicit research discussion in his 10 a.m. session “Emotion and Reason: Why Consumer Neuroscience Should Stop Disparaging Conscious Measures” in the ground track.

 

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