Thoughts from The Market Research Event

During the past few days, I had the pleasure of attending The Market Research Event in Orlando. It was wonderful to meet so many of Revelation's customers, and vendors in person, as well as many friends and colleagues. 

For those who have never attended TMRE , it can be a little overwhelming.  There are nine (yes, nine!) concurrent tracks over the course of nearly three days.  It’s impossible for any one person to see everything and inevitably there are sessions you want to attend that happen during the same time slot.

The event has only just finished up, but I’ve collected some of my high level takeaways:

1.     From hype to reality - social media research is getting tested by end clients.

There were several presentations featuring end clients (Intel, Coleman) who have jumped into the social media research pool to see if it lived up to the hype and where it fit into the market research tool kit.  The sense I got from the presentations is that the verdict is still out.  On one hand it’s clear that SMR has value and can’t be ignored. On the other hand, specific applications, research norms and a realistic sense of time and effort required to get good results are part of the learning curve that end users are still climbing.

2.   Innovation – not just the technology, but also business models

The idea and need for innovation permeated many of the sessions.  There were presentations that dealt with market research technology and services, but I believe there is also starting to be some innovation around how market research fits into other business models. For example uSamp released a new DIY survey tool that’s totally free, and is essentially a driver for sample usage.  As it scales, it also gives them a huge database of business contacts to potentially leverage in other ways.  Google is playing with the idea of using micro-surveys as ‘pay-gates’ to premium content.   In these cases money is not being made on the research itself, but enabling other revenue streams.   It’s still VERY early days, but MR being integrated into other business models warrants keeping an eye on.

3.   Things that were new three years ago are still new to a lot of people

While so many of the presentations presented forward looking technologies and methodologies, the MR industry still moves very slow in adoption of new things into mainstream practice. Ultimately new techniques and methods need to prove out and prove value.   In the MR world, that takes time.