Improving Insight Skills, Status, and Impact

I have just finished an extended visit to Japan where I was lucky enough to be involved in a wide range of projects aimed at energising and advancing insight and market research. I am looking forward to sharing the benefits acquired from this trip with colleagues in North America and globally (find out about my October 2015 No Nonsense Tour of the USA by clicking here).

The approach in Japan was to provide an integrated collection of courses and materials to help move the insight profession forward, rather than just focusing on individual topics.

The sorts of projects I was involved in included:

• Running trainingworkshopswithShiggy Kishikawa’s JMRX organisation on topics as varied as:
  • What is hot in market research
  • Big data and advanced analytics
  • Trends in presenting
  • From data to storytelling
• Presenting with Tomoko Yoshida at the ESOMAR Best of Japan event on why and how Japanese researchers could create a bigger impact.
• Teaching a semester on market research at one of the local universities, using the ESOMAR book ‘Answers to Contemporary Market Research Questions’ as the course text.
• Session with clients and supplier agencies looking at analysis, storytelling, mobile research, and the process of taking global market research trends and applying them to specific countries, verticals and situations.

The big lesson that was learned was that insight progress is improved when organisations combine the best of the local with the best of the global, to help identify a plan with impact.

Next, the USA
My next opportunity is to work with GreenBook, Research Now, and Schlesinger Associates to bring a similar impetus for change to the USA. We have organised a tour of workshops for October, covering New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Chicago. The workshops will focus on 3 themes

1. What works
2. What does not work (yet)
3. And what you should be doing now!

The tour is called the No Nonsense Tour because it is going to share the good, the bad and the ugly, to help people learn from the local and global picture to enable them to optimise their 2016 insight performance.

The tour includes 3 different workshops, and all the workshops will be led by me, Ray Poynter, with assistance from local experts:

• Mobile Market Research
• Social Media Research
• Creating Integrated Insights

Find out more about the Tour and/or book a place by clicking here.