Research & Results International Issue 2017/2018

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Interview Steve Schlesinger, CEO of Schlesinger Group, discusses his experiences navigating acquisitions Page 14

International Issue 2017/2018

International Market Research

Automation Why dashboards are the future Page 16

Product Innovation The role of customer IQ Page 20

Politics Understanding political sentiment and the political climate with brand research Page 36

Studies, Interviews, Future Trends

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International Issue 2017/2018 Advertisement

Interview Steve Schlesinger, CEO of Schlesinger Group, discusses his experiences navigating acquisitions Page 14

International Market Research

Automation Why dashboards are the future Page 16

Product Innovation The role of customer IQ Page 20

Politics Understanding political sentiment and the political climate with brand research Page 36

Studies, Interviews, Future Trends

Editorial

Next Gen Research The second international edition of Research & Results, the Market Research Magazine is now out. And once again, the world of market research has grown a little closer together.

The international events in this industry, such as the Esomar Congress, the Quirk’s Events (page 10) and the Research & Results show offer the ideal opportunity to discuss and find solutions together with colleagues from all around the world.

These are events that we at Research & Results Magazine are happy to cover and support as a media partner, because as a rule, the same issues occupy all market researchers: digital disruption, automation and the clients’ desire for faster results.

In his article on page 16, Roddy Knowles explains the contribution that dashboards will be able to make in future, and which benefits they offer in an ever more automated market research industry. On page 24, Danyo Dimitrov shows how online panels help close the gap between the investigation of rational and emotional behavior. Dezső Karasszon is convinced that, while technology has become a major aspect of market research, quality results can only be obtained with a highly-qualified team. He describes three specific cases starting on page 28.

But a completely different topic has been on the world’s mind for some time now – and not just the world of ­market researchers: political research. The field has lost a lot of prestige in Germany in recent years, but that is just one more reason to tread new paths. Stefanie Sonnenschein and Sören Scholz examined political parties as brands, and their research exposed some fascinating conclusions that you can find on page 36.

Photo: © www.dominikmuenich.de

Those wishing to find out how smart the future of market research will be, and what diversity and essential competence the industry has to offer, shouldn’t miss the Research & Results 2017 show in Munich on 25 and 26 October. Find out all about the Research & Results on page 6.

Dagmar Dreßler Chief Editor dressler@research-results.de

Find Research & Results also on:

Content

Events 6 Trade Show: Research & Results 2017 10 Quirks Event 2018

News 12 AIMRI Joining the Insights Association

Research 14 Interview Steve Schlesinger, CEO of Schlesinger Group, discusses his experiences navigating acquisitions 16 Automation Why dashboards are the future 20 Product Innovation The role of customer IQ 24 Big Data Solving problems with online panel solutions 28 Project Management How an operations team can be set up in an ideal way 32 Technology Improving performance with automation 36 Politics Understanding political sentiment and the political climate with brand research 40 Study What are the most urgent issues that countries need to resolve today?

44 Customer Experience How to implement a successful strategy 48 Skype Is International qual research all about it?

Embracing New Technology Why Market Research Needs Automation

Lifestyle 50 10 Questions – 10 Answers Tom Abele, CEO and partner, IFF International

 Page 32 Photo: © ojogabonitoo – Fotolia.com

Sections 3 Editorial 51 Imprint

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The leading international Trade Show for Market Research

25-26 October 2017 MOC Munich · Germany

INSIGHT INNOVATION

170 Exhibitors 104 Workshops

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Data Science · Virtual Reality · Brand Future Customer Experience · Social Media · Mobile

REGISTER NOW! Free admission for registered visitors:

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Variety, Competence, Innovation Research & Results 2017 in Munich

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Research & Results, the world's leading market research show, will be opening its gates this year on 25 and 26 October in Munich’s “MOC” congress center. This is where the experts and decision-makers in market research, marketing and media meet. Visitors to Research & Results can expect a huge selection of German and international exhibitors and an extensive workshop program. New this year: the Innovation Area in Hall 2.

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Market research is becoming increasingly complex. There are more market players, surveying methods and evaluation options today than ever before. All the more reason to visit the show, because the range of exhibitors at this year's Research & Results covers the entire spectrum of the market research world and informs visitors about the things that are moving the industry. From Big Data to implied methods, through to soft- and hardware solutions such as virtual reality glasses – the show promises profound insights to the interested visitor. With GfK, Kantar TNS, Ipsos and Nielsen, four of the world's top five market research institutes will be at the show. Along with various start-ups, online providers the likes of Research Now, SSI and Toluna, smaller institutes and market research associations, they look forward to a lively exchange with show visitors.

The range of exhibitors at the Research & Results covers the entire spectrum of the market research world and informs visitors about the things that are moving the industry.

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Events

And another trend seen in recent years is also continuing: the Research & Results show is becoming more and more international. No other market research event has more exhibitors or visitors from so many different nations. Ideal conditions for making new contacts and meeting up again with existing ones.

Extensive Workshop Program The increasing internationalization is also reflected in the workshop program. Almost half of the 104 presentations will be held in English or translated simultaneously in rooms 1 and 2. Like the exhibitors themselves, the presentations will cover the entire spectrum of the market research world, and while the topics often remain the same, such as customer experience, for instance, the approach to them changes. For example, GIM will show how one can find out what is going on in consumers' minds with implicit methods, and Produkt und Markt will present its mobile approach to shopper insight research. In its workshop "Branding to Go – Mobile Display and Video as a New Brand Experience for Mobile Consumers," Eye Square will show how mobile devices can be used for a successful market launch. Under the heading "Digital Hit or Digital Shit?" Kantar TNS will explain what makes digital campaigns successful, and Interrogare will show how brand drivers can be identified using innovative tools. Several presentations look into Generation Z; not only how it ticks, but how best to survey it. For instance, one workshop title from Q Agentur fßr Forschung is "Turning Insights into Ideas: a Collaborative Research Concept for Better Understanding Gen Z." GfK and Intelligo, in contrast, will be showing how VR glasses can be used, and the start-up Supercrunch by GfK will demonstrate how to optimize marketing using Big Data. Some exhibitors like Respondi, will use the workshops to present new tools. The workshops will cover all the current and relevant topics in the market research sector.

Innovation Area This year's Research & Results is all about Insight Innovation. For the first time, new methods will also be introduced in an open forum held in Hall 2. In this "Innovation Area", selected exhibitors will present revolutionary techniques, panels and ways to gain more profound insights with implied approaches, in quick-fire slots. Innovation in market research doesn't only mean new technologies and automatic tools, but also other strategies for obtaining deeper consumer insights.

The increasing internationalization is also reflected in the workshop program. Almost half of the 104 presentations will be held in English or translated simultaneously in rooms 1 and 2.

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Infos and Registration Networking When the Other Work is Done Alongside the extensive program and wide diversity of exhibitors, Research & Results 2017 also offers numerous opportunities for colleagues to chat. For instance the Research Club on the evening of 25 October is holding a Networking Party in the Kongressbar in Munich. And from 4.30 pm on the final day, the event organizer invites guests to a Happy Hour. â– www.research-results.com

Register at www.research-results.com and gain free entry to the two show days and the congress program.

The MOC Convention Center is easy to get to by public transport, regardless of whether you are coming from the airport, railway station or the inner city.

The website above also contains hotel suggestions and information on all exhibitors, the workshop program and the hall plan.

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Events

The Quirk’s Event

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s we move closer to the start of 2018, the team at Quirk’s Media is gearing up for the fourth annual Quirk’s Event. Quirk’s will again set the stage in Irvine, California (January 30-31), and Brooklyn, N.Y. (February 27-28), providing attendees with an interactive exhibit hall; packed session schedules offering research and insights professionals a host of new ideas; and valuable, in-person meetings – with friends new and old.

Inspired by Research & Results In 2014, Quirk’s saw the need for an inclusive, low-cost event that catered to client-side researchers throughout the industry. Our clientside research showed us that hosting the events in New York and California made attendance accessible to as many researchers as possible. We were inspired by exhibit-centered events such as Research & Results and worked to give the Quirk’s Event a uniquely American twist – embracing the big city hustle in Brooklyn and the laid-back vibe of Orange County. In our third year, more than 2,100 attendees gathered at the Quirk’s Events in Irvine (819) and Brooklyn (1,287).

Of the registered attendees, 63.3 percent were end-clients/corporate researchers.

When we first launched the Quirk’s Event, one of our main goals was to try to re-create, in conference form, the practical, useful in10

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formation we try to deliver with our various Quirk’s entities – striving to promote the use of marketing research and help researchers to do their jobs more effectively.

In hopes of offering something for everyone – from the new researcher to the experienced veteran – we will again curate a good mix of techniques, industries and sophistication levels, vetting our speakers and work to provide attendees with the highest-quality sessions.

Making Connections From the interactive exhibit hall to the various informal networking events, the Quirk’s Event offers opportunities for attendees to connect with each other and with exhibitors. In 2017, more than 8,500 leads were obtained by exhibitors via lead-capture devices (not including any exchange of business cards).

To help foster positive attendee-exhibitor interaction, we encourage exhibitors to offer event experiences – which in 2017 ranged from Skeeball tournaments to a sketch artist. We even host the Quirk’s Event Expo Bingo, where attendees explore the hall and collect enough stamps to be entered into a drawing for some great prizes. One attendee commented in our post-event survey, “The bingo game was awesome!” www.research-results.com

Photos: © Margarita Corporan for Quirk's

US Marketing Research Event is Entering its 4th Year

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Continuing to Improve While we will continue to strive to improve the Quirk’s Event, our post-event survey results have been heartening. In the 2017 postevent survey, 95 percent of attendees said they would recommend the event to a co-worker or colleague.

Here are some sample comments: “As a corporate researcher, the Quirk's Event offers a great value for the price and allows our entire team to attend ... which is very valuable to us.”

“Really liked pretty much everything about it. I spoke about my experience very positively to my peers and leaders. I wrote a synopsis of key learnings that went over very well among the leadership team.

I would definitely like to come back next year.”

“I like that there was plenty of free time within the day. Not being rushed between sessions helps with the chance to network.”

“Really useful event. Found it to be valuable for networking, learning about other research providers and new research techniques and approaches.”

From the educational sessions to the casual networking environment, it is our hope that the Quirk’s Event provides attendees with a fun and rewarding experience. We always welcome ideas and suggestions on how we can make the next Quirk’s Event even better. If you make it to Irvine or Brooklyn in 2018, stop by and let us know how we’re doing! www.thequirksevent.com

Exhibition Area at the Quirk's Event in Brooklyn 2017

Event Locations 2018 Orange County, CA Brooklyn, NY

January 30-31, 2018 February 27-28, 2018

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News

Concentrated Strengths AIMRI Joining the Insights Association Launched at the start of this year, the Insights Association was formed in the United States through the merger of two organizations with long, respected histories of servicing practitioners within the market research and analytics industry: CASRO and MRA. Both of these organizations had been active in advocating industry positions on legislative and regulatory issues and the new association is therefore better able to represent the interests of market research within the world’s most powerful economy.

Specifically, the new association draws upon the traditions of its founder organisations to effectively represent, advance, and grow the research profession and industry by pursuing the following primary activities: • Providing government advocacy through legislative, regulatory and judicial means • Caring for and improving the industry’s image in the eyes of the media and public • Marketing the business case for industry products and services to buyers and users • Setting and enforcing professional standards • Establishing and reinforcing best practices through education, certification and events • Helping members grow their businesses, their departments, and themselves as research professionals In summary the Insights Association helps empower intelligent business decisions by providing a voice, a resource and a network that advances the interests of companies and individuals engaged in the important activities of market, social and opinion research and analytics.

