What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – September 15, 2012

By Jeffrey Henning

Of the 1,727 unique links shared by the Twitter #MRX community in the past two weeks, here are the top ten most influential.

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. 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.”
3. Marketing Chiefs Have Their Say on MR, and More – Joe Fernandez of Research provides some key quotes from a panel of marketing leaders from Coca Cola, Kraft Foods, Hyatt Hotels and SunTrust Banks. Wendy Clark of Coca Cola said, “We are flush with data. It’s not about keeping that separate but making that research available to every part of the business. Big data is massive. Our most important relationship outside of marketing is with IT. This will be a huge part of our business in the next few years.” Her advice to MR firms? “The approach the industry should take can be summarized as ‘think big, start small, then scale appropriately’, or else the danger is you might scale the wrong thing.”
4. ESOMAR Unveils Draft Guidelines for Mobile Market Research – With additional news from the ESOMAR Annual Congress, Joe Fernandez reports on draft guidelines to meet the legal and ethical requirements of mobile research. A key concern: because it is so easy for a research application to track and transmit extensive data (photos, audio recording, videos, GPS location, behavioral data), research apps need to disclose to application users “the purpose of the app, the specific data it collects or uploads and any impact it may have on the functioning on other installed apps or the performance of the device.”
5. Building Brands with BRICs – At the ESOMAR Annual Congress, Ana Alvarez of PepsiCo provided a case study for a mobile panel in Brazil, for which 400 consumers logged every time they saw Gatorade or heard it mentioned. Based on Mesh Planning’s analysis of this research, PepsiCo de-emphasized broadcast marketing in favor of social affirmation, resulting in higher sales and greater consumer satisfaction.
6. The Influencer Myth – Ray Poynter of Vision Critical reviews some of the research into influencers and networks, concluding that influence may exist but it has small effects and little predictive power. “If we look at last winter we could examine a town and work out who caught flu first, last year, and call them early adopters. We could look at who tended to catch it from whom, and we would identify some nodal points, people who interfaced with lots of people and who seemed to be implicated in the spread… However, if we try to use this model of flu ‘influence’ next year to predict the path of the next flu outbreak we would probably be wide of the mark.”
7. The Data Scientist will be Replaced by Tools – Gil Press, writing in Forbes, discusses data science and whether it will rely primarily on human judgment or automation. Peter Norvig of Google has said, “We don’t need an expert to tell us the theory; maybe we can gather enough data and run statistics over that and that will tell us the answer without having to have an expert involved.” John Myles White of Princeton counters: “Data scientists will have portions of their job automated, but their work will be much less automated than one might hope. Although we might hope to replace knowledge workers with algorithms, this will not happen as soon as some would like to claim.”
8. 10 Marketing Research Mistakes that Stand the Test of Time – Quirks re-publishes an article from the 1970s by Jim Nelems: the fact that it could have been written for a blog yesterday is a testament to the timelessness of the advice as well as the perennial popularity of the Top 10 format!
9. Global Top 25 Grow 4.1% to $18.7bn, says Honomichl – The Honomichl rankings of the top 25 global market research firms are out, with Ipsos jumping to #3 overall, thanks to its merger with Synovate and leapfrogging IMS Health (#3 last year, #6 this year) and GFK (#4 each year). Adjusting for inflation, total revenues for the 25 firms are up just 1.4%.
10. PSB Founder Berland Leaves to Lead Edelman Research Unit – Edelman has hired Michael Berland from WPP’s Penn Schoen Berland to oversee a rebranded research arm, Edelman Berland.

And here’s one that should get more attention:

• John Gongos Commemorated with Charitable Fund – Gongos Research, Research for Good and Outrun the Sun have created the John Gongos Melanoma Education Fund. They are looking to raise $10,000, and have already raised $6,800. You can donate here.

Note: A link’s influence is a tally of the influence of each Twitter user who shared the link and tagged it #MRX.