Driving Research Forward at The Quirk’s Event New York

InsightsNow at The Quirk’s Event New York

Conference season continued to “drive research forward”, with The Quirk’s Event in New York earlier this month. Along with exhibiting and speaking at the show (and giving away an Oculus Quest 2 to our winner Alka Bhatia at Rickett!), we had the chance to learn about research innovation, data security, questionnaire design, and other hot market research topics. Networking was also a blast, especially since we had a full contingent of InsightsNow employees at the show. We had seasoned InsightsNow employees Ann Bracken, Kayte Hamilton, Amissa Giddens and Greg Stucky there, as well as our brand new team members Christina Holstein and Sara Yang.

Efficiency vs. Integration Learnings

Between the six of us, we got to attend demonstrations, interactive workshops and topic talks with quality, relevant content. Our CRO Greg Stucky found a theme in the content presented—rather, two themes. He notes that there seems to be a clear differentiation between research teams who are focused on efficiency (research that happens in minutes rather than days or weeks) versus those teams whose goal is the integration of more data sources so they can seek out the deepest insights possible (meaning more time has to be spent on the research process). Both approaches can have tremendous value.

As an example of the “efficiency” research approach, Ben Jordan (The Clorox Company) discussed how they are using the latest tools and processes for streamlining their questionnaires to make them super focused (4-5 questions) where they can get answers and disseminate internally with same or next-day speed. They focus on taking this efficient agile approach for 80% of the topics they are addressing, which allows them to run at the speed of business. As an example of the longer, more integrated research process, Sarah Davanzo (L’Oreal) discussed how her team integrates a wide variety of research sources to uncover the deep human insights which drive all levels of innovation.

The Newness Effect Presentation

Greg himself presented our case study “The Newness Effect: Connecting the dots between implicit emotional impact and behavioral disruption.” He talked about how emotions are the underlying motives for all human behavior and how you can understand this more deeply through an approach we are calling The Newness Effect. This approach uses implicit research techniques to gauge emotional impact of a new product and its potential for category lift (a prediction of the market share that a new product will take from a product category or competitive set of SKUs). The newness effect is extensible to any product category and product positioning. If you’d like to learn more, you can view our webinar on this topic.

Other Learnings at Quirk’s

Some of the other sessions our team attended included the “From Insights to Foresight” panel discussion with Lisa Gudding (Ipsos), Sean Burress (Kimberly-Clark), and Srabani Rake (Kellogg’s) where they covered foresight’s 3 Ps: possibilities, planning, and preparation. Mars Wrigley presented a great session called “Trust me, I’m a futurist–How I harnessed curiosity to imagine a post-pandemic future.” The talk covered tracking human motivations, harnessing curiosity and the effectiveness of harnessing the potential power of foresight for business and research planning.

We also caught some other interesting trend topics too, like “How Small Teams Can Make A Big Impact” with representatives from Chobani, Digsite, Gold Eagle and Harry’s. This session talked about how agile teams need to prioritize listening, prioritize and be productive. And “Out in Research: How PepsiCo, Mondelēz and Suzy approach LGBTQ+ Research” was very informative and emphasized how this community needs more consideration in market research.

And we don’t even have to wait a whole year until the next Quirk’s Events, as right now they are being scheduled for spring 2022! Looking forward to seeing everyone again soon, and learning even more about industry trends and topics.

Want to learn more about what we learned? Reach out to us!