Last week, we spent the day at the New England Market Research Association’s (NEMRA) Spring 2016 Conference, learning from colleagues in the region, both on the corporate research and consultant/provider side of the business. There was a lot to take in, but a few ideas particularly stuck out to us:

1. Embrace Agility: A session on the lessons we can learn from startups challenged us to dismiss existing perceptions of “agile” research as simply “fast and cheap.” Instead, he encouraged us to think about market research agility in terms of being flexible, working smarter, and challenging the industry or process-related status quo (without sacrificing data integrity).

2. Be Consultative: While “faster” and “cheaper” are often king, we also have an opportunity to be better by being more consultative (which is critical to CMB’s approach). A panel of corporate researchers at the conference underscored the importance of research partners being more consultative by:

• Developing a better understanding of how researching findings will be used. If findings are going to be used primarily to convince a C-level executive of one key point, a one-pager should be included in the report that addresses that point clearly and concisely.

• Telling the story and delivering insights—not just “data dumps.” While the panel acknowledged that the research team may want the 100-page report for their own edification, a project is only successful when the data is socialized and shared off-team. We have the opportunity to help organizations do that. 

3. Evolve: A speaker on mobile data collection and another on gamifying research encouraged us to consider instances when incorporating new tools might help us better solve our clients’ research problems. For example, there’s an exciting opportunity to capture real-time path-to-purchase data with mobile, in-the-moment research. With gamified questions in an A&U study, we can help better engage respondents and collect richer data (e.g., asking respondents to play a game in which they enter words to try to get another respondent to name a brand—think Catchphrase for a brand study). In both cases, it’s important that we stay at the forefront of what’s new and useful in the industry without forgetting to apply the same critical thinking and rigor to any “new” tools that we do to the tried-and-true ones.

What innovative approaches to research have you been exploring?