Conference Collateral Benefits

Hurray! At last one much neglected group of consumers is getting fairly treated. Individuals who have lived in the shadow of stupor-inducing mornings and lunch-drugged afternoons have been set free. I write, of course, of the break with tradition that is occurring in the market research conference world. Where once we had to sit still through innumerable slides with pictures of pie charts now we have speakers genuinely attempting to entertain as well as instruct us. Two very differently organized and targeted one day conference took place this week and both, in their different ways, endeavoured to engage.

The conferences in question were: on Tuesday, the IJMR Research Methods Forum 2011 ‘Does Research Reflect Reality’ an annual event which cherry picks speakers from both research and industry to talk on a specific topic and on Thursday, the second ‘Festival of NewMR’ again an annual event conducted as a webinar which runs from 00:00 – 23:00 allowing delegates to dip in and out throughout the day and across the time zones.

Firstly, let’s make a list of what was very different about the two events:

IJMR was physically located in Bloomsbury in Central London whilst NewMR was everywhere registered attendees found themselves as the sessions started.

IJMR had a list of delegates and we could make sure we caught up with colleagues or business associates by grabbing them at coffee or lunch whilst in NewMR we were tweeting throughout the process and these tweets sometimes elicited a DM from someone we knew.

Speaking of lunch, it was a bit good news/bad news. At IJMR the good news was someone else prepared lunch and it was tasty. The bad news was that unlike NewMR delegates we couldn’t just sit munching our own marmite and banana paninis.

However putting aside the minor logistics, locations and (probably) lifestyle variations, what both conferences had in spades was a great sense of entertainment and fun. One speaker, Mark Earls, gave virtually the same paper at both events (new book out -I’ll Have What She’s Having – available from all good book stores) but to each one he brought real excitement about the subject and some variations adapted for the medium. A plus point for the corporeal event was that in London we got to do a Mexican wave and jump up and down while holding each other’s wrists, forms of social behaviour that Earls could only describe in the webinar. However he had added extra slides for the webinar and he did describe the ‘Deli’ scene from ‘When Harry Met Sally’ quite well verbally, although that might have been done better with some sound effects.

John Kearon was the speaker who seemed most adapted to the medium at NewMR. He produced no slides, in fact he acknowledged that most of his listeners were also engaged in checking their email, talking to colleagues or even writing a presentation they had to give the next day, so he had decided to treat the medium like radio. He gave us full permission to doodle and threatened to sing (which he did).

The main point of both these conferences was that they didn’t want us to be bored. That might seem like a no brainer but how many of us can say that we didn’t suspect that some talks we were attending had been put together with the complete opposite intention and how many of us can say that they have never watched a room full of people stifle a yawn as they talked? The key to these changes in presentations has an obvious source: market researchers are having to seriously juzz up their game in the way they interact with both respondents and clients and delegates at research conferences are getting the collateral benefits. Now that participants in research are expecting gamification and rewards and end clients are expecting infographics and storytelling the humble market research conference paper is suddenly watchable again. We are even getting lots of webby anthropomorphism: in London we had a shaggy dog story about a market researcher, a pig and a cow from Ed Mayo, Secretary General, Co-operatives UK and at NewMR we had ‘The Case of the Dead Cat: Curiosity Not to Blame’ from Rosie Campbell of Campbell Keegan, the latter accompanied by lots of cute pictures of the Internet’s favourite animal. These were both great papers brought to life by the light relief of their humour.

An honourable mention also goes to Prof Gemma Calvert, MD of Neurosense whose paper on how neuroscience was revolutionizing the way we do marketing zinged with a rallying cry to use the methodology or fail, at IJMR. Also to Ray Poynter, one of the organizers of NewMR, with his short talk on Storytelling which advised us on the types of narrative to use in presenting to clients. Apparently a good Agatha Christie style whodunit is most suitable for segmentation and characters out of Eastenders make highly suitable avatars in market studies.

If the improvement in the entertainment value of market research conferences is a trend, I look forward to the day when we can score points and win prizes merely by answering questions or raising concerns during papers and that if we do fall asleep after lunch it will because we have been told a nice bedtime story.

Teresa Lynch

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