What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – September 1, 2014

By Jeffrey Henning

Of the 2,298 unique links shared on #MRX in the past two weeks, here are 10 of the most retweeted:

1. Getting Personal: The Ever Growing Debate around Brand and Personalization – Personalization isn’t just inserting the recipient’s name in each email of a marketing campaign. Coca-Cola “personalized” its soda cans by printing each with a random selected common name, John Lewis offered personalized shopping bags with the shopper’s name, while McDonalds is piloting sandwich personalization to keep up with Subway and Chipotle.
2. Creating a Research Transformation Agenda for 2015 – The pumpkins haven’t even been harvested yet, but Joel Rubinson has 5 New Year’s resolutions for you to consider as you look to move beyond traditional trackers and concept tests.
3. Millennials’ Social Boundaries Changed by Mobile –AHavas Media Labs/Weve survey of 3,000 U.K. 16-to 24-year olds finds that:
   1. 79% report using their phones while on the toilet
   2. 74% can’t be separated from their mobile phones
   3. 67% are more confident exploring new places, thanks to GPS apps
   4. 35% report they plan less and participate in spontaneous get-togethers more often
   5. 29% think it is acceptable to check their phone in a business meeting
4. Virtual Launch of The Handbook of Mobile Market Research– To celebrate the release of their new book, Ray Poynter, Navin Williams, and Sue York are hosting two upcoming webinars with a wide range of guests to discuss the topic of mobile market research.
5. Economic Optimism Up to Second Highest Ever but 3 in 10 Are Still Worried About Paying the Bills – Ipsos shares the results of its latest UK tracking study, with economic optimism the second highest since the index began in 1978. (See their infographic below with other poll results.)
6. Focus Group Therapy: When Market Research Has Unexpected Benefits – Maya Middlemiss of Saros Research shares the joy that focus-group participants report when they discover there are others like them: sufferers from “obesity, erectile dysfunction, chlamydia, chronic diarrhea, and bankruptcy” find in focus groups a safe place to share their experiences.
7. Updated! Market Research Steps Up to the ALS #IceBucketChallenge (and Learns About Social Campaigns Too!) – Lenny Murphy shares a wide selection of Ice Bucket Challenge videos to raise awareness of ALS.
8. 2014 NGMR Disruptive Innovation Award – Nominations are open for the NGMR awards, which will be announced and presented at the The Market Research Event in October.
9. The 2014 AMA Gold Global Top 25 Report – The AMA shares the results of its analysis of the Homomichl Gold Global 25, the largest marketing research firms worldwide, which grew 3.3% in 2013, up from 2.6% in 2012.
10. Data Honesty Wins Consumer Support – According to a survey of 2,000 consumers by tech company Intent HQ, 86% dislike ads personalized through the use of cookies, but 59% don’t mind personalization done through the use of logins.

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. Only market research links are considered, although the #MRX hashtag is occasionally used for other types of tweets, including – recently – tweets about Mr. X, an upcoming Indian 3D thriller film.