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Photos: © Oakozhan – Fotolia.com, AIMRI

New Aims Rooted in Tradition

News Throughout the World A particular strength of the Insights Association is its eleven regional chapters designed to promulgate its services and member benefits across the United States. These provide the Association with a real, immediate, local perspective with assessment and guidance on all national issues, challenges and opportunities, from “relevant” to “critical”. Now, the board of the Insights Association has formed an International Chapter to provide enhanced service and support for member companies and individuals operating outside of the United States. Further, in a move to extend the international coverage of this new chapter, the Association invited the Alliance of International Market Research Institutes (AIMRI) members to join with others to become founder members of this exciting new development.

Joined Forces Meanwhile, in common with many other associations, AIMRI was finding it difficult to maintain its unique identity in the face of growing competition from other organizations. Against that background the AIMRI council became convinced that direct access to the vibrant US market would be of most benefit to members and their businesses. Particularly since these benefits extend beyond the AIMRI companies to also include their employees, who become individual members of the Insights Association.

Accordingly, the council agreed a resolution to dissolve AIMRI and for members to transfer to the new International Chapter of the Insights Association. This motion was put to a ballot of members

and was overwhelmingly carried at the AGM on the 30th June.

Future Missions The council of AIMRI are convinced that this decision will best ensure that the objectives of the alliance will be carried forTony Dent, ward into the future, including the mission Chairman AIMRI to help members develop their business by connecting them with fellow professionals throughout the world. In particular, the International Chapter will continue to service those clients who need to research across different national boundaries and prefer to use companies with genuine local knowledge.

Many of the traditions of AIMRI will carry through to the new organization including the AIMRI villages at Research & Results in Munich (October 25th/26th) and the Insight Show in London (March 7th/8th 2018). Moreover, the International Chapter will have its own forum in the Insights Association’s Engage Online community, enabling access to the AIMRI archive. Finally, the new chapter will also play a key role in producing the Insights Association’s annual CEO Summit to be held in London in March, 2018. This event will be produced in partnership with the UK’s Market Research Society (MRS) and emphasizes the Insights Association’s desire to work with other organizations to promote the image of research throughout the world. www.aimri.net www.insightsassociation.org

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Against the Odds Steve Schlesinger, CEO of Schlesinger Group, discusses his experiences navigating acquisitions in the international marketing research services arena.

Schlesinger: I believe that those high figures must represent acquisitions and mergers of key competitors and companies for whom the key strategy is a “get” – to knock out or absorb competition or to enter a completely unknown market. Our acquisition strategy is deeply seated, not in what we can “get” from a company, but in what we can “give” it as a group. When reviewing a company, we look for opportunities to add competitive value for future growth and return on investment. There are, of course, many success and failure criteria but for Schlesinger, this is a key element of a successful acquisition. The other key criteria for us are a thorough investigation into the culture of the company and how that will integrate within our culture.

What are your main reasons for deciding to acquire a company? Do you target particular price ranges?

Schlesinger: With a total of eight acquisitions – six in Europe and two in the US, purchase prices have ranged from 400 thousand dollar to 13 million dollar. We look at the revenue at the time of acquisition and forecast what it could become once we introduce our knowledge, resources, technology and client base. Of course, we always wish to grow our business and any acquisition has to be profitable in the medium to long-term but growth is just one of our goals. In the US, growing our expertise has been a factor. In Europe, the bigger picture of providing a one-stop solution for our client research needs in key markets has been the main driver. Some of our companies are more profitable than others and this can vary year on year but the constant is that “the whole is great than the sum of its parts”.

You are experts in data collection services, setting up and running research facilities, recruitment teams and managing platforms, so why not just create a blueprint and set up your own facility and team in your acquisition market?

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Schlesinger: There are some really great companies out there which are open to the idea of taking their business to the next level but simply do not have the resources to do so. What they do have is invaluable local knowledge of the economic, cultural and research landscape along with loyal clients and deep relationships. We believe in seeking out the best companies – not always the biggest – with shared core values and passions, we are better off than doing it from the ground up. Importantly, we will have already partnered with such companies through our Global Services team and have tested their performance which helps mitigate the risk.

It is one thing for an owner of a business deciding to sell – it is a whole other experience getting the buy-in of their employees. How do you achieve this?

Schlesinger: It is important to recognize the strong stereotype of a big US Company acquiring in Europe and imposing its US culture and business formulas. When we seek to acquire a company, after taking a look at the accounts, our next interest is the incumbent team, in particular the future leaders of the company. A strong team for us is critical. The very first communications we make with our new teams is that their talent is valued and was a critical part of the decision process. We share our culture code and know that establishing genuine trust is paramount. We do a lot of listening and can learn a great deal from even the smallest of companies. And indeed, our acquisition companies often influence procedures and methods across our group. Our new teams soon see the new opportunities that they can seize to learn and grow.

Why have you kept local brand names? – You have quite a collection, how do your clients keep track?

Schlesinger: Adopting a single brand name is sometimes tempting and our Head of Marketing might certainly thank me for not having to create and manage multiple brands. But, she would also be the first to agree that we have acquired brands with their own equity that their clients recognize, trust and even have affection for. We respect the intrinsic value of each brand and believe keeping it reflects our www.research-results.com

Photo: © Schlesinger Associates

Mr. Schlesinger, according to Harvard Business Review, 70 to 90 percent of all mergers and acquisitions fail. At Schlesinger Group, acquisitions form a major part of your strategic plan and appear to be operating highly effectively. To what do you attribute your success?

Research

entire approach to the acquisition. Yet clients are aware of our group name and benefit from the one common purpose: to deliver outstanding marketing research services and holistic data collection solutions. As required, our brand leaders come together as one Schlesinger team to create exceptional results and a unique Schlesinger brand experience.

Do you encounter integration challenges?

Schlesinger: Naturally, each acquisition is always a learning experience and there are bumps in the road but we have become experienced over the years. From the outset, our success has been based on effective integration. There is a view that consistent systems, process and technology deliver the most efficient and effective outcomes.

While I agree, this view is over simplified and can have great complexity and challenging ramifications. We have developed a keen sense of when to push for brand and operational synergy and when to support local tacit information for the benefit of the team and the clients. Thus, we avoid making fast or sweeping changes across the board until each process and technology is reviewed individually to assess local compatibility – legally, practically and culturally – to achieve desired results.

With your companies speaking different languages, how do you communicate effectively?

Schlesinger: Keeping employees engaged is fundamental, so we apply the same care and attention to our internal communications strategy as we do to our external communications strategy. Discipli-

ned cascading of company messages is key. We are fortunate that the companies we have acquired already employ numerous multi-lingual people who accommodate their US clients but it is still important to internationalize our communications to reach all our teams in their local languages if needed. Cultural localization is just as important as language localization. It is important to understand what behaviours are cultural verses personal and what is just different versus right or wrong.

What learnings can you share with us?

Schlesinger: Don’t “fall in love” too quickly – do your due diligence.

Don’t assume EU laws, employee rights and norms are the same across European countries – be open to the need to be flexible by country. Budget beyond the purchase price, factor in taxation implications, auditors and lawyers – one particular acquisition cost us almost as much in legal fees as the value of the business!, factor in opportunity costs of acquisition and integration – can you afford to be distracted from your existing business? Understand currency risks – changes can occur during the negotiation and acquisition process and also in the longer term. A company may perform well locally but how will that translate in your local currency? Be prepared to walk away – sometimes either party needs to do this to really understand whether they truly want the acquisition to happen. And when things get complicated, remember we have far more in common with each other than things that divide us. www.schlesingerassociates.com Advertisement

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Automation in Market Research

Connecting

People

utomation has something of a storied past in the history of market research – even if its past is seldom discussed and of late has been presented as something utterly new. We could look to the use of punch cards to process data, the advent of autodialing, the rise of online sampling, or many other examples to point to how automation has been integral to research and has propelled the industry forward. While conversations about the newness of automation may be a bit misguided – as well as the fear of automation exhibited by some – it is a fact that automation is being embraced in a number of ways that are changing the way research is conducted. Done well, automating elements of the research process can dramatically increase efficiency, make data more impactful, and fuel innovation in our industry.

Photos: © Rawpixel.com – Fotolia.com, Research Now

Standardisation allows for data to be shared or socialised with clients and within organisations.

Roddy Knowles focuses on the benefits of automation and explains why he believes dashboards are the future.

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The Need for More Efficiency Most of the internal and external pressures on those in market research have been driven by the desire, or perhaps more accurately put, need, to be more efficient. Calls for faster, cheaper data are ubiquitous. While this has had some negative effects, it has also had many positive effects by inspiring researchers to think about how they can do their work more efficiently.

Are there human tasks that don’t need to be human tasks? Some obvious examples come in data processing and data coding (where automation is also not a new concept). While I’m glad I learned to write SPSS syntax, if nothing other than to have a novel, outmoded skill, today the UX of many tools is so simple I can get what I need out of data with minimal knowledge of how statistical packages actually work. I could code my own open ends – and in some cases I might want to – but I’m also pretty keen to slough off that laborious task to capable machines.

Where we have seen more resistance and discussion is with research design, specifically in using predefined or templated surveys. Many people hold in esteem that research engagements are unique snowflakes, that they should be bespoke. There is – and always will be – a place for custom research. However, there are plenty of places where creating something custom, even if it is so you can just charge more for it, simply isn’t needed. Look to concept testing, CSAT, or ad testing work for obvious examples. Rather than treating each study as unique, think about the benefits that standardising survey instruments can bring. Asking the same questions in the same way time after time, wave over wave, reduces significantly design and programming time, getting projects into field quicker and saving money to boot.

Moreover, it allows for easy comparison between studies and creation of benchmarks and norms. One of our clients saw that over the course of 15 copy testing studies, they were able to save nearly three months of time in field by using a templated design and automating the analytical processes.

One of our clients saw that over the course of 15 copy testing studies, they were able to save nearly three months of time in field by using a templated design and automating the analytical processes.

Shared and Socialised Continuing to think about standardisation and how that can influence the research process, it’s worth looking at how it allows for data to be shared or socialised with clients and within organisations. Here we find a similar issue as with custom research design. With custom work, what is the standard deliverable? Usually it’s a PowerPoint deck that humans spend a lot of time creating, perhaps with some (usually ugly) automated charts interspersed. This deck, in turn, often gets reworked and shared up the food chain. Yes, a really polished, concise, story-driven PowerPoint deck can be amazing. I’ve seen these rare jewels. But the reality is that this type of deliverable is time consuming and often underwhelming. Again, it has a place but it is not fit for all places.

Dashboards are the Future When you’re creating or purchasing an end to end automated research product, you’re also getting a predefined data deliverable, which people have spent a lot of time developing and polishing. And it’s usually a dashboard. Somewhat unfair, I know, but I’ll leave aside some of the cons of dashboards for now and focus on some of the pros. This is largely because I think dashboards are the future. As a researcher, one of the most disappointing things is when I spent time on a project and the data just sort of withers. It happens, but it’s sad. On the flip side, one of the most rewarding things is when people spend time with and take action upon the data I collect. They share the data with their boss and their colleagues in other departments; the data is able to make an impact because it is properly and widely disseminated.

