BIG Conference Feature: (Volcanic) Ash Thursday

By dint of starting on a Wednesday night, the conference of BIG, the UK's b2b research group, is the only one on the circuit which manages two out of two mornings-after-the-night-before. Our Features Editor Teresa Lynch waits for skies and heads to clear, and reports.

This year's BIG (Business Intelligence Group) conference was held in the Marriott St Pierre hotel in Chepstow, Wales, for the umpteenth and possibly the last time. The formal Conference Dinner takes place on the Thursday night, but after dinner on the Wednesday the delegates were subjected to a knock out quiz tournament (see pictures) and (optional) heavy drinking into the wee small hours. However every delegate was sitting to attention when the conference opened with a Keynote address from Rohit Talwar, founder of the research consultancy Fast Future.

Rohit ran us through the demographics of the world of the future, highlighting a significant power shift from West to East, increased competition for resources, and most worryingly: the uneven distribution of hope, with the developed world in despair mode and the emerging economies positively engaged.

However, he also talked about the potential increase in longevity requiring us to redefine life itself and considerably cheered some of the older members of the audience with the fact that anyone under 50 today has a 90% chance of living to be 100.

The theme of the conference is 'Back to Black' and the majority of papers on the first day were really emphasising the basics and the old reliables of market research. However as with other recent conferences the sub text was 'Due to the recent volcanic activity...', which was mentioned in virtually every paper and by several session chair people. It seems as though even if the economy is in recovery the sky above us is not.

In the spirit of old fashioned good practice Cathy Bickham (BT), Alex Johnson (Jigsaw), and Duncan Fergusson (ICM) gave us a master class in how to conduct a joined-up research project where all the individual companies involved co-operated in a textbook manner to produce actionable deliverables.

Next up, trying to outdo the previous paper in the pragmatic stakes, were Mark Long (BDRC) and Debbie Johnson (Nationwide) on how a major financial syndicated study was rescued from falling participating companies by its remaining subscribers when the bottom fell out of financial research in 2008. This was another excellent example of agency and clients working together for the benefit of both parties.

Scott Dodgson rounded off this session with the only really web 2.0 paper of the day: a case study in co-creation using LinkedIn to ask market researchers on the social network to give a description of the most cutting edge research they had come across. Scott saw this as a qualified success and pointed out the pluses and minuses of this approach.

The last session before lunch was entitled 'Emerging from the storm' (again with the weather!) and consisted of a paper given by Vikki James (BPRI) and Sarah Goodson (Accenture) on how to embrace the opportunities inherent in a downturn and something very special from Allan Hyde (ORB) about conducting market research in Iraq. Allan really brought to life the conditions under which everyone (including researchers) works in Basra and also gave us a flavour of what The Venice of the Middle East was like before the conflict.

Last session of the day was a showcase for three young researchers each given a ten minute slot for an opinion piece. The speakers then had to put up with a Q and A from the 'old fogeys' on the floor looking for answers to 'what next for research?'

Eventually it was 'make your mind up time' with a choice between two excellent workshops: Ruth McNeil's 'What's Today that's also Tomorrow' which led the participants through a Synectics brainstorming session in order to achieve some stabs at forecasting the future of the industry; and Ray Poynter's 'The busy exec's guide to social media' which did what it said on the tin.

And of course while we good boys and girls attended the workshops the sporty types played in the tennis tournament and the drones sunbathed on the terrace with a cooling drink.

BIG is online at www.b2bresearch.org . More from the Conference in the Monday edition, weather permitting.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.