Now that's Significant

This episode of Now that’s Significant, a market research podcast features Diana Lucaci, the Co-Founder and CEO of True Impact.

Diana is a Board Member of the Canadian Research Insights Council (CRIC), Canadian Representative of ESOMAR and Committee Member of the Standards Council of Canada (SCC). She holds a degree in Neuroscience and Psychology from the University of Toronto. 

Diana and host Michael Howard (Head of Marketing at Infotools) discuss the value that market researchers can bring, regarding the increase of customer loyalty, when they help their organizations to better understand attention and emotion.

In this episode, we talked about:

• The effect and the need to understand attention and emotion to pull on these things, to draw on these things as well, to understand consumers and to be able to use neuroscience and other means as well to give those traditional methods to try and predict market behavior and help consumers to move through, whether it be your website, your product to choose you at the store, etc., as well.
• We briefly touched on the value of loyalty on a brand as well.
• We touched on the role of traditional research in terms of helping improve the overall neuroscience projects that we're going through as well, and then vice versa as well.
• We had to look at it's not enough just to use things that typically pull on emotional strings, but we have to, I guess, use some carefully and thoughtfully in a way that is contextually relevant to the consumer as well, but also relevant to your brain, too, if you've just got something there for the sake of it, then people do start raising questions and they can quite easily switch off as well. If it isn't that relevant.
• We had a look at some of the content scientist, so they had the concept testing and how it evolved over the years as well in response to innovation and being able to do things now and ours that used to take a lot of years as well, months rather, or days to some really shortening of time and cost as well too, to be able to help marketers to make better decisions in terms of the projects that they're doing.
• You also shared about some of the big mistakes marketers can make are often trying to do too much. Whether that be key messages or CTAs call to actions being able to just focus on one main thing that is directly related to the strategic directives or objectives of the brand or the campaign as well is really key - which is ultimately about being more commercial.
• And lastly Diana touched on some of your favorite projects that you've done as well,

We hope you enjoy the show. 

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast, Host Michael Howard, the head of marketing at Infotools is joined by two esteemed representatives from ESOMAR in North America. The first is Bob Birdsell, ESOMAR’s Membership Development Director for North America and the second is Dan Fleetwood, President of Research Suite at QuestionPro and the chair of the North American Representative team for ESOMAR.

Bob and Dan share in the episode some great insights into the impressive growth and potential that they're witnessing out of Canada and the United States.

On the show, we discuss:

• ESOMAR reports
• Growth opportunities for the industry
• Data quality initiatives
• ESOMAR Congress
• The AI Taskforce
• And more

We hope you enjoy the show.

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast, host Michael Howard, the head of marketing at Infotools is joined by Lauren Isaacson, founder of Curio Research, a market and UX research consultancy based in Vancouver, British Columbia specializing in the green technology sector. Lauren is a researcher with over 20 years of experience working as an in-house researcher for various companies and on staff at a number of advertising and research agencies over the course of her career. Now she helps companies improve the experience, accessibility, and messaging of their digital products for both the business and consumer sectors.

On this episode, Michael and Lauren discuss:

- How research accessibility helps companies hear from large, diverse, and growing market

- Why we shouldn't be intimidated by the possibility of having someone with a disability as a participant or respondent.

- The reason why we need to keep our processes simple and flexible

- Asking participants what they need to fully participate in the group or interview

- Defer to their expertise

- Don’t use fancy question formats in surveys

- How the industry needs to normalize incorporating people with disabilities in research, 20% of the population is significant 

We hope you enjoy the show.

This episode of Now that’s significant, a Market Research Podcast sees host, Michael Howard, the head of marketing at Infotools, speak to Steve Mossop, Executive Vice President of Leger Vancouver. Before this, Steve was president of Insights West who Leger acquired in late 2021, and prior to this, Steve was at Ipsos for 17 years managing 30+ client service staff in multiple cities after starting his career at the Angus Reid Group and TNS in earlier years. And what might give away what we’re going to be talking about today, Steve has, impressively, correctly predicted the outcomes of over 25 elections over his career. 

In this episode, we discuss the crucial role of election polls, and notably, how they're actually far more accurate than many realize.

We hear how Steve got into polling and some lessons he's learned along the way.

Steve shares the role of polls and how they can be used to help gauge public opinion, and also encourage others to vote.

We discussed how one of the best indicators of whether or not someone will vote is if they know the election day date.

We talked about how the main pollsters got it so wrong in the USA over the past two elections.

Steve shares how important it is to know your sample in order to minimize fraud and maximize the most realistic projections.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

Regards,

Michael and the team at Infotools.

On this episode of Now that’s significant, a Market Research Podcast, host Michael Howard (head of marketing at Infotools) was joined by Kathy Cheng, founder and CEO of Nexxt Intelligence, the Toronto-based research technology company behind Inca, conversational AI purpose-built for market research. Kathy is an entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience in the market research industry. 

Kathy's significant statement for the show revolved around how technology can make market research more human.

One of the key ways Kathy saw this happening was through the use of conversational AI, being able to probe further into respondant's views or positions on certain subjects - which Kathy described as active listening.

