What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – February 4, 2014

By Jeffrey Henning

Of the 1,877 unique links shared by the Twitter #MRX community in the past two weeks, here are 10 of the most retweeted.

1. Mustn’t grumble: the British are happy, despite being gloomy – According to an international survey conducted by Ipsos MORI at the end of 2013, Indonesians are the happiest (92% are very or rather happy) and Hungarians are the least happy (53%), with Americans in the top 5 (84%) and Brits in the middle (49%). (Those who worry about cross-cultural bias in the use of scales are unhappy.)

2. Great expectations – InSites Consulting also conducted an international survey, asking respondents what they want from brands in 2014: 35% want the focus on product/service quality, 20% on customer service, and 16% on “actually listening to consumers’ opinion about what the brand should do.” That’s a great message for any market researcher to take to their clients (internal or external).

3. 2014 is market research’s time to shine – Peter Harris of Vision Critical discusses how Fast Company’s vision of Generation Flux affects research – “the general idea that today’s environment is so chaotic that we must constantly rethink everything, including our value propositions and business models.”

4. 2014 UK TRUSTe Privacy Index – A survey of British users of the Internet finds that 88% worry about privacy and only 55% trust businesses with their personal information.

5. How to close the feedback loop – Matt Kleinschmit shares 4 articles related to key points about feedback: Gather feedback from the front line; don’t make feedback complicated; provide timely feedback; and ensure satisfaction.

6. Driven to frustration – Annie Pettit of Research Now takes a Peugeot ad to task for dismissing research, and suggests 6 “NewMR” techniques that might help the aspiring car designer leverage consumer input.

7. Quirks Corporate Research Report [PDF] – This may be the first annual report on corporate researchers from Quirks, but includes 20 years of past survey results and the fifth year of its salary survey. Lots of great information. (Did you know the median size of a corporate research department is 3 to 5 staff?)

8. How to cause hysteria with statistics – “Candy is good for you! Coffee increases your memory! Drink more wine! Eat more Doritos!” At least, according to Annie Pettit, if you don’t pay too close attention to the actual statistics.

9. The mobile advantage in illiterate or limited literacy pops – Navin Williams of Mobile Measure discusses using mobile surveys to reach limited literacy rural populations.

10. Stop asking when mobile will be the next big thing, it happened a year or two ago! – Ray Poynter, Navin’s coauthor on an upcoming book on mobile research, points out the sheer breadth of types of mobile research to argue that it is already more widely used than commonly realized.

 

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.