Dashboards make it incredibly easy to share, update, and interact with data. Yes, there may be a slight learning curve and a bit of handholding to get some of your colleagues to engage, but it’s usually worth it. With a predefined output, hopefully one that is both pretty and embraces data visualisation best practices, people are able to easily understand data and become familiar with it. Especially for recurring studies, which are the types of studies most fit for www.research-results.com

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A client who runs a multi-market study has eliminated significant time on the front end by automating design and programming, and specifically not having to translate the questionnaire into 10 languages each time. Additionally, they have been able to access results in a dashboard and swiftly share these with stakeholders, a welcome change from the 2-3 weeks it took to receive a report historically.

automating, people can become accustomed to the format, reading and negotiating data with ease each time rather than having to cull through a deck and/or data tables. Additionally, most dashboards are built to update in real time (or near real time) so you can track data as it comes in, sharing updates and quick reads on data without having to put manual effort into creating reports. The benefits of standardised research outputs are too often overlooked and companies should be considering which types of studies are well served by such deliverables. A client who runs a multi-market study has eliminated significant time on the front end by automating design and programming, and specifically not having to translate the questionnaire into 10 languages each time. Additionally, they have been able to access results in a dashboard and swiftly share these with stakeholders, a welcome change from the 2-3 weeks it took to receive a report historically.

Linking and Utilising Data I mentioned earlier that I think dashboard adoption will dramatically increase in the future and while dashboards don’t need to be automated, automation certainly makes them more powerful and effective. There are many tools and approaches to research that are empowered or entirely made possible by automation. So, what transformative impacts can automation have on how we think about and conduct market research? I’ll highlight a couple. Researchers are increasingly embracing data integration as a viable and improved approach to achieve many research objectives. What I mean, simply, by data integration is linking and utilising data from multiple sources. This usually entails an element of survey research linked with other data sources, which could be internal CRM data, third party modelled data, purchase/ transactional data, or passively collected behavioural data, to name a few. So, why does automation matter here? It may be largely invisible to the end user but automated ­processes of passing and integrating data make it possible to quickly leverage data and act on data without tedious manual efforts. Not only can data be transmitted automatically via APIs so researchers can work with it, but data can be used to directly target surveys, drive logic, reduce survey burden, and not unimportantly, increasing data quality.

On Their Terms One of the things that the ever increasing usage of mobile devices by people in their daily lives – and in turn in their participation in research – has done is forced researchers to think much more about the modes used to engage with people. I’ve long championed meeting

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Research www.nipo.com people on their terms, making it as easy as possible for them to participate in research, and I haven’t been alone in calling for more action on this front. We have seen some, though it would be misleading to say we are winning the war. I’m hopeful, however, that automation and more specifically machine learning will allow us to engage people in a way that suits them. Some companies have been exploring and using chatbots or machine-driven moderators to conduct research and this is only possible because machines can be trained to converse with people and specific to this industry, path them through a questionnaire. Currently, applications have been mostly qualitative, but there are plenty of applications for quantitative research as well. When a machine can ask open ended questions and/or provide some closed ended questions and path someone through a survey, the result is a research engagement that works much like a chat, something many people are more keen to do than complete a survey, especially in younger age cohorts. The industry is in dire need of easier and more compelling research in which to participate.

Evaluate Your Business The case for automation in market research is strong. And it’s more than just a trend. That said, I’m not arguing that you should automate everything. Rather, you should look to automate what makes sense. The easiest way to start is to take a step back and identify two things. First, look for repetitive tasks. Are there things that you are doing over and over again in essentially the same way on many projects? Whether this be in design, fielding, or analysis, dig deeper into how these processes can be automated. Two, identify the most time consuming tasks in your projects. Is it worth investing in technology that can streamline and improve these burdensome tasks?

Have a discussion with those most involved in this work and find out what their biggest pain points are. Lastly, if there is an overlap between the repetitive and time consuming tasks, then you’ll probably want to really focus there. While it’s important to evaluate your current business in light of what automation makes possible, it’s also crucial to think about how it can fuel improved and innovative approaches to market research. With one eye on the present, and another eye on the future, take a look at how automation can change the way you do research. â–

Roddy Knowles is Director Product and Research Methodology at Research Now, where he champions how to (and how not to) leverage mobile technology to conduct market research. www.researchnow.com

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The Customer’s Role of Customer IQ in Product Innovation

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Customer IQ in a business context is very helpful for companies to understand and target their customers better based on their tastes and considerations – so says Thomas George.

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roduct innovation is the buzz word nowadays. Companies are introducing innovative products to the market almost on a weekly or monthly basis. In this scenario, the question that inevitably comes to mind is: what exactly is product innovation? Innovation is a term denoting creativity and new ideas and their application.

Product Innovation Methods

PLACE Retail Wholesale Local export Internet

PHYSICAL EVIDENCE User stories Recommendations Office premises Buzz

TARGET MARKET

PROCESS Service delivery Complaints Response time

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PRICE Penetration strategy Cost plus Loss leader more

PROMOTION Advertising Recommendations Special offers Gifts User testing

PEOPLE Founders Employees Culture Customer service

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There are many ways to achieve product innovation, but here we focus our attention on two prominent methods. One way is technological innovation and another is market-oriented innovation. Technological innovation is the modification made to technical attributes of a product, while product innovation has a broader meaning, particularly in a business context. In this context, product innovation is not just about ­technological modification; it represents the upgrading of all elements of the marketing mix.

Marketing Mix and Market-Oriented Innovation Marketing mix consists of a set of marketing tools: namely product, place, price, promotion, people, process and physical evidence. They are collectively regarded as the 7 Ps of marketing as detailed in figure 1. Businesses use the marketing mix to pursue marketing objectives in the target market. All the seven elements of the marketing mix are directed towards potential customers of the product in the target market. The marketoriented approach in product innovation involves the upwww.research-results.com

Photos: © Anna – Fotolia.com, D'Well Research

PRODUCT Design Technology Useability Usefulness Solves pain Value Quality Brand Warranty

Fig. 1: The 7 Ps of Marketing

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grading of these seven elements. This approach ensures that the product meets the demands of the customers and tests it for user experience before its introduction to the target ­market.

Here, product innovation can be validated only through the market-oriented approach. So in a business context, the market-oriented approach to innovation is seen to be more effective than the technological approach and it succeeds only if businesses have information about the market and their competitors.

Market Research and Product Innovation Market-oriented product innovation relies on two methods for obtaining market information. The first one is the external method and the other is the internal or the statistical method.

In the internal method, the information we get from respondents is analysed and decisions are taken internally by the research analysts for the organisation. In the external method, the strategy decisions are based on knowledge acquired from the respondents through interviews, for instance information and knowledge acquired from a doctor or a chartered accountant about their profession. Both methods are used widely by companies to develop innovative products for the target market.

How Customer IQ is Related to Innovation Innovation differentiates a product from its competitors, so how is customer IQ related to innovation? When an innovative product is introduced into a market, the customer uses the product based on his idea or conception of the product. The understanding is based on his intellectual capacity. He uses the product in different ways; thus the customer’s IQ plays an important part in the innovation process and actually contributes to the resulting innovation.

Mapping Customer IQ (Using the Lavidge and Steiner Model) Customer IQ reflects in the behaviour of the customer. So the IQ of a customer can be fully understood by mapping the purchase journey of the customer using the Lavidge and Steiner model. The six steps are: 1. Awareness: The customer becomes aware of the product from different channels, mainly advertisements.

2. Knowledge: The customer acquires knowledge about the technology or different features of the product – for example, through the internet or a retail advisor.

3. Liking: The customer develops a favourable attitude towards the product or its features.

4. Preference: The customer prefers the said product over other brands or substitutes in the market – and due to its unique features.

5. Conviction: The customer develops the opinion that the product is good enough and meets his needs and requirements. He is sure that the product meets all his conditions and satisfies his wants. He is convinced it is a safe purchase.

6. Purchase: The customer makes the actual purchase. www.research-results.com

In the customer’s purchase journey, all six steps are more or less related to the IQ level of the customer. We understand that the customer is not just a demographic; he or she has the ability to think, analyse and conclude.

Customer IQ and its Impact on Business • Customer IQ is a method based on customer intelligence that grades the intellectual ability of customers to assess the product to match their own needs.

• Companies should draw conclusions on the cognitive ability of a customer who uses their product.

• It helps companies to acquire deeper insights about the customer, which in turn helps them to provide better service to customers and deliver better outcomes.

• It has become a necessary input for new product development, to design product advertisements, create instruction manuals and design packaging, and provide after sale service.

How to Measure Customer IQ Customer IQ is measured by calculating the cognitive ability of a customer to understand the product. This is done by using a questionnaire which probes the customer’s capacity to understand the product’s utility, price affordability, distribution channel, reliability of advertisements, physical appearance and people behind the product. In the questionnaire, different weightage points are assigned to all answer options to calculate the customer IQ of the respondents. The sum total of the weightage points for each respondent gives the individual customer IQ. Using this method, companies can find out which percentage of the population has a certain level of IQ. The customer IQ, thus derived, can be used by the company to do market segmentation based on IQ and also prepare marketing strategies. The method can be used by companies to boost their businesses. The largest group of customers with a particular IQ can be derived using this method and businesses can target this segment. Customer grading based on their IQ is a form of psychographic segmentation.

In figure 2, the X axis shows the IQ score of the population, and the Y axis shows the percentage of population. The mean IQ score is 100. Here we get a bell curve which shows the normal IQ score distribution of the population. The curve shows that 68 per cent of the population have an IQ score between 85 and 115. esearch &

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Typical IQ Level of Population 34 %

34 %

68 % Population in %

14 %

95 %

2%

0.1 %

14 %

55

70

85

100

2% 115

130

0.1 % 145

IQ Score

Fig. 2

Source: D'Well Research

IQ and Skewness of Distribution Focus on larger part of the business, where the same efforts would have resulted in millions more in terms of profit

Mode

Mean

Mode

Negative Skewness (left modal)

Fig. 3

Negative Skewness (right modal)

Customer IQ Differs from Customer Experience

Source: D'Well Research

Reality Differs from Ideal Scenario Companies assume the same bell curve of the IQ level of population for their selected customer segments, which is an ideal scenario, but in reality, customer IQ varies with age and background. The actual curve is either skewed towards the right or to the left as seen in figure 3. Companies must focus on the part that represents the customer IQ to maximise the business gains.

Distinction between Normal IQ and Customer IQ Normal IQ is measured by calculating the analytical or cognitive abilities of a ­person in relation to their age group. The IQ is calculated using the equation mental age / chronological age x 100. Here, mental age represents your cognitive abilities relative to what others of different ages can do. For example, if a child who is 10 years old can do only those things which can be done by others of the same age, then his mental age is 10, but if he can do things done by a 25year-old man, then his mental age is 25. So using the above equation, 10 / 10 x 100 = 100 is the normal IQ of the child with mental 22

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age 10. Studies have shown that about 68 per cent of the population have an IQ between 85 and 115, which is the normal IQ range, and the average normal IQ is 100, which is derived by taking the midpoint of the normal IQ range.

Customer IQ is the understanding or cognitive ability of a person to use a product. The method used to measure customer IQ is the same as normal IQ, but in a business context. It is calculated by using a questionnaire-based algorithm to calculate the overall ability of a customer to understand the product's usefulness, affordability, distribution channel, reliability of advertisements, after sales service, design, etc.

