Daily Research News Online no. 4589 - Winning Papers from ESOMAR

Winning Papers from ESOMAR

September 21 2005

ESOMAR wound up the 58th Congress in Cannes today and announced the winners of its awards. Speakers from The Leading Edge agency and Carlton & United Brewers, Australia, won the Best Paper Overall Award, while employees of Brainjuicer, Maritz and LG Electronics were also recognised.

Best Paper Overall - the Fernanda Monti Award

Monti presented the award to Kristin Hickey and Derek Leddie from The Leading Edge in Australia and David Jenkinson from Carlton & United Brewers, Australia, for their paper 'The Heart Transplant: Consumers at the Heart of Your Business'. For more details see www.mrweb.com/drno/news4576.htm . An interview conducted yesterday with Hickey and Leddie will appear soon on MrWeb.

Other nominees included John Kearon from Brainjuicer (see Best Methodological Paper below).

Best Use of Case History in a Paper

This award went to 'Powerful Insights - the Power of Ethnographic Research' by Edeltraud Kaltenbach, Project Manager at Maritz in Germany and Ji-Seun You, LG Electronics' Europe Product Planner. The paper covered the use of videos installed in people's homes to analyse use of dometstic appliances in different countries across Europe. See www.mrweb.com/drno/news4576.htm

Nominees also included The Leading Edge (winner of Best Paper Overall).

Best Metholodogical Paper

The winner was John Kearon, CEO of Brainjuicer for 'A Fresh Approach to Concept Testing: How to Get More Research for Less Time and Money', which outlined his experiments in applying the 'wisdom of crowds' theories to market research. This involves doing away with targeted samples, and testing products with a diverse crowd or 'decision market'. The results are surprising: not least to Kearon, who stated, 'it shouldn't work but it seems to'. For more details and the full paper, see www.mrweb.com/drno/news4588.htm

Nominees in this category included Add+ Impact's paper 'Global Advertising That Sells', Vanguard Strategy's 'Pushing the Boundaries of the Research Debrief: quantifying the impact of strategic recommendations', and Harris Interactive and Boeing's joint 'Predicting the Unpredictable'.

John Downham Award for Standards of Performance in Market, Opinion and Social Research

This year saw the introduction of this new annual award, named after Downham, who was previously Chair of ESOMAR's standards committee. He presented the award yesterday evening to Mario Van Hamersveld, Director of van Hamersveld MC in the Netherlands, which specialises in international marketing, management and research.

The award recognised his 'vision, leadership and commitment to the global MR industry, promoting professional standards internationally and bringing together industry leaders through the WIN (World Industry Network) and RELEAS (Research Leaders' Summit) initiatives'. Van Hamersveld expressed his surprise and 'honour to be presented with an award named after a pioneer of research standards in ESOMAR'. He also expressed his gratitude to former employer Royal Philips for being 'generous in developing his skills and competencies'.

Prior to his present role, van Hamersveld was Marketing Development Manager of the Consumer Electronics Division of Royal Philips in Amsterdam. He served as management consultant in the strategy team and was Manager Marketing Research & Support for the Consumer Electronics Division. He has also held other marketing positions with Philips at a corporate level. He has been engaged in a variety of international management, marketing training and development activities and contributed to various international publications. He has been active in ESOMAR as Council Member, 1990-1996, President, 1996-1998 and Acting Director General (2001-2003).

Other nominess for the award were Mogens Storgaard Jakobsen, Epinion, Denmark, and Bill Blyth, UK for development of the MRQSA scheme.

ESOMAR's President announced this morning the launch of a new annual award: the ESOMAR Excellence Award for Best Paper Presented at any ESOMAR event. The first winners will be announced at next year's Congress, to be held in London.

ESOMAR's web site is at www.esomar.org.