Insight 2005

I'm just back from "Insight 2005 - the only exhibition and conference for buyers and users of market research". If someone caught my eye and said "can I tell you a bit about our company" I'd say "sure, tell me what you know about blogging". My overall impression is this is not a widely understood term.

The conference was large but mainly to do with suppliers to the market research industry, or else quantitative companies and this year, lots and lots of "online research" companies. Can I just say, very little differentiation between them. No clear cut positioning although some very nice logos and material.

This is certainly true for "brainjuicer", "The MindReading Agency". I love their logo and I love that tagline. So I asked a researcher on the stand "what's involved in the mind reading?" Turns out it's something to do with the "patented technology" which "enables respondents to express what they think and feel about the research topics".

Everyone's looking for a way to make doing "proper" research easier. I haven't found a methodology that achieves this and probably wouldn't trust it to determine the deeper feelings people have in any case. That takes a considerable amount of time and fieldwork by experienced researchers.

I never ask these companies "how can you be sure respondents are telling the truth about themselves" because I have it fixed in my head that people exaggerate all sorts of information about themselves and no researcher can convince me otherwise. Like to see them try, of course. I also wonder about online research, as it's based on respondents having decent typing and mouse skills and I'm just not buying it.

According to 'trendwatching.com', blogging is one of the ways that "Generation C" expresses themselves. C for creativity. Putting up photos, writing on a blog, or sharing music and film files is all part of this increase in creative activity. You can read more about 'Generation C' here.

The number of truly creative friends I've got who say "I just wouldn't have the time to blog" is astonishing. And kind of flattering. Does this sound like I've crafted it for ages? I'm typing away with narry a pause to crack open the thesaurus, except to look up much better words for the word "stupid".

Because that's the first word that comes to mind when describing the latest research survey that's being quoted as if it were the most trustworthy set of statistics since, well, the Lancet casualty figures. The research quoted in the Telegraph last Sunday is: unsound, laughable, meaningless, moronic, worthless, brainless, deficient and just down right ghastly. If you know ANYTHING about market research, you know I'm right.