We have to assign different weightage to the answer options. The sum total of all the weightage points for each question gives the individual customer IQ. The average customer IQ can be calculated by taking the mean of the customer IQ score range corresponding to the maximum number of customers. For example, let’s assume that the average IQ score-range for visitors at a mall is 70-74 corresponding to the maximum number of people, then we can determine the average customer IQ by taking the mean of 70-74, which we get here as 72.

Is there any difference between customer IQ and customer experience? The terms can be confusing sometimes. Though ­connected, they actually reflect two different facets of the customer in a purchase journey. In a customer purchase journey, awareness, knowledge, liking and preference are based on cognitive or thinking behaviour. Customer IQ reflects this facet. The last two

Relevance of Customer IQ in Goods-Services Continuum Salt

Automobiles Soft Drinks Cosmetics Fast Detergents Food Outlets

Tangible Dominant

Intangible Dominant Airlines Consulting Fast Food Outlets Investment Advertising Agencies Management Teaching

Fig. 4

Source: D'Well Research

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factors, conviction and purchase, are based on the emotional feelings of the customer created from initial analysis. Customer experience reflects this part.

Relevance in Different Business Sectors In the scale (figure 4) we can see significant differences in the relevance of customer IQ for respondents from the goods sector (tangible dominant) and the respondents from the services sector (intangible dominant). The relevance of customer IQ was high for the services sector as a whole, but its influence was seen to be most high in the teaching and consulting segments and less in the investment management, airlines and advertising segments. The role of customer IQ was evidently less in the goods sector as a whole.

An Input for Innovation In this age, companies are at the center of innovation. It is through them that new technologies, inventions, products and ideas come to the market. Companies have to be aware of the importance of innovation in the competitive scenario, which requires them to make important decisions on product and process. Innovation requires a better understanding of the process through which the customer makes his purchase decision and the role of customer IQ in the purchase decisions. Customer IQ is an inevitable input for new product development, designing product advertisements, instruction manuals for usage, packaging design and after sales service. The biggest impact will be on the companies as they will now have to look beyond their R&D development centers and work with customers to foster cuttingedge innovation. ■

Thomas George is Managing Director of D’Well Research, a research provider with 20 years experience in user experience studies. His experience includes user-centered product development and forecasting using market research tools like prototype testing, interviewing, ethnographic studies and group discussions. He is experienced in qualitative analysis and project planning.

He is a member of various market research organisations and actively participates in international conferences organised

by Research & Results, ESOMAR, QRCA, AQR, CRC, MRA, PMRG, ARF, AMSRS. www.dowellresearch.com

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Solving Big Data Problems with Online Panel Solutions

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Closing the Gap

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We can learn a lot from people’s online behavior. Danyo ­Dimitrov explains how Big Data can be used effectively by bringing together the rational and the emotional.

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Photos: © monamis – Fotolia.com, JTN Research

btaining the best insights from respondents has always been a key objective in all research projects. There are many facets to that insights-gaining process, from the research methodology, to interaction with respondents, keeping their attention and hopefully receiving a complete point of view on the subject researched. Through the years, the pursuit of the ever-elusive insights has seen many transformations and even revolutions. With the latest development in technology and online tracking tools, this chase has been taken to a higher level yet again. Combining actively asking and passively listening may be the key to constructing a better and more comprehensive picture of consumer behavior.

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The Backstory Online market research has been around for almost 20 years now. It allows researchers to interview their respondents remotely with all the gains this brings. The online venue ensures that data quality can be monitored and actively measured via a combination of clever tools and approaches. Panels were and still are an essential building block of that construction, as they allow pre-targeting in an easy way and provide much more predictability on how big their potential consumer audience is expected to be. The level of detail increases as more and more clients and agencies move towards using online market research and online panels.

Many advancements have been made over the years with gamification, adapting surveys for mobile use, perfecting survey design and question visualization to obtain the best possible level of engagement from the respondents. Making it easy for them means gaining more of those precious insights we are all after.

Greetings from the Subconscious No matter the technology, however, the principle remains the same – asking people to actively share their opinion and provide as much detail as they possibly can, breaking down their perception of the researched subject to its smallest molecule and trying to make sense of it. After all, consumer behavior is expected to be rational, based on solid arguments of “why I buy this product”, “why I like it” and “how it is different from any other.” We all like to believe we are rational, but if we are honest, we have to admit that a portion of our consumer behavior is emotional. The rational part in us evaluates the pros and cons of certain purchases, but there is always this small somebody sitting on our shoulder, whispering in our ear: “Buy the red one, buy the red one.”

Actively gathering rational opinions gets us very far. It gives us fairly high levels of certainty on what the consumer would do. Still, the more we know about the subconscious little somebody on our shoulder, the more we look for ways to capture that emotional effect in our research findings. That “looking around” got us to think more about the data we gather but do not measure, as it makes no sense at first glance – Big Data.

…there is always this small somebody sitting on our shoulder, whispering in our ear: “Buy the red one, buy the red one.”

The New Big Thing In the first years of Big Data analysis used for market research purposes, there was great excitement about Big Data being the answer to all our questions. Surveying respondents started to look like a thing of the past. After all, people give us so much information with their online behavior alone. They show us what they are interested in by what they look for online, the articles they read, their preferences in the social networks, product mentions and more. There are so many sources to gather information from that actively asking became less attractive. The industry was counting on the fact that emotions were leading consumer behavior, and emotions are harder to extract in a standard research environment. They have to be deciphered from the unguided things we do when no one is watching. Clients began looking at this new solution and diverting their interest towards Big Data analysis in order to finally be able to capture and measure the subconscious drivers of their potential customers.

Big Data promises speed and accuracy. One can analyze, slice and reformat the data set as to discover trends and identify connections between seemingly unrelated factors. A number of software platforms came up with diverse solutions for sorting through the endless feed of data and making valuable findings. It appeared that we had the answer to all our questions: the ultimate solution.

Questions Arising Working more in that field soon displayed certain drawbacks. Clearly with unstructured data there are problems that pile up. The initial excitement began to give way to some important questions: • How to weed out important points from noise in the data?

• How to identify the most useful data channels to observe and analyze the given research objective?

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• Is it possible to gather information without invading personal space and sensitive data of the members of your audience?

• Where are the exact boundaries between personal space and the research-shareable information?

• Why is analysis based on Big Data only effective if done by a specialist with a certain set of technological and analytical skills, when such experts are not abundant?

• How to control costs, when collecting data from multiple sources requires significant storage space, which is bound to grow, sometimes beyond expectations?

• What is the route to putting together a 360-view of the consumer profile, bearing in mind it requires access to a wide range of data for that person, which is close to impossible to obtain and arguably crosses the limits of intrusiveness?

The realization of these issues made clients and researchers alike take a step back and contemplate traditional research for solutions again. Which methodology is fast, precise and easily compatible with Big Data? The answer has always been right in front of us – online market research via panels.

Stronger Together

Online panelists are aware of the fact that the panel owner holds their data and has a clear commitment to keeping that data safe from intrusion.

We know all about online panels. They have been around for quite some time. However, they hold key points in relation to the consumer that, if used wisely, can address the problems Big Data brings. Within the online panel, members are actively asked to share significant amounts of personal information from the very beginning. They are aware of the fact that the panel owner holds their data and has a clear commitment to keeping that data safe from intrusion. Members can decide how much they want to share and whether they’d like to get involved in a given research activity, being aware of how long it lasts and what it will actually monitor. This may seem like quite a straight-forward bunch of panel advantages, but if we go back to the Big Data problems mentioned above, it is clear where the pieces start to fit.

Big Data Problem

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Online Panel Solution

Removing “noise” from data

By correctly pre-targeting your audience, “noise” in the data is much less altogether, and important indicators are more visible

Identifying the most useful channels to monitor

Research findings from panel-based samples can easily point to the correct channels, and even which timeframes to observe closely

Respecting audience members’ privacy

Panel owners have a clear commitment to protecting member privacy.

Losing panelist trust is the worst option for the panel owner, hence no compromise is made with data protection

Boundaries between personal and research-shareable

The panelist's identity is proven upon registration, but remains anonymized during the course of research activities. Hence, personal data is available for analysis, without the actual personality being disclosed

Requires very specific mix of expert skills to analyze

The synergy with panel-sourced data puts exact scope on the research project and allows for a wider range of specialists to get involved in the analysis

Excess storage space costs

When limiting the Big Data collection to the panel-sourced sample, storage space is always under control

The unobtainable 360° consumer view

With the detailed profiling information within the registration questionnaires of the panel members, there many key points for putting together the 360°view in combination with the Big Data findings

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Pieces Fit Together Nicely The problems and solutions listed in the table are important, but do not give any specifics on how the process actually works. Depending on the needs of the client, the mechanics of bringing together panel surveys and gathering Big Data information vary. As with any other study, it all depends on the topic and objective. Defining the audience for the panel study already brings some answers as to which channels are most appropriate to monitor and which monitoring approach to apply.

The concept is quite simple, but executing it can get complex. In essence, there is a quantitative online survey using an online panel as a sample source, which is connected to a Big Data gathering tool to ensure that questionnaire respondents are also prompted to give the tool access to other information of theirs. The key aspect of the Big Data/panel synergy is to ensure both data collection modules communicate with each other on a technological level and variables are stored properly.

With this “dialogue” secured, the scene is set for either choosing cookie tracking, Facebook or another social media tracker, even installing a type of virtual companion that would measure certain lifestyle features, based on past choices. As long as the survey participant agrees to install the given tool and is made aware of what it actually tracks and for how long, there are no constraints in working with the data afterwards and sharing the findings. Under no circumstances should the respondent’s name, address, email and other personally identifiable information (PII) be stored or shared with third parties. The respondent profile is what matters for the researcher, not the specific person. As long as the respondents are confident that no PII is being shared, they will be confident to allow us to collect the information we need for the analysis.

The active and passive listening work together to solve the mystery of consumer behavior…

Real Value Added This is where all the pieces of the puzzle fit. The active and passive listening work together to solve the mystery of consumer behavior, where Big Data bases findings on past behavior, like search items, likes and dislikes, and online panel surveys generate input by asking about intentions, views and perspectives, oriented towards the future. The synergy between traditional research methodology and Big Data analysis is what creates the real value added.

A push to achieve a better understanding of what really goes into the purchase-decision process, from both the rational and emotional point of view. ■

Danyo Dimitrov has been working in market research since 2002. For the last six years he has been a part of JTN Research, leading the company as Managing Director since end of 2014. His research background consists of both operations and analytics work, as well as online panel construction and management. Danyo’s professional interests are focused on enhancing respondent experience and interdisciplinary research synergies. www.jtnresearch.com

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Concentrate on the

Goal

A Future-Oriented Operations Team

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t’s 9 o’clock in the evening, the room of the small flat is silent except for the noise of the computer. In front of the computer sits, on not such a comfortable chair, a young employee-less entrepreneur, trying to figure out how to create a special table set.

I have no idea how to proceed. Telling the client that I cannot ­deliver is not an option, I have to find the solution. But I have never used the software tool before. I call the client and describe the situation and I hear familiar words which I would use many times myself in the years that followed: “Don’t concentrate on the tool, concentrate on the goal!” After the line goes dead I find the solution in seconds. The next day the client is happy and we can continue to build DataExpert.

