FEATURE: Simple Truths for a Complicated World

Another year, another venue for the MRS Conference: this time The Grange St Paul's Hotel, London. Features Editor Teresa Lynch gives you a rapid roundup of everything you need to know (honest) about the first morning of Research 2011.

Things the delegates learned this morning: the world is a complicated place; we need a new definition of representative for online communities; and Sheffield is really rather beautiful.

The first of these came from Tim Harford, the author and columnist, aka 'The Undercover Economist'. He gave a highly entertaining talk on how the world was such a complicated place that we shouldn't be surprised that virtually every human endeavour was doomed to failure. He made a very good case for trial and (mostly) error being the default mode of the human condition and used this to explain everything from why we keep electing inflexible politicians to the impossibility of any individual manufacturing an electric toaster from scratch.

Next some real market research (?) in the form of a session on online communities. All the speakers acquitted themselves well on how valuable a tool social networks now are for market researchers. However the most interesting thing in the session was Tom Ewing of Kantar suggesting that rather than asking whether communities were representative of the market as a whole we should simply change our definition of representative to reflect the existing online community.

In the next session, on Ethnography, we had a presentation from Mark Thorpe of Truth which had what may prove to be the most beautiful set of slides at the conference. They represented methodologies such as Semiotics and Anthropology as characters from graphic novels, with Ethnography the star of the show as a market research version of Indiana Jones. What Thorpe was proposing was using all these tools together to stretch our ways of seeing, and increase our insight.

Also in the ethnography session we had a film from Ella Fryer-Smith of Ipsos MORI exploring the question, set for them by a client, 'What is beauty?' Apparently one of the answers is Sheffield. Who knew?

And so to lunch... A considerable improvement on the bill of fare on offer last year. Looks like it's going to be an interesting conference.

Considerably more from the MRS Conference in tomorrow's DRNO.

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