Now that's Significant

In this edition of Now that’s Significant, a market research podcast, Michael Howard, the head of marketing at Infotools, is both guest and host.

The show covers the rising preference we're noticing of stakeholders and decision-makers getting their hands on the data to actually become data driven, They've realised the value in being able to dig in deeper to the data, interrogate it, challenge it, in order to arrive at the most valuable of insights.

It's why we're championing those who, to use a sports analogy, would rather play than watch from the stands. 

Why do this? Well, when your insights function is working well, you’ve got everyone playing the game who needs to be, and you’re making decisions that help lift the overall performance of your team on the pitch, you’ll start winning more often. And when this happens, you’ll start seeing more people want to watch from the stands - be this your customers, prospects, and potential employees. And when your prospects like what they see, they’ll sooner or later become fans. And we all know what happens at that point. 

Hope you enjoy the show.

On this latest episode, David Paull, founder of Dialsmith, a pioneer in instant and continuous moment-to-moment feedback software, joins us to talk about the crucial steps required for landing the perfect messaging.

On the show, we talk about:

- How effective messaging, that brings about a desired outcome, follows a storytelling framework that anyone can learn and deploy

- David described how effective messaging is achieved by covering off four key things – personas, cognitive bias, a storytelling framework, then testing and refinement.

- We discussed when brands get this right, barriers to purchasing are eliminated because customers are drawn to brands that are connected with their needs and wants.

- And David closed with a few examples of brands that are getting messaging right, which included Zoomcare, Liquid Death, and Gong.

Enjoy the show

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, Horst Feldhaeuser, Group Services Director at Infotools was joined by Jason Buchanan, Managing Director at the Global Market Research Agency Verve.

Jason has a rich history in the insights sector, founding the Research Now APAC chapter and steering SSI’s APAC business to greener grass. Jason has a passion for exploring how the world works, the know-how for making it better, a deep understanding of consumers, and even has a degree in neuroscience.

Horst and Jason discussed:

> How 12 year olds next door could be completing MR surveys to buy electric scooters (and you may not even know it). This behaviour is likely more widespread than we think it is (or accept it to be). To put this into persona talk, Fabricated Frank sure does answer a lot of surveys.

> Automatic fraudster detection and checks aren’t good enough anymore. There is more that's needed to be done in order to clean up this issue.

> There is a significant need for panel and field suppliers to truly verify the identity of people.

> The market research space really needs to care about this – not just pretend we do.

> On top of compensation, the industry really needs to focus on survey experience (SX), in order to recapture the stature and reputation that has been lost by the industry over the past decade or so.

> And of course, that having something that you are passionate about outside your professional career and even outside your comfort zone, whether that’s a side hustle, a hobby or something that truly challenges you – often makes you a better professional.

Enjoy the show.

Bryan Smith, the BHT Data Solutions Director for Ipsos Global, joins us on Now that's Significant to discuss what market researchers want, what they really, really want. But it's more than that - it's what insights teams really need. And for most teams, when it comes to market research data, Bryan Smith argues that they don't actually need dashboards.

Ultimately, dashboards are a means to an end, they should never be table stakes. Bryan and Geoff discuss how dashboards are often a way to give people access to consumer data. When this is working well, organizations can make decisions in much shorter time frames, which is paradigm-breaking for most who haven't embraced modern processes and technologies.

Enjoy the show.

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, we were joined by CEO and founder of Relative Insight, Ben Hookway. Ben came on the talk about the possibilities and value that is sitting in our owned, qualitative text data.

Rather than analyzing all data that is common between two people groups (generally 90-95%), Relative Insight scrupulously digs into all that is different between the two groups (normally 5-10%). This approach enabled the one law enforcement department to spot those bad actors who were posing as teenage girls.

Relative Insight then moved into the insights and market research world and is quickly becoming a force in its own right, helping insights teams understand different target audiences, knowing which ways to talk to them, and how one should even gather text for analytics in the first place, in order to get respondents to respond with meaning.

On this episode of Now that's Significant, we’re joined by not one but two guests who played and continue to play a key role in helping maintain high standards of practice in the market research space. The first is Annie Pettit, Chief Research Officer at E2E Research, and the second is Elissa Molloy, Director at ISO Audit Solutions.

In this episode, we discuss the international standards certification for market research ISO 20252.

Annie and Elissa provide a little background on their careers and involvement in producing and maintaining the standard.