Since that moment it became our strategy to use and get the best out of the highest quality software tools on the market so that we could focus solely on meeting our clients’ objectives.

Building a Team Of course, if you only have the best tools all will be lost – you also need the best people to use them. So, along with my business partner, Zoltán, and after ten years of being heavily involved in the HR of our company, what have we discovered to be the key skills of 28

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a good scripter or data processor? Firstly, they should be committed to market research with a strong IT background, some background in social sciences is also desirable. Other prerequisites include good project management skills, a clear understanding of their project’s economic background, global communication capability and more recently the ability to design (data visualization). We could only achieve this across our more than 50 people strong team by providing them with continuous, multi-leveled training programs.

Building the right team through training has become even more important in recent years, with the need for IT innovation increasing significantly and the market searching for people who can both understand needs and explain solutions to customers. OPS teams have to be good at IT innovation, understanding research and have strong interpersonal skills. How do we make sure it happens? By offering our people continuous training, using the best software tools and understanding and concentrating on the goal we set together with the client.

1. Offline Conjoint on Tablets Let me share a case study of a project we worked on this year. It shows exactly how IT development and research understanding work www.research-results.com

Photos: © nd3000, adiruch na chiangmai, Prostock-studio – Fotolia.com, Dapresy, DataExpert

How can an operations team be set up in an ­ideal way? Dezső Karasszon knows a lot about it.

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Fig. 1: The DataExpert translation tool – an example of combining goal and knowledge

Less calculation means longer battery life – a key point when you consider the use of Android tablets.

hand in hand. A multinational client needed a conjoint program in an offline environment. This rarely happens as a conjoint is more often an online genre, where lots of combinations appear based on previously defined settings for each respondent to find the best product, price model etc. The calculations should be done on the server side where performance is easier to manage. Here – the project being a global study with an agricultural topic – it was only possible to use an offline methodology with every respondent getting a unique combination of questions.

Variable and Adaptive Additionally, we reduced the size of code as much as possible as the fieldwork was running on Android tablets which aren’t meant to deal with complex and long calculations. Less calculation ­means longer battery life – a key point when you consider the use of this technology. Furthermore, we built up the script dynamically – the study contained forty different markets with large variations in and different numbers of products, packaging, currency, price and pricing models. With the script package labelled accordingly, only the combination suitable for the given market was downloaded in each country. We could ensure easy quality control of the script as the format of the conjoint input data was kept in the same structure www.research-results.com

and was easily followed.

In summary, the goal was to transfer the combinations of conjoint on the individual machines and conduct the fieldwork offline.

Running a Project Successfully DataExpert managed this firstly by using Nfield CAPI from software solutions provider NIPO and some JavaScript to shorten the code and improve performance. In several countries, in the data ­collection phase, the script had been completely de-centralized and was running on diverse devices, but in the end we arrived to a fully centralized approach with standardized data structure. Only by understanding the business goal could we run the project successfully, resulting in excellent data quality and a highly satisfied client.

2. The Goal of the Translation Tool The DataExpert translation tool (fig. 1) is another example of combining goal understanding and technical knowledge. The goal here is to conduct the scripting and translation of multi-country studies as efficiently as possible. Multi-country studies are more effectively done with the central scripting approach, where all the programming is done in one location. A centralized data collection helps reesearch &

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The dashboard was optimized for both PC and mobile phone, the mobile version being responsive and structurally different.

searchers save time and effort on project coordination and quality checking. With this coordinated approach the overall data quality improves significantly as well.

Central Scripting However, the translation phase is often challenging as translation in several languages should be done in parallel, but if further changes come they have to be corrected every time in each script. Reviewers need to collect all the feedback and send it all together to reduce the email communication to a reasonable level. Also, the layout and look and feel can be different due to language specific wording and the small typos made in the translation. These can only be ­discovered in the testing phase, when the tester sends back the file to the translation company. It is enough to mistype an HTML code and the translated text is not shown correctly anymore.

Research Going Global DataExpert’s translation tool is an online way of completing and validating the translation in parallel and on one interface for several countries, and of seeing the survey page exactly as it will look on the respondent’s screen. Clients can save time, while all respondents – regardless of the country they are residing in – get the same experience. Also, the tool works as a text editor, so no HTML tags and programming need be done, and any kind of translation office can intervene without prior training. The tool can be easily optimized for any data collection software – any amount of software can be involved.

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After the translation is ready on the online interface and the quality control has been done – of course, by controlling the layout part as well – all the translated texts can be imported to the software in less than a minute. With the globalization of market research over the last couple of years we find this tool to be an absolute must for further increasing efficiency and quality in international data ­collection.

3. Dashboard Setup for Thousands of Users A third symbiosis example in connection with our data team and business is a visualization project for a study, the end client being a large international chain. Several data sources were combined to make sure that users could regularly keep abreast of any business changes. However, the data of all individual users from each store was one of the input files. And as they were only allowed to see the results of their own unit it was necessary to set up user rights for approximately 6,500 users with 8,700 different levels of usage, thus allowing them to see only the data of the store they were working in.

Huge Amounts of Data Of course, we are talking about huge amounts of data – more than 1,000,000 respondents with the number increasing by 100-150,000 each month, containing customer connection, store operation sub measures, so that on the user level it becomes only a few KPIs that are understood by everyone and that clearly show how the www.research-results.com

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The globalized approach of market research operation and high quality can only be achieved with a highly educated, not to say cultivated team.

business is doing. In addition, and for a better user experience, the dashboard was optimized for both PC and mobile phone, the mobile ­version being responsive and structurally different. We use, and will continue to use, the storytelling approach of Dapresy, which perfectly handles such high numbers of users.

It goes without saying that some super user rights have also been defined so that the regional and global management can see the results on both those levels. The individual users also see the benchmark data and can act on the business data accordingly. Again, this project could only be done by concentrating on the goal and having a profound understanding of the business case. While, of course, a good dashboard design made the whole project sexier.

pro-cesses lies in understanding the context of each project and long term vision of our partners. All technical innovations start with a required professional innovation and a need from a client. The future success stories start by talking with each other today. What gives our team members flow and happiness in their work? Besides the love we have for quality data we also like to contribute to our clients’ marketing and innovation. That leads us to the greatest professional experience.

Let’s talk about it in Munich at the Research and Results 2017.

We will be there! ■

Vision for the Future The globalized approach of market research operation and high quality can only be achieved with a highly educated, not to say cultivated team. We need to have a profound understanding of different cultures, approaches to our profession and can only act once the goals of certain studies have been clearly set. We save time and effort by automating processes and investing continuously in developing our team’s soft skills. Internal communication is always a crucial aspect in every organization, and it is even more important to speak the same language with an operations team outside your organization.

After more than ten years partnering different organizations worldwide, we still think the key to success when building efficient www.research-results.com

Dezső Karasszon is Managing Director at DataExpert. In fact he founded DataExpert together with Zoltán Vasvári in 2006. He believes being an entrepreneur is his life mission and enjoys being part of the global market research industry as well as contributing to the economic development of his Hungarian home town, Debrecen. DataExpert works with many of the best professionals in the market research industry and is happy to be one of the exhibitors at Research & Results. www.dataexpert.hu

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Addressing

Automation

In market research, automation frees up everyone to focus on their core strengths – says Ben Hogg.

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Technology Improving Performance

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Automation is nothing new, and it is here to stay

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ur biggest asset at Lucid is the empowerment of our employees to make swift decisions that solve problems and remove pain points. Internally, we call it “Speed of Decisions”, but it is actually another way to explain how valuable automation can be. Sure, automation is a trendy word.

However, upon reflection, it is apparent that this concept is not new to our company, and definitely not new to the market research industry.

I recently chaired a session at the Market Research Society’s Future of B2B Research Conference in London, which focused on automation in our industry. My fellow panelists and I may have different approaches to how our companies should be automated, but we all reiterated the same points I have come to realize – automation is nothing new, and it is here to stay.

Discovering the Need From an industry perspective, the utilisation of automated dialling technology through Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) has been widely accepted and adopted for longer than I’ve been in the industry. Researchers (and their clients!) have long been searching for ways to reduce both cost and time in gathering and delivering insight. In fact, two of the more negative associations across the research industry are “time-consuming” and “expensive”.

If speed and automation are important to companies and drive the industry forward, why haven’t more research agencies adopted automated solutions? Like many, our industry is improved by the people. This means offerings that alter this human dynamic can be seen as threatening, and in some cases, downright scary. However, the beauty lies in the fact that automation frees up everyone to focus on their core Human-based transcription strengths. Those compelling insights and recommendations that our cliat a cost of £25 per minute versus ents need come faster, smarter, and cheaper through the power of automated solutions. We have an opportunity to take inevitable change and employing automated transcription make it meaningful.

at £1 per minute. The implication is that a human-based solution is 25 times better.

Can this really be true?

Cost versus Quality

Briefly, pause and consider a few things. First, think about how much time is spent sending out multiple requests for quotes. Now, add on the extra steps of comparing multiple feasibilities and prices, and finally bringing on partner after partner to close out those last remaining completes. The number and cost of resources required to get this process right are nothing short of astounding. At the core of this is an equation we all are very familiar with – the cost versus quality argument. As Blue Yonder’s Jonathan Million pointed out in a recent presentation at NewMR, in some instances costs differ wildly from quality. One poignant example Million shared was that of a video transcription company that employed traditional human-based transcription at a cost of £25 per minute versus employing automated transcription at £1 per minute. The implication is that a human-based solution is 25 times better. Can this really be true?

One of my co-panelists, Steve Phillips, founder and CEO of Zappistore, explained that his company was an idea built purely upon automation from the beginning. Steve admitted that previous failures and challenges had been the impetus behind his faith in their model and that he believed the time was right to address the growing demands for something “quicker and more cost effective” than what was available at the time.

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Our team is constantly questioning the norms that persist within the industry and looking to automate those procedures.

Solution Driven At Lucid, our focus is also on automation. We’re reinforcing our foundation by making a concerted effort to hire people who are willing to question the status quo and have at least a “hobbyist” interest in coding. Many of our employees do not come from market research, and explaining some of the traditional processes is mind-boggling to them. Activities such as proposal writing, assessing feasibility, pricing and data collection are unnecessarily manual in their eyes. Our team is constantly questioning the norms that persist within the industry and looking to automate those procedures. In doing so, we are able to spend more time exploring new technologies.

Improving Quality Lucid employees create and implement automated solutions to improve the overall quality of the customer experience. Platform integrations and custom tools are able to perform these repetitive tasks without human interaction, enhancing our accuracy, consistency, and allowing us to focus our attention on more complex scenarios.

It also helps our customers reconcile, and take advantage of, the discrepancy that exists between cost and quality in market research today.

Embracing New Technology Ben Hogg is Managing Director at EMEA, Lucid. He started his career as managing director and owner of Bristol-based youth communications and marketing agency Out of Hand. His first job in online market research came with passive measurement company NetValue in 1999. Ben then moved to MyVoice as business development director before joining Nielsen//NetRatings. He launched SF-based mobile measurement and survey company Telephia in Europe and became e-Rewards’ first European employee in 2006. Ben was previously MD, EMEA portfolio companies at Research Now. www.luc.id

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Ultimately, change is difficult for many to embrace. Automation not only represents change, it represents a threat to individuals’ existing futures, one where their core competencies could be rendered irrelevant. Disruption will always cause alarm amongst those that are affected, but advancing technologies allows for more opportunities.

