What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – Best of 2012

By Jeffrey Henning:

Here are 10 of the most influential stories shared by the Twitter #MRX community in 2012.

1. The 6 Worst Market Research Mistakes– Annie Pettit of Conversition Strategies identifies the top six market research problems she encounters:

• Not starting with a research objective.
• Using insufficient sample sizes.
• Being bound by statistical significance, or lack thereof.
• Generalizing beyond your sample.
• Creating something out of nothing.
• Focusing on entertaining, not educating.

1. Using Market Research Just for Marketing Is a Missed Opportunity – Writing for the Harvard Business Review blog network, Werner Reinartz of the University of Cologne wants researchers to look beyond tactically improving marketing effectiveness to strategically renovating marketing assets and the product mix. To accomplish this, MR departments need to develop better online insight capabilities, to truly understand how customers discuss an industry.
2. Turns Out Apple Conducts Market Research After All – Steve Jobs’ antipathy towards market research for new product development is often exaggerated to imply that Apple has no interest in research. Having done research for Apple as far back as 1987, I know that was never the case: court filings in Apple vs. Samsung illustrate some of the customer satisfaction work done by the company.
3. Creative Career that Hits the Right Notes – Louisa Peacock, writing for The Telegraph, quotes Adam Gammel, 25, on how he ended up at Sparkler, where he fell in love with a market-research career. “I was instantly thrown in at the deep end,” he said. “I felt like my opinion mattered. I’d gone from photocopying to being in a boardroom and having 20 people looking at me and expecting me to say something.”
4. Social Media Are Giving a Voice to Taste Buds – Stephanie Clifford of The New York Times shares examples of major food brands using social media to understand what new products to develop: from Frito-Lay’s pickled cucumber-flavored potato chips for the Serbian market to Sam Adams B’Austin Ale to cake lollipops at Walmart.
5. An End to Old Struggles – Joe Fernandez of Research argues that the tough economic climate is forcing creatives and researchers to set aside their differences and work together. Joe concludes his article with a case study on how Coca-Cola used global market research to inform its “Reasons to Believe” campaign.
6. Final Thoughts on MRMW – Reg Baker shares his four takeaways from the Market Research in the Mobile World conference in July.
7. Twitter Chart Toppers – Research magazine and Dollywagon present a newly expanded analysis of research influencers on Twitter, including more clients and more analytics specialists.
8. Britain 2012: Who Do We Think We Are? – Ipsos Mori celebrates Britain’s hosting of the 2012 Olympics with a look at how British attitudes have changed since the previous time the country hosted the Olympics (1948).
9. NewMR Main Stage 2012 Play Again – Check out 18 recordings from the NewMR Virtual Festival covering the majority of the topics presented this year.

Note: This list is ordered by the relative measure of each link’s influence in the first week it debuted. A link’s influence is the sum of the influence of each Twitter user who shared the link and tagged it #MRX.