Research 2011 – Programme highlights

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

ON SOCIETY – CHARLES LEADBEATER
A prolific writer, innovator and strategic adviser to government and business. Author of We Think, Living on Thin Air, The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur and most recently Learning from the Extremes

ON CONSUMERS – MAGNUS LINDKVIST
A trendspotter who combines insights about trends with energy to create vivid images of the world we live in. He runs Europe’s only academic course in trendspotting at Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship.

ON BUSINESS – WILL HUTTON
Vice executive vice chair of The Work Foundation. Will is an influential voice on work, employment and organisation matters in the UK. He is theauthor of The State We’re In, and most recently, Them and Us.

ON ECONOMICS – TIM HARFORD
A multi award winning economist and journalist, Tim has made a career of bridging these two worlds with columns, books and radio and TV shows. Tim writes two columns for the Financial Times, is working on his second book on popular economics and fronted the BBC 2 series ‘Trust Me, I’m An Economist’

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT:
Engaging the business to action and commercialise insight
Chair: Mike Weber, Interbrand

The true value of insight is unlocked when multiple teams throughout the business know what to expect, and can translate insights into decisions for improvement. Business cases, targets and opportunity sizing are becoming standard language that must be driven by insight teams to improve the customer experience.

BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS:
Enough talk. Where’s the payback?
Chair: Nick Southgate, IPA

Behavioural economics has been the hot topic of the last couple of years. The government now talks about  nudge policy. Business talks about behaviour change. It’s now time to ask if anyone is really doing anything with it and if it’s making a difference. Has the breakthrougadvertisingh happened? If not, will it ever happen? This session draws together experts and practitioners from research, planning, business and policy to answer this question.

ADVERTISING RESEARCH:
Making ideas bigger, not just safer
Chair: Peter Totman, Jigsaw Research

The prevalent belief in advertising agencies is that research is essentially toxic to creativity, either killing, or arguably worse, diluting ideas to point of invisibility. In this provocative session, Chairman Peter Totman charges leading advertising research practitioners to persuade combative and outspoken Ogilvy planner and research critic Hilary Woods that it doesn’t have to be this way, that research can not only identify winning ideas, it can strengthen them.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN:
A playful approach to changing the rules of research
Chairs: Orlando Wood, BrainJuicer, Peter Harrison, BrainJuicer

This interactive workshop will introduce participants to the principle of gamification and reveal how games are being used successfully in business. By playing a real-life game participants will experience how simple game mechanics could enhance the way we conduct research, revealing unguarded feelings and behaviours, and deepening respondent engagement.

EVERYONE CAN BE A DESIGNER:
How to apply design thinking to research projects
Chair: Erick Mohr, Truth

Design thinking is a hot topic. It provides a creative approach to solve problems and innovate. This hands-on, practical workshop will equip researchers with a toolkit to better understand what customers really want, co create new products and services and creatively communicate findings. Most importantly, participants will learn techniques to leverage their creative potential to deliver better, more insightful projects.

DEBATE OF THE DAY:
Who cares about privacy anyway?
Chair:Robert Bain,Research

For an industry that relies on persuading people to share information, respecting privacy is more than a question of ethics or etiquette, it’s a question of survival. In a world where consumers share intimate details of their lives online, how do researchers steer the right course? And will respondents become more demanding as they begin to realise the value of their personal data?

CONSUMER CHANGE:
Fact versus fiction
Chair: Patrick Hourihan, Yahoo

We live in a world of accelerating change. A world of convergence, divergence and changing alignments. Brands may shape the development of change but the tipping point remains with the consumer. We must look beyond the craze. The Hula Hoop was a fad; the transistor radio changed our lives.

THE IDEAS LAB:
Collaborating with others to generate and develop experimental ideas
Chair: Ayisha de Lanerolle, The Conversation Agency

What happens when we take a cornerstone of an established research methodology, then place it centre stage to seek out the philosophical assumptions it contains? Come along and find out. This is a workshop designed for risk-taking, innovative and collaborative thinking.
‘Ideas lab is a space in which delegates and speakers alike can enquire as peers into ideas and conversations that arise during the conference.Compare different understandings of key concepts, share perspectives, loosen fixed opinions and join in the ‘live’ thinking.’

THE CLIENT/AGENCY SUMMIT:
Leading players gather to debate the future of market research
Chair: Simon Chadwick, Cambiar

The winds of change are definitely blowing through market research. New technologies, the advent of social media, methodologies based in biology and neuroscience, the rise of India, even the prospect of pay for performance in research – all these things (and others) promise a research industry and profession in the future that is far different from that of even the recent past. How are these changes seen by agencies and clients through their respective prisms? Do they see the same thing or are they pursuing divergent paths? How will the client-agency relationship change as a result? Views differ on the answers to questions posed by the inexorable march of change. Come and hear agencies and clients debate these issues – and have your own say. This will be the debate of the conference!

FUTUROLOGY INTERVIEW:
The long view on short-term thinking
Interviewer, Richard Young, Journalist. Guest, Nicola Millard, BT

Nicola Millard, Customer Experience Futurologist at BT, will be interviewed live on stage about how research can increase its value to users by looking beyond the short-term and offering medium-term insights into increasingly unpredictable markets. At Research 2011, she’ll discuss:

• The death of “business as usual” – and what it means to researchers.
• Testing user readiness for radical innovation.
• Her approaches for accelerating the application of new technology.

ONLINE COMMUNITIES:
Investigating the power of the many
Chair: Rachel Lawes, Lawes Consulting

How can we get the best out of online communities? How we can be sure we are using them to their best advantage? Are online communities just big focus groups or should they be treated as a unique research mechanism where different rules apply? A lively debate punctuated by presentations.