Not long ago, salespeople in the research panel industry distributed laminated rate card grids. Today these feel like artifacts from a bygone era, but they represent the leading technology at that time.

Looking back, we can see that automation arose out of a need to achieve goals faster and more efficiently. Even now, it seems we’ve barely scratched the surface at the capabilities that automation will unlock for us. ■

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Human Nature Understanding Political Sentiment and the Political Climate with Brand Research

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ost-truth – a word which existed several decades without being noticed – became really popular last year, especially in the political context. The frequency of its usage increased rapidly, so the Oxford Dictionaries declared it to be the word of the year 2016, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. In other words: it became common knowledge that even rational themes like politics are crucially influenced by emotions. In a different context, this finding was already learned long ago: in brand management. The unconscious perception determines a great part of our consumption preferences and decisions. Hence communication as well as product development have to take into account the unconscious, emotional perception. While conducting brand research and revealing unconscious per-ceptions in this context, we came up with an innovative idea: After having analyzed hundreds of brands, advertising materials, industries, markets – what if we treat parties like brands and analyze them with our approved method that captures the unconscious emotional impact? Said and done: As 2017 is a year full of elections www.research-results.com

Photos: © Robert Kneschke, sharpi1980 – Fotolia.com, Interrogare

Brands and products affect emotions. The unconscious perception determines a great part of our consumption preferences and decisions.

A fact that also applies to politics. Stefanie Sonnenschein and Sören Scholz explain what voters and soccer fans as well as parties and brands have in common.

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Fig. 1: Emotional profiles

in Germany – especially the Bundestag elections – we chose these to be the main subject of the study, in particular the parties. We ­wanted to explore what elective citizens in Germany unconsciously – and hence also emotionally – associate with parties and their top candidates.

Tool and Study We conducted an online survey with 2,661 representative elective citizens in Germany. To measure the subliminal level of perception, we used the Emotional Branding Monitor (EBM) – a method used for brand research for approximately ten years at Interrogare. The results of this method make it possible to identify the emotional profile of the analyzed brand, to compare its emotional positioning to the competition, to determine its implicit likability and its crucial factors – everything for optimizing the brand strategy, as well as communication, product or packaging design.

How does it Work?

The EMB is able to identify subconscious emotions by reaction time measurement. In a brand research context, the participants are shown a brand and several stimuli – pictures and verbal items – on their screen one at a time. The respondents have to indicate for each stimulus – by clicking on the “does fit” (A) or “does not fit” (K) key – whether they associate an image or term with the shown brand or not. The faster the reaction, the stronger the subconscious, emotional association. The used verbal items and pictures are validated and represent the seven scientifically proven basic emotions that make up the foundation in all human emotions. The technique used has a long track record of scientific and practical implementations, for www.research-results.com

example in marketing and social psychological research. It records subconscious, cognitively non-reflected associations and emotions, hence there is no distortion of results due to influences such as social desirability. Another advantage is that the way of answering is simple, fast and intuitive. The quality of results is ensured by a training module connected ahead, the rescaling of individual reaction speed, an elimination of outliers and a full randomization and avoidance of sequential effects. In this study, we simply modified it by showing a party or candidate instead of a commercial brand.

Subconsciously Linked The results of the study show emotional profiles for parties and top candidates, as well as precise information on the strength of the associations with certain items. On this basis, statements can be made about how and how strongly parties and candidates are subconsciously linked with certain pictures and terms in the minds of the people. Above you are shown the emotional profiles of the six analyzed parties: CDU/CSU (grey), SPD (red), GRÜNE (green), LINKE (purple), FDP (yellow) and AfD (blue) (Fig. 1).

The governing parties CDU/CSU and SPD have the most similar emotional profiles. The most extreme profiles belong to those parties, which also polarize the most: LINKE (purple) and AfD (blue).

Across all respondents, they are strongly associated with the terms skepticism and caution – thus parties not to be trusted much in the average perception of the elective German citizens. The emotional profile of the green party has a clear peak in the emotional system of balance, which derives from strong associations with terms like sustainability, simplicity or even friendship. FDP’s profile is mostly similar to the average profile of all tested parties, indicating a lack of a unique selling proposition compared to the other parties. esearch &

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Fig. 2: Party likability

Overall Brand Likability Besides the emotional profiles, we also collected data about the unconscious overall brand (or party) likability for parties and candidates. It reflects the above emotional profiles in a certain way: The SPD, which has the strongest emotional profile of all parties tested, is also implicitly perceived as the most likable. The two parties which were seen most critically also assume the most negative values in this context. The parties with the most elaborated emotional profile yield the highest overall implicit (brand) likability (Fig. 2). To that effect, the emotional profiles and overall brand likabilities for the parties reflect the last election results – and even more so – the survey results of the “Sunday question” (“Sonntagsfrage”), which measures the voting intention in the run-up to the elections.

Driven by Emotions These results highly indicate that measuring emotions of voters may be a helpful tool in order to better understand political sentiment and the political climate. Having analyzed brands in various industries and markets ranging from highly emotional FMCG brands to rather rational B2B brands, these results are by no means a surprise for us. In fact, although elections should be made up by rational, conscious decisions, voters are still humans who are driven by emotions and emotional perceptions to a substantial part. A fact that has coined the term “post-truth” and could be witnessed in many recent elections, such as the Brexit in the UK Fig. 3: Party likability split up in voters and non-voters

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Fig. 4: Party likability split up in voters and non-voters

and the US presidential elections in 2016. In other words, it is worthwhile to apply brand research tools seeking to understand the implicit, emotional perception of parties in the context of political research.

Substantial Differences Despite this, we could also identify substantial differences in the perception of parties and commercial brands tested in other studies: In brand research, we usually find that nonusers still rate other brands than their main brand benevolently or have at least neutral perceptions of brands they do not use. Particularly leading brands are usually perceived well by non-users in most markets. This does not hold for parties: The potential voters and supporters of a specific party usually feel a substantial antipathy for most of the other parties – yielding in negative ratings on the overall brand likability scale. We have not seen this result for a single commercial brand so far. The reason for this, can easily be seen when splitting the emotional profiles into voters and non-voters of each party (Fig. 3). For an easier legibility, the profiles are visualized as a vertical line-chart, where the dashed line stands for the nonvoters, and the continuous line for the voters of the respective party. It is clear: voters and non-voters have almost opposite perceptions of a party.

Voters and Non-voters Even more revealing are the results of the implicit party likability split up in voters and non-voters: From all parties tested, CDU/CSU yields the highest difference in overall party likability between voters and non-voters (Fig. 4). Concluding, voters do not perceive parties similarly to brands but rather show a rivalry like soccer fans: Being a supporter of one club (for example Borussia Dortmund) often implies not to like specific other clubs (for example FC Schalke 04 or Bayern Munich). Based on this result, one has to be cautious when simply trying to transfer branding strategies to the political context of parties. While brands can easily benefit from a co-branding partnerships (such as putting an Intel sticker on the new Dell computer or Louis Vuitton designing an exclusive set of suitcases and bags for the BMW i8), parties should have more concerns when joining forces.

This is supported by the fact that substantial parts of the German population are not in favor of a great coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD. Or, put in another context, who would want Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich to club together in the Bundesliga? ■

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Stefanie Sonnenschein is responsible for marketing and communication at the market research agency Interrogare. Brand management and research, in particular implicit measuring approaches, have been one of her key areas since the time of her studies and work for the business consultancy SWP. She studied economics with a focus on marketing and international management at the University of Kassel.

Sören Scholz is Managing Director of the market research agency Interrogare and in this position responsible for method development and its implementation. His expertise focuses on brand and communication research, preference, price and customer satisfaction ­surveys. He studied business economics and psychology at the University of Bielefeld. www.interrogare.de

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People’s Worries

Study “Challenges of Nations” 2017 What are the most urgent issues that countries need to resolve today? Ronald Frank describes the results of this year’s survey and identifies which challenges people are seeing and what they’re concerned about. or the “Challenges of Nations” study, GfK Verein has been annually surveying ­citizens about the most pressing challenges facing their country since 2001 – this year 24 countries were included in the study. The replies from this survey make visible the empirical changes in public and published opinion that have taken place over the year. Together, they show the comprehensive shifts in the significance and timeliness of individual topics – something that is especially topical in times of widespread “post-factual” opinion.

International Concerns

Unemployment is the number one of international concerns

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Unemployment Globally in 2017, people view unemployment (24 percent) as the largest challenge to be overcome – the Spaniards lead this category with 61 percent. Unemployment also deeply worries people in Kenya (51 percent), France (48 percent) and Italy (46 percent). Official World Bank unemployment statistics point to comparatively high unemployment in these countries, which justifies the strong concern found there. According to statistics, South Africa's unemployment rate is the only one that is higher than Spain's. However, the people in South Africa have another topic to worry about. Just under 40 percent are concerned with crime in the country, and only 30 percent see unemployment as an important problem.

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Cost of Living In addition to worries about the job market, people worldwide are anxious about rising prices and the cost of living. At 23 percent, concern about developments in pricing and purchasing power ranks second globally – and thereby loses the top position from last year. People in Nigeria, in particular, are seriously concerned about this topic (67 percent), where they are especially struggling with the consequences of a drop in the price of crude oil.

People worldwide are anxious about rising prices and Corruption the cost of living At 16 percent, corruption takes third place on the global list of concerns. Kenya is the most

worried by far, where more than half the population is concerned about it. Therefore, Kenya the only country in this study in which corruption – standing neck and neck with unemployment – is explicitly named as the biggest challenge. Indians (29 percent) and Spaniards (25 percent) also show above-average worries about corruption in their own countries, where the topic occupies second place. However, Swedes, the Dutch, and the Swiss are less concerned.

Not a single respondent listed corruption as a problem there.

The results largely match the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) published by Transparency International. In the countries in which people express serious concern, corruption is clearly visible according to the CPI, while there is very little in countries with less

Nations at a Glance – The Challenges 2017 (top 2 per country) EUROPE Immigration / Integration 53 Unemployment 35

AUSTRIA

Politics / Government 24 Unemployment 20

BELGIUM

Unemployment 51 Price and purchasing power 16

FRANCE

Immigration / Integration 56 Poverty 17

GERMANY

Unemployment 46 Immigration / Integration 28

ITALY

Health service 25 Care of the aged 20

NETHERLANDS

Health service 22 Unemployment 20

POLAND

Price and purchasing power 31 Housing / Rents 16

RUSSIA

Unemployment 61 Corruption 25

SPAIN

Immigration / Integration 35 Health service 12

SWEDEN

Immigration / Integration 36 Pensions / Old age provision 23

SWITZERLAND

Politics / Government 22 Terrorism 21

TURKEY

Health service 31 World policy / European policy 20

GREAT BRITAIN

■ No. 1 challenge ■ No. 2 challenge Source: GfK Verein “Challenges of Nations”; base: 27,517 respondents, unaided answers; in percent rounded; multiple responses possible

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Research Nations at a Glance – The Challenges 2017 (top 2 per country) NORTH & SOUTH AMERICA Health service 56 Education policy 32

BRAZIL

Crime 43 Price and purchasing power 34

MEXICO

Immigration / Integration 17 Politics / Government 15

USA

ASIA & PACIFIC Unemployment 30 Corruption 29

INDIA INDONESIA

Price and purchasing power 34 Economic stability 34 Politics / Government 40 Economic stability 36

IRAN JAPAN

Family policy 22 Care of the aged 16 Economic stability 46 Politics / Government 46

SOUTH KOREA

AFRICA Corruption 51 Unemployment 51

KENYA

Price and purchasing power 67 Power supply 65

NIGERIA

Crime 39 Unemployment 30

SOUTH AFRICA

■ No. 1 challenge ■ No. 2 challenge Source: GfK Verein “Challenges of Nations”; base: 27,517 respondents, unaided answers; in percent rounded; multiple responses possible

concern. People in Turkey and Russia make an exception to this.