The certification has specific annexes that organizations can be audited on, which are relevant to the role they play within the industry - from sampling methodologies to data management and processing requirements.

The certification is relevant for all parties, including in-house corporate insights teams, agencies, and software providers.

Elissa speaks to the benefits she has witnessed organizations realize after undertaking the changes required to meet the standards - a couple of the biggest of these being efficiency gains from avoiding re-work, as well as reducing risks of things going wrong with their research.

Enjoy the show.

John Geraci joins us on this episode of Now that's Significant to talk about the alarming problem of trust in market research polls. As the President of Crux Research, as well as a career heavily focused on polling, John brings a wealth of knowledge to the challenge of declining trust in polls.

Throughout the podcast, we talk about:

- What led to John writing his book Poll-arized: Why Americans don't trust the polls.

- There are serious data quality issues across all types of survey research – not just the election polls.

- One of the biggest contributors for this historically low trust is all stems from low response rates.

- The industry's investment in methodology and technology has largely not gone towards improving respondent trust and response.

- Our sector's tendency to focus almost exclusively on sampling errors, when there are many more consequential errors to consider.

- And, ironically, how lack of trust in polls could actually lead to an increase in voter turnout.

Enjoy the show.

This episode of Now that's Significant, Karine Pepin from 2CV joins us to discuss the value we could be missing out on by discarding incompletes too soon.

During the podcast, we discuss:

- How the market research industry is changing rapidly as a result of cultural shifts and innovation

- The demand for good survey participants far exceeds supply, as a result, survey conversion is more important than ever

- Our first line of defense is creating an engaging survey experience. Mind, you could still have hundreds of participants drop off even if the survey is short and engaging

- Keeping partial completes could help solve the participant crisis and speed up fieldwork. It’s not a straight forward decision. Like everything else it requires trade-offs

Hope you enjoy the show

We welcomed Lynn Pellicano on the podcast to talk about ways to improve our sample quality so we're spending less time cleaning it and more time analyzing it. In the podcast, we explored:

Sample quality has become endemic across the industry. You mentioned that B2B suffers from this the most, but obviously B2C prone to it as well. It is a significant issue. A number of things that haven't or aren't sufficient any more like the Double Opt In, self-selection, etc.

We really need to have buttoned up screeners to help us to weed out bad actors. Customer recruitment can help in this space too.

Phone interviewing and field studies are back, which is great, since it's fraud can't be scaled to the extent that 100% online can. This means there's a whole lot of new or not new, but existing collection tools that people can use to reach a broader section of society.

We talked about how some are cleaning up to 80% of the sample, which is quite scary to think about the value which they could be missing out on by doing such things incorrectly.

We discussed how we need to get our surveys shorter, be device agnostic with the with our collection tools and also use multiple recruitment methods to make sure we're not just focusing on over those representative, prolific online people.

We explored the use of technology in the recruitment phase, with the likes of geolocation, language, IP addresses to help keep people out of or confirm people before they enter using prescreen as well.

There's also improvements we can make in the design phase, using things such as refusals, questionnaire design, flaws, falsehoods, social desirability, people giving politically correct responses rather than the true opinions that we talked about briefly on the screening phase.

We looked into some things we can do in real time as well, such as developing consistent and efficient, accurate data checks, confirming knowledge respondents confirming attentive respondents, but not being too aggressive with it.

And then we looked at a few different things such as speeders, open interviews, straight lining, red hearings. You also talked about numeric outliers and contradictory and probable responses as well.

And lastly, we spent a moment imagining if we were to get everything right in the sample space, as improbable as it may be, and what would happen.

Enjoy the show.

We welcomed Jason Jacobson, Director of Consumer Insights at Woodside Homes to this episode of Now that's Significant.

On the show, we discussed:

- How less is more when it comes to consumer insights data as organizations and decision makers alike have far too much on their plates to be sifting through and trying to make sense of the fathoms and fathoms of data stored in lakes.

- We went on a trip down memory lane to explore Jason’s journey in the market research and insights world.

- We discussed how having less data can actually help insights teams and businesses to go deeper into the data and analyses.

- We briefly looked at the reason for the deluge of data we find ourselves in.

- We mentioned the importance of respecting the context of storing data in order to retain its full value, think respondent vs syndicated data.

- We talked about an alternative north star to quantity of data, which is action. There’s no point in having the best, most interesting insights in the world, if it’s just academic no change or success comes of it.

- And lastly we had a look into the crystal ball to see what’s instore for the insights sector.

Hope you enjoy the show.