Lead up to Market ResearchMW: Interview with Elias Veris & Filip De Boeck of InSites Consulting

Interview eight of the pre-MRMW interview series was with Elias Veris and Filip De Boeck of InSites Consulting.  Getting consumers into the boardroom, marrying MROCs and mobile and bringing market research higher up the organizational ladder are some of the themes that Elias and Filip touch on here.  Filip will be with us in July and I look forward to hearing more.

RM: What are you most excited to share about with us at MRMW and why?  What difference could it make for your audience if they were to implement what you’ll be talking about?

EV & FD: How MROC’s and Mobile are “friends with benefits” is what we are excited about.  Friends with benefits means that MROCs and Mobile are extremely complementary, but do not replace each other. We’ll argue that it’s virtually impossible to conduct a mobile-only MROC or an MROC that doesn’t include a mobile extension. Well, it is technically possible of course, but it comes with a whole bunch of trade-offs.

If the audience would implement mobile in their MROC’s they’d see several different things:

• More engagement from the community participants: people are constantly in touch
• More personal data from participants; a closer connection to them because the MROC is with them all the time
• More contextual data; more ‘heat – of – the – moment input’, which is closer to the real consumption/purchase moment than we’ve ever been
• More visual/audiovisual data, which helps us truly bring the consumer to life for our clients
• In conclusion: more & richer data, leading to better market research overall.

RM: It can be easy to bemoan the state of market research today.  Instead of us talking about what you’re against in the traditional MR space, I’d love to hear about what you’re for – what you stand for – in the MRMW space.  What makes this something you’re willing to stand up for?

EV & FD: We’re all for bringing consumers in the boardroom and creating impact at the client side. As our CEO put it in the recent CEO series at the greenbook blog: “To us, the future of research lies in bringing consumers in the boardroom of companies, narrowing the gap between employees and consumers, and enabling ‘ordinary’ consumers to create extraordinary value for companies. It serves the needs of clients and participants altogether. But more importantly, it puts marketing research higher up the organizational ladder.” 
And that is basically where our interest in mobile stems from; the mobile toolbox helps us to get closer to consumers, to bring them to life and to really connect with them on an ongoing basis, but on their terms. Through mobile, we can empower them to share whatever they think is relevant for our clients or for us researchers, with us. They are not restricted by one platform, or even one place or time, and they can give their input to us in almost any form they choose. Exactly this diversity and richness of data helps us to truly connect our customers with their consumers, with extraordinary value for both parties as a result.
 So in conclusion: we believe in bringing consumers in the boardroom, and mobile is a great tool for doing so. That is exactly why we feel we need to stand up for mobile within market research.