Only a few people see corruption as a problem there even though corruption is clearly noticeable in these countries according to the CPI.

Crime Crime has become less of a concern for people in general in the past year. The international average for this topic is 14 percent, which puts it in fourth place on the international list of concerns (2016: 18 percent) In Mexico (43 percent) and South Africa (39 percent), people are particularly worried about the omnipresence of crime in the country, and this topic therefore ranks first in each case. In Brazil, this challenge ranks third place in the national comparison at 30 percent, just like in Germany (16 percent), France (16 percent) and Austria (15 percent).

Politics Politics and the government cause worry for about a tenth of citizens worldwide, and this topic ranks fifth overall. Last year, ­concern about politics and the government did not rank first or second in any of the 24 countries surveyed. This is different in 2017. In Iran (40 percent), Belgium (24 percent) and Turkey (22 percent), this is the leading concern, and in South Korea (46 percent) and the USA (15 percent), it takes second place with a narrow margin. The reasons for this somewhat marked increase in skepticism are hetero42

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geneous across countries. Political issues can be brought into focus very quickly and seriously by election campaigns or election results as well as by far-reaching political decisions.

Challenges in Germany Immigration and Integration Although an above-average number of Germans are concerned about the topic of poverty, there is still another issue that is very present in their minds: immigration and integration.

Last year, worry about immigration and integration rose dramatically in Germany. And although this concern has clearly lost some of its topicality this year with a decrease of 27 percentage points, more than half of Germans are still concerned about it. Since the Balkan route was closed and the EU-Turkey Refugee Deal came into effect in March 2016, the number of incoming refugees has decreased significantly. Even if this has prevented another influx, the urgent societal task of integrating immigrants in Germany remains.

Austrians, the Swiss and Swedes are also having similar thoughts – the issue of immigration and integration is also top on the ranking of concerns in these countries.

Poverty in Old Age As briefly mentioned above, a different issue is causing concern for more and more Germans: poverty. With an increase of seven perwww.research-results.com

Research The Challenges in Germany (2007 to 2017) 2007

2009

2011

2013

2015

2016

2017

Immigration / Integration

7

7

16

8

35

83

56

Poverty

3

6

6

13

15

10

17

Crime

10

8

17

8

10

10

16

Unemployment

67

57

55

32

22

13

16

Pensions / Old age provision

18

9

17

14

16

8

14

Pricing and purchasing power

18

13

33

29

16

8

12

Education policy

10

14

23

16

15

9

12

Social security

8

13

25

12

9

8

11

World / European policy

-

1

4

4

7

7

10

Terrorism

-

-

1

1

6

4

9

Immigration and integration are less serious issues for Germans, but still concern number one

Source: GfK Verein “Challenges of Nations”; base: 27,517 respondents, unaided answers; in percent rounded; multiple responses possible

centage points, poverty ranks second in the German list of concerns, for the first time, at 17 percent. The respondents named poverty in old age a problem in particular. Concern about pensions and retirement benefits is also generally increasing and came in fifth place this year.

Crime and Terrorism Worry about crime increased in the last 12 months from 10 percent to 16 percent and therefore is positioned in third place currently in the German list of concerns. According to crime statistics, the number of registered offenses in Germany only increased by nearly 1 percent in total from 2015 to 2016. In detail, however, there are larger changes. For example, domestic burglaries decreased, and the situation also improved for shoplifting and white-collar crime. However, this has not been the case for violent crimes and violations of the German Weapons Act. Politically motivated crimes also reached a new high.

For the first time, terrorism also ranks among the ten most important concerns in Germany this year. It has increased from 4 percent to 9 percent (tenth place). Since the attacks in Paris in November 2015, other European countries have become the target of terrorist violence. This includes Germany in July 2016 when an assailant attacked several people on a regional train with an axe. Only a few days later, an attacker blew himself up in Ansbach. And twelve ­people died in Berlin in the winter of 2016 during a truck attack on a Christmas market.

“Challenges of Nations” The representative “Challenges of Nations” study covers 24 countries worldwide in 2017. This year, Kenya in East Africa was included for the first time. Asia is currently represented by India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Iran. The African continent currently participates in this study with three countries, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. In the Americas, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States are once again part of this survey, and the list of countries in Europe has also remained unchanged from the previous year. The survey is based on this open-ended question, which is worded the same every year: “What do you believe are the most pressing challenges that need to be solved today in [respective country]?” There are no restrictions on the responses given by those surveyed, and several issues can be mentioned. 27,517 people were surveyed for the current 2017 “Challenges of Nations” study.

Unemployment Concern about unemployment currently ranks fourth, with 16 percent, and this is the first time since the start of the study that it has not been in the top two. With an unemployment rate of 4.1 percent for 2016 according to the OECD, there have never been so few unemployed people since the reunification. However, the German government is expecting unemployment to rise again in coming years due to immigration. Above all, a lack of educational opportunities for refugees – such as language courses, enrollment options in schools or apprenticeship options – could significantly reduce their chances on the labor market. ■ www.research-results.com

Ronald Frank heads the field of studies at GfK Verein. He previously worked for many years in media research at GfK SE. He conducts research that unveils fundamental structures and developments for private consumption in society and economy. Most of his studies are available to the members of GfK Verein free of charge. www.gfk-verein.org

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Leading by Example In a time when customers are ever-more selective when choosing between products and services that are increasingly exchangeable, it has become instrumental for companies to differentiate themselves through a unique customer experience (CX). Stephan Thun explains what steps to consider when implementing CX. 44

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How to Implement a Successful Customer Experience Strategy

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ccording to a study by Gartner, 89 percent of companies entered the competitive battleground of CX in 2016. Getting the customer experience right not only gives a company the competitive edge, it also improves customer loyalty and retention, share of wallet and customer acquisition through positive word of mouth. The goal for many companies looking to set themselves apart from the competition through CX is to deliver the ultimate customer journey. This entails providing the customer with a single, consistent, and seamless experience across all touchpoints. However, two thirds of all CX initiatives fail before they have reached full maturity. In order for your CX strategy to succeed and reap the rewards, we have summarised five essential steps to take before launching a CX programme.

1. Set Clear Objectives and Commit Resources Without a unifying goal of what a company wants its customer experience to become, a programme can become fragmented and inconsistent. A realistic objective should be ­established. For example: “To improve customer experience to reduce churn, resulting in increased revenue of five percent annually.” Whatever your objective may be, make sure it shows the impact on revenue or other meaningful outcomes that matter to the company, such as customer retention, increased sales, increased life-time value, profit, margin, ­decreased costs, etc. If you can relate your programme to the language of revenue, your success will skyrocket.

Once you have formulated a realistic objective, communicate it clearly to all employees.

Ensure that they all work towards a common goal and understand their responsibilities in achieving it. When a company takes the plunge of putting a CX programme in place, it usually involves large investments in surveying, training, and devising new CX strategies.

Make sure you set resources aside. Without resources, both financial and human, ­dedicated to the joint CX goal, a company’s best intentions and strongest beliefs about CX will fall flat.

Make sure you set resources aside.

Without resources, both financial and human, dedicated to the joint CX goal, a company’s best intentions and strongest beliefs about CX will fall flat.

2. Create a Company-wide CX Culture with Shared Beliefs In companies that start a CX programme without a clear sense of what the customer experience should look like, there is often frustration that the best surveys and data analytics cannot overcome. As MaritzCX’s CXEvolution model makes clear, for a company to succeed in CX, the company needs a pervasive shared cultural belief throughout the organisation.

Getting broad buy-in from across the organisation is key to success. Help everyone understand what the programme means to them and regularly share success stories from the field to highlight and reinforce engagement in the programme. Even if your programme is small, give it a name and a brand, and treat it like a product. Many of our clients report that the single most important item related to their programme success is the personal time they took to meet with key influencers and leaders at the business to explain what is happening, its impact and to solicit their support. Keep it positive, get employees to talk about it and keep the programme top of mind through regular communications.

A Strong Leader is Essential It is essential that a CX programme has a strong leader or leadership team who serve as evangelists for the programme. The leadership must also insist that employees learn about the CX programme through training, which needs to continue with new employees coming in. As the programme evolves, employees need to be kept abreast of changes. Every employee should know what he or she needs to do within their positions to make the desired customer experience come to life – and be given the freedom to deliver it. This means that providing solid customer service becomes second nature to all employees, enabling the company to succeed in its CX goals.

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3. Putting the Customer at the Centre of the Experience It would be wrong to assume that just because modern customers use mobile phones to manage and organise their daily lives, that one should only communicate with them online, via an app, or a text message.

Looking at the customer behaviour through this singular lens would leave out decisive factors that would help you to understand your customers.

This includes their attitudes, emotions, contexts, and goals. Ignoring these factors will result in missing the opportunity to create a customer experience that puts the customer at the centre. At the same time, despite their digital savviness, these same customers might look for analog interactions such as being able to contact a human customer service representative by means of a phone call or in store.

Build a Customer Journey Map A major step in putting the customer at the centre of the experience is to know how and when customers interact with you and what their experience with your brand, people, products and services is. Building a customer journey map will help you get the customer’s point of view on key moments, reflect on attitudes and emotions that might come into play, as well as preferred channels of interaction. Doing this will give your company the essential evaluation points to start improving your customer’s experience. Surveys, social media audits, online ratings, and the like should be the cornerstone to your CX programme. All of these help you to explore the effects of various impactful “moments of truth” along the customer journey. They are the most time- and cost-effective way to get statistically significant customer insights on an ongoing basis. Transactional and relationship surveys should be triggered automatically. For transactional, the invitation should be sent shortly after the interaction took place in order to receive feedback while the experience is still fresh in their minds. Many programmes will have several transactional surveys active at one time.

There is a direct correlation between how employees feel and how customers feel about a business.

Don’t Forget Your Employees Relationship surveys consider all the transactions and interactions collectively as well as how customers feel about competitors. These surveys reveal the overall engagement and ­loyalty of the customer. In other words, a transaction survey may reveal that customers like the purchase experience, but a relationship survey might reveal that customers don’t see value in the collective products and services of a company. Perhaps the brand value is misaligned, or marketing is selling the wrong items to the wrong people. For unsolicited feedback, such as social media and review websites, do not forget to have the right tools in place to filter and analyse this data for hidden insights. Most importantly, don’t forget your employees! There is a direct correlation between how employees feel and how customers feel about a business.

By surveying them on a regular basis, you will receive insights from an internal perspective.

Employees respond well to these surveys and they want themselves as well as the company to improve. This survey should ask questions about employee passion, what drives them, and what they want the company to do better.

