ART verses iiEX – where does true Market Research Innovation Reside?

By Aaron Reid
August 16, 2013
For years, I attended the Advanced Research Techniques Forum (ART) sponsored by the American Marketing Association. This conference was seen as the place to be to learn about the latest in advanced research. Unfortunately, the conference began to lose some appeal a few years back as the presentations increasingly narrowed on Hierarchical Bayesian estimation of utilities and optimizing statistical models. In fact, Greg Allenby, one of the pioneers of HB in market research, made a remark that spoke to the impending issue the ART conference and the industry were facing. <!–more–>He made the point that the industry moved to choice based design years ago, because the traditional surveys and explicit importance questions weren’t giving us the predictive accuracy we needed, and has been working on optimizing those models for years. He then asked the audience where do we go from here, now that we have these choice models so well optimized, what is the market demanding that we’re not already providing?
This comment and question foretold the coming of a change wave in the research innovation space. I would argue that IIeX is now the place to be for broad insight on the most advanced research techniques. ART could benefit from taking a page from the IIeX playbook and broadening the scope of the content it covers. However, I would also argue that IIeX could benefit by taking a page from the ART playbook and injecting greater scientific rigor into the review process of potential presentations. Ultimately, as an industry, we need both the visionary inspiration and the scientific evidence behind the ideas to truly produce lasting, impactful research techniques.
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Aaron Reid

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Founder & CEO, Sentient Decision Science, Inc.


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