FASHION OR REVOLUTION?
Debating the rise of peer research and co-creation
Chairs: Carol McNaughton Nicholls,NatCen and Jamie Keddie, Turning Point Research

Do peer research and co-creation bring genuine value to the research process? Or do they merely represent an additional, expensive and time-consuming layer? Come and be prepared to pitch for either side of this debate in a session moderated by social research practitioners working with peer researchers.

THE GREAT GLOBAL CROWDSOURCE EXPERIMENT:
Around the world in 60 minutes
Chairs: John Griffiths, Planning Above and Beyond and Joanna Chrzanowska, Genesis Consulting

Swarm to our workshop to listen to live discussion and contributions from experts building crowdsourcing research businesses round the world. Themes will include stakeholder polling and predictive futures, as well as the use of agents polling their peer groups in Asia where consensus is so important.  You always get a great crowd at the MRS conference – just thought we’d achieve a world first by inviting a global crowd of crowders to join in.

BRAND RESEARCH:
An intimate guide to attraction, love and loyalty
Chair: Nick Coates, Promise

The Victorians covered up piano legs to keep people from getting aroused. Today it’s brands we should be more worried about. Seems they’re busy trying to get us all hot and bothered. Join us for a romantic session to hear about digital media, phones and toilet tissue and how we can all learn to build love and loyalty.

ONLINE RESEARCH:
Fight back for the fundamentals
Chair: Martin Oxley,BuzzBack

How are online research and Groucho Marx connected? When it comes to the fundamentals of online research, it seems that the research industry has at best adopted the quote from Groucho Marx, ‘Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.This session will focus on the fight back through three highly engaging papers, which outline today’s new and old principles. Join us for this lively discussion. We encourage you to participate; not just to observe.

DEBATE OF THE DAY:
Quality is in the mind of the beholder
Chair: Peter Mouncey, IJMR

‘What does ‘Quality’ mean in market research today?   All steps in the research process can impact upon the quality of the final ‘product’, and often compromises have to be made due primarily to time considerations and available budget.  If there are quality issues, who is primarily to blame – the client or the agency? So many potential questions, but do we have the answers? We have assembled a panel of experienced researchers to answer your questions on this theme’. 

ETHNOGRAPHY:
Up close and personal with new techniques and technologies
Chair: Fiona Wood, COI

Ethnography has long been established as a way of enriching our insight into the lives of citizens and consumers. This session explores some of the latest influences on ethnographic techniques, from academic theory to new technologies, with case studies to illustrate how new approaches have been applied.

SHARPEN UP THE SOFTER SKILLS:
A high energy workout for every research professional
Chair:  To be announced

Post-Web 2.0, have we lost the ability to connect? Reawaken your humanity with this entertaining, thought-provoking session on the joys of face-to-face, one-to-one interaction and communication: those soft skills getting ever harder. A smorgasbord of tasty tips and tricks, satirical sketches and side-swipes.

NEUROSCIENCE:
How tapping unspoken responses sparks better decisions
Chair: Graham Page, Millward Brown Neuroscience Practice

Methods derived from cognitive science seem here to stay – but how and when are they best used?  How do we combine them with existing tools?   This session showcases practical examples, and the panel will debate how to tap people’s unspoken responses in ways that make a real difference to decision-making

I’M A RESEARCHER… GET ME OUT OF HERE!
Chair: Alan Hathaway, Discovery

Discovery have combined our favourite quizzes and game shows and will be gathering both up-and-coming and established researchers to pit their talents against each other in rounds of questions in the style of shows from Family Fortunes to Shooting Stars. Research codgers will pit their talents against the fresh faces of the industry on the hottest research issues and established techniques. Don’t miss out on what promises to be an entertaining and engaging platform that will put contestants’ knowledge to the test on real research findings.

VIEWPOINTS:
This book will change your life
Chair: Chloe Fowler, Razor Research

In the time it takes to boil an egg, precisely 3 minutes, our panellists will tell us about a book that changed their working lives. A fun, fast and furious session where we recommend the books, authors and megatrends every researcher should know about. Come and be inspired.

NERDTOPIA!
A nerd culture workshop for researchers
Chirs: Tom Ewing, Kantar Operations and Nick Gadsby, Lawes Consulting

The nerds won the culture wars. Consumers coming of digital age are doing so against an online cultural backdrop which has been built from the tropes and customs of role-playing games, fandoms, and bulletin boards. If you don’t understand this culture, you won’t understand your future consumers. This bizarre, enlightening and practical workshop is a crash course in the real roots of modern culture, from cosplay to 4chan, avatars to lolcats.

CO-CREATION:
So, we’re all together. Now – where are we going?
Chair: Michelle Harrison,TNS-BMRB

RESEARCH ETHICS:
Researching children: are we getting right?
Chair: Corrine Moy, GfK NOP

Unethical corporate behaviour is judged harshly.  Unethical behaviour towards children is beyond the pale.  So it’s important that the market research industry inspires confidence and trust. This session will stimulate debate over how we can ensure that we treat children and young people involved in research fairly and respectfully.  And we ask what it feels like to be a ‘researched child’.

THE FUTURE OF DATA DISPLAY – Get involved and win an iPad

We are calling on the marketing and insight industries, agencies and clients, to submit entries for the Infographics Showcase at research 2011: The Annual Conference.

The Showcase, curated by Brass, aims to inspire through featuring new methods of visualising data and by challenging the industry to think creatively about data communication. We’re looking for examples of where you have communicated data with impact, this might include:

• How you’ve brought complex information to life
• How you’ve made recommendations memorable
• How you’ve inspired change within an organisation

The best entries will be shown in a galler at Research 2011and the winner will recieve an Apple iPad!

Entry deadline: 25 February – click here for more info