4. The Right Technology to Translate Data into Insights The whole point of gathering data is not to collect more data. Most businesses have­ mountains of it already. The goal is to create usable insights that drive change. Technology can both enable and hinder an omni-channel customer experience approach. Companies that leverage multiple systems to track interactions and experiences can have a hard time actually achieving omni-channel execution. In order to drive the right decisions and im-

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provements, it is critical that customer feedback and operational data, such as customer ­relationship information, financial and contact centre data, be consolidated into one ­central platform. By gaining and analysing feedback, you will be able to evaluate customer satisfaction at various touchpoints, identify and measure the drivers of channel satisfaction, and determine how well the channels work together to form a seamless experience. The end result will be a new-found ability to connect customer perceptions with customer behaviours and understand exactly what your organisation should do operationally to improve.

Identify Weaknesses With the right insights, you are able to know your customers in terms of profile, product ownership and usage. You will truly know your customers and be able to engage with them based on their preferences with relevant content. In order to achieve the objectives set in the programme strategy, modern software uses data mining algorithms to find hidden ­patterns and correlations in your data, such as segments of CX customers who are either under or over-served. It helps to identify weaknesses in service, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, and areas where more support is needed. In the last few years, there have been huge advances in text analytics and natural language processing. Both of these help you to create meaningful summaries of openended comments from surveys, social media feeds and review sites without too much manual intervention. Today, techniques exist for topic analysis, entity identification, sentiment analysis and emotion detection, allowing you to quickly ascertain topics without having to read a large number of comments.

The end result will be a newfound ability to connect customer perceptions with customer behaviours and understand exactly what your organisation should do operationally to improve.

Empower Every Employee And even if you don’t receive feedback from all of your customer groups, you can apply predictive analytics to identify customers who are likely to defect, and those who might deepen their financial relationship with the company – all based on the feedback received from other customer groups sharing the same journey. A modern CX programme empowers everyone in the organisation with the data and insight that applies to them, in the right formats, at the right times. The right software makes data and insights available in real-time to all those who can have a positive impact on the customer experience. By managing access rights and creating different dashboard views and reports, you can give employees the tools to fulfil their KPIs as well as the overall company-wide CX goals. With the right insights, your employees will get to know their customers in terms of profile, product ownership and usage. In turn, this will allow them to pro-actively engage and interact with customers through their preferred channel and with relevant content.

5. Demonstrate the Value and Keep the Momentum Going!

Many CX management programmes either disappear entirely or become largely irrelevant if they cannot prove their positive contribution to the financial performance of the company.

Rightly so: If CX management is seen as a cost item rather than a critical and profitable business strategy, it will eventually experience its death. Therefore, it is viable to tie CX programmes to business outcomes and continuously demonstrate a return on investment. This profit story will resonate with the management board and secure necessary encouragement from the highest levels of an organisation to use the data generated. Without that encouragment, members of an organisation tend to become apathetic about survey results. By encouraging employees from the highest level, leading by example, to devise strategies that will make meaningful positive differences in the customer journey, and by regularly reporting on the successes, commitment to using CX data for a sustainable positive change will grow. ■

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Stephan Thun is CEO International at MaritzCX and a member of the company’s global management board. As a strategic leader, Stephan has brought disparate country organisations together to build an effective international machine. Early in his career, Stephan founded BASIS-KONTAKT, a successful German research company that was later acquired by Maritz in 2000. Stephan is a regular speaker on global industry events and has published dozens of articles related to the future of international business in research, marketing, and customer experience management. www.maritzcx.com

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Where Machine meets Mensch Is International Qual Research all about Skype?

I

nternational research is being transformed – why visit say Taiwan when you can Skype with a native speaker doing their best to speak your language? Throw in some mobile ethnographies, Google Translate, a few crowd-sourced trend snippets, social media analysis – and stir. All from the comfort of your own office. The advantages are obvious – less horribly cramped airplane travel, delays, expense, jet-lag, and a notable cost-reduction. Which means you can do more research. So all good?

I’d say no. This approach is going to miss stuff – it just isn’t granular or culturally rich enough to deliver anything really powerful that’s going to spark a new idea, range, message. The forces behind the race to lower cost, centralise, consolidate at regional or global HQ levels are diametrically opposed to where consumers are at in many countries – which is radically local. The ideal product in food is “local” – buy local = support local businesses, savour local cultural richness, explore maybe historically re-juvenated varieties, tap into history...

Cultural Understanding is the Key

Offers such as Skype and Co. tempt you to do research from your office. After all, it is costefficient and fast. Which disadvantages and problems are caused by such an approach?

Edward Appleton explains.

Provenance is a powerful seller – where it’s from matters. Who made it, how. All tied up with emotions, people... and yes, culture. Cultural understanding is core to understanding motivation and behaviours. Referring to and precising what strategy consultant Christian Madsbjerg has to say in his book Sensemaking, Harvard Business Review (HBR/Liberal Arts in the Data Age) summarises as follows: “...deep cultural knowledge businesses need comes not from numbers-driven market research but from a humanities-driven study of texts, languages, and people.” Does Skype give us that? A bit – but it scratches the surface.

To what extent can Skype help you surface a cultural insight? Can mobile ethnography fully explain to HQ marketing folk why a local brand A is underperforming in a high growth market? Brand identities are increasingly about “experience” – and that means contextual understanding, emotions, situations, societal factors.

HBR/ref. Christian Madsbjerg

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“...deep cultural knowledge businesses need comes not from numbers-driven market research but from a humanities-driven study of texts, languages, and people.”

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No – to get “there”, you have to be immersed in locality in all its complexity, doing face-to-face research. Being there. Researching in Asian markets – to quote Skim’s Robin de Rooij (MRMW/ Implicit Mobile Research) – means attuning locally: “Many Asian cultures are characterised by high context effects. In other words, in social settings, much is unsaid”. So Skype (or its like) might not get you that far, or even far enough – companies and brands lose touch with their consumers, or from the same HBR article: “...unless companies take pains to understand the human beings represented in their data sets, they risk losing touch with the markets they’re serving”.

Digital Disruption and Agility It is of course true that we live in a world shaped by digital disruption and yes, agility. And there’s no doubt that international face-to-face qual research can appear onerous, expensive. Take in-homes for example: in Brazil and/or India. Invariably very powerful stuff, galvanising, authentic, to see and feel up-close how people actually relate to a brand or category. The value of client side stakeholder involvement is significant, budget owners really seeing their product through a different lens, re-thinking their marketing challenge.

That being said, the cost-per-completes can appear scary – there’s the need for a central researcher to be there herself, costs of interpreters, flight and hotel costs…. Logistics can also be tricky if participants pull out at the last moment. It’s tempting to shy away from all this – budgets are invariably tight, so if cheaper/simpler is possible, and online solutions claim to be able to deliver, why not?

A digital option certainly seems enticing – legacy solutions can appear old-fashioned. Take this excerpt from digital qual specialist ­discuss.io founder Zach Simmons in the Greenbook Research Industry Trends Report for Q1/2 2017: “Leveraging ubiquitous technologies, like Internet browsers, webcams, insight communities, audio/ video streaming, VoIP, and natural language processing, brands can

still form human connections and gather rich insights, but with less friction in the research process.”

Beware of Generalisation Sounds tempting – but overly sweeping? Suggesting that digital qual can do exactly the same job as face-to-face multi-national qual needs careful scrutinising.

Firstly, the outputs from digital qual are almost always different to face-to-face, often inferior – less culturally rich, content output can easily be thin depending on the target group and subject matter.

Contextual understanding is invariably lower.

Secondly, digital doesn’t work equally well across the globe. In plenty of emerging markets existing technology infrastructure is a limiting factor – availability of affordable broadband access, for example, or unstable connections. MROCs in India? Currently not advisable.

Which leads to the third point: total project cost. What appears to be a significant cost-saving at first sight turns out to be misleading once all the non-anticipated costs involved in work-arounds and the related manpower hours are added-in.

All that having been said: of course online qual has a role – often complementary. It definitely makes sense when knowledge needs are more straightforward, tactical – simple feedback on a claim, for example, or top-line reactions on a concept board. And yes, if budgets are stretched, doing online in lower priority markets is preferable to doing nothing at all.

All Business is Local When a project is more strategic, however, or there’s a lot at stake, for example, with a new international brand approach, using face to face qual is highly advisable, whatever the challenges and cost constraints. To wrap up: all business is local – and maybe increasingly so. We need digital to help us capture that – but we have to have humans on the ground, culturally filtering and explaining the potentially complex-cum-chaotic mix of locally significant signs and the emotions attached to them. So – here's to Machine-meets-Mensch.

Maybe even a tech company might get behind that message. ■

Edward Appleton is Director Global Marketing & Sales with Happy Thinking People. He has worked for over 20 years in Market Research on both the agency and client side. He blogs regularly at www.researchundreflect.blogspot.de and for Esomar. Edward is bi-cultural English/German, speaks fluent French, is a member of the MRS UK and a founding Board Member of Mobile Research in the Mobile World (MRMW). www.happythinkingpeople.com

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Lifestyle

10 Questions – 10 Answers

“It’s exciting to find out something new every day“ Tom Abele, CEO and partner, IFF International Which cliché about market researchers annoys you the most?

“That we paint our own picture of things. In other words, that we interpret the results of surveys to suit our needs.“ And which one is accurate in your case?

“You mean which cliché? Apparently that I can interpret any statistic right off the cuff.

At least, that’s what people say about me.“ What would you have liked to have become – apart from market researcher?

“It’s not a common choice for a career, but after university I liked the idea of becoming a member of some parliament. But I ultimately decided to go out on my own in market research. In hindsight I’d say it was a good decision.“ And what did you definitely not want to become?

“Anything that requires being good with your hands. That is definitely not one of my strengths.“ Do you still enjoy being a market researcher? And why?

“Yes, I actually still do. It’s exciting to find out something new every day and help people be heard by interviewing them. Some project designs are also intriguing.“ Would you advise a young person to become a market researcher today?

“That depends whether they are willing to specialise and learn new things. If you are resilient and a flexible thinker it is a fascinating field to work in. So the answer is a clear maybe – with a tendency towards yes.

I’d give it a 7 on a scale from 1 to 10.“ What product have you recently bought only because of the advertising?

“Good question. (After much deliberation): a set of garden furniture.“ And was it good?

“It’s an excellent place to sit.“

How can one recognise a “typical German” market researcher?

“They are also data protection experts. I don’t always see that in other countries.“ Tom Abele studied administrative sciences with a focus on labour and social affairs at Constance University, and in 1993 he founded his first market research institute. Today he is CEO and partner in the company IFF International, an international field-services provider with offices in Germany, England and Italy, and 50 employees. Alongside market research, he is also politically active on a voluntary basis, and can often be found in the Tyrolian mountains together with his Jack Russel terrier. Tom Abele is married and has two adult sons. www.iff-international.com

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When did you last cancel your participation in a survey? And why?

“I want to take part in surveys, even if purely for professional reasons, although it can sometimes be challenging. What is annoying are standardised, simplistic questions developed in someone’s office that are difficult to understand in a real life situation. “

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Editors: Judith Grabmayer, Sabine Weich Authors: Edward Appleton, Danyo Dimitrov, Ronald Frank, Thomas George, Ben Hogg, Dezső Karasszon, Roddy Knowles, Sören Scholz, Stefanie Sonnenschein, Stephan Thun Art Direction & Graphic Design: Brainpirates GmbH Cover Photo: © nanuvision – Fotolia.com Advertising and Sales: Heinrich Fischer (responsible for advertisements) Lange Straße 64 71332 Waiblingen · Germany Phone: +49 (0)7151/270889 Fax: +49 (0)7151/270890 E-mail: fischer@research-results.de

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