Probing for greater clarity wasn't the only positive outcome though, AI can also help to increase engagement and completes as well, plus, it can help avoid the painful coding process through advanced tech analytics.

Ultimately, technology is helping the fundamentals of market research to become stronger in these three ways:

1.   Human-centricity, with tech such as conversational AI we can finally put our most precious resource, research participants at the center, and create experiences that are effortless or even delightful for them, we can actually listen to voice of customer, in their language with more colours and texture at scale.

2.   Better data quality – enaged participants --> considered responses.

3.   Researchers – we are better equipped and can become better storytellers.

We hope you enjoy the show.

On this episode of Now that’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast, Daniel Berkal, SVP Research at The Palmerston Group was hosted by Michael Howard, Head of Marketing at Infotools.

Daniel's team has conducted literally hundreds of energetic market research projects of various sizes, and specializes in immersive methodologies and hard-to-reach participants. 

In this episode, we talked about the key role that creativity should play across the market research process, in order to get the best results for our clients, their customers, and consumers in general.

Daniel spoke about a course he's running that focuses on injecting creativity in recruiting, methodology design, and reporting. It's not about doing things differently just for the sake of it, but to improve on our ability to understand people and achieve meaningful results.

The discussion touched the role of technology as a way of approaching each phase creatively.

We hope you enjoy the show.

This episode of Now that’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast sees Infotools' Head of Marketing Michael Howard speak to InsightsNow's Chief Research Officer Greg Stucky.

Greg joined us again on the show, this time to talk about the one thing that people who are really good at innovation don’t really want you to know about. It really is the insider’s secret that you will likely never see in books or taught in universities. That secret is: The most valuable piece of information you have as an innovator is the size of the aspirational gap in a specific moment in a person’s life. If you know what the context of the moment is and what that gap is, then you are equipped to build a product for where people desperately want to go out and purchase. 

The episode saw Greg and Michael discuss a couple of examples of how moments and the aspiration gap play out in the real world, and they being sustainability and breakfast.

The latter of these two were discussed in relation to the context (it's not good enough from a product perspective to think about just food in the morning but to go further than that i.e. food in the morning when you're in a rush), needs (for example their needs states, goals, desires, aspirations), and their motivators.

We also looked at some of the reasons why such a gap exists, and these can be quite varied. A big one of these being cost. Another being the benefit trade-offs. From a breakfast perspective, if you need to eat breakfast on the fly, something that's hand-held and not messy will likely trump something that is sustainable.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

In this episode of Now that’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast, host John Birdis joined by Melanie Courtright, who serves as the CEO at the Insights Association, the leading voice, resource and network of the marketing research and data analytics community in the US. 

Melanie and John draw on their extensive experience in the market research space to discuss some of the latest issues and challenges facing the industry. They also explored how the Insights Association is helping its members navigate the seismic changes that are impacting the world.

In this episode, they touched on:

Generative AI, what it means for market researchers, and how the industry needs to make sure it is not lumped in with Generative AI. If it is, then it will need to comply with impending AI legislation - rather than just a portion of it.

Melanie discussed Insights Association’s Pillars (Protect, Connect, Inform, and Promote) and how it is help its members and the industry operate effectively.

They talked about the global data quality initiative in which multiple associations and organizations are contributing.

There was raised several ways for insights professionals to get involved with the Association's activities, including CRC, a must attend event for corporate researcher.

We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode of Now that's Significant, Host Geoff Lowe, Director at Infotools and Chair of the Research Association of New Zealand, was joined by two industry stalwarts, Paul Graham of Waka Kotahi, and Colin Yee of Glasshouse Consulting.

Paul and Colin joined us on the show to talk about their sustained market research partnership in the road transport sector, which has spanned 25 years. Fittingly, this episode number shares its number with one of the most famous roads in the world - Route 66.

Waka Kotahi, New Zealand's governmental transport agency, has a primary function is to promote an affordable, integrated, safe, responsive and sustainable land transport system.

The episode explores all challenges and benefits that come from such a prolonged relationship, the significant team that it took to achieve the results it did, and some of the reflections both parties have had over the past two and a half decades.

We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode of Now that’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast, we’re joined by Karine Pepin, Sr. Vice President at 2CV, an insights solutions market research organization for a complex world.

We discussed how market researchers need to rethink how they view their sample, treating it not as a commodity but rather as an asset. By taking this view, market researchers are better able to improve quality of the data going into the analysis process, rather than trying to fix what’s broken once it’s already in play.

The intent is obviously not to dismiss the value and role of data cleaning tactics like fraud detection software, as well as in-survey and post-survey checks, but cleaning up sample before a question has even been asked is far more valuable for all involved.

Karine discussed how being far more intentional in whom we recruit can be a big aspect too, with a potential swing back towards the previously written-off channel in social media.

We talked about how we can start targeting the 95% of people who don’t engage in market research, to try and see how we can reach them in order to improve our representation.

Ultimately, taking time to disrupt our ways of working and improve our overall attitude and approach to sample is worth the hassle. We’ll all be better off for it. 

We hope you enjoy the show.