By Greg Stucky
At the end of August, I had the pleasure to take the 
microphone for a few minutes at the Insights Association, Northwest Chapter’s Open Mic Night. It was a fantastic session featuring five “speakers” who had the opportunity to engage with the audience on a wide variety of topics relevant to the market research industry and the work we have been doing lately.
Consumer Behavior at Restaurants
I spoke about the interesting phenomena our tracker study is seeing regarding restaurant behavior right now, where very few people are willing to go into a restaurant to eat, but a quickly growing number are perfectly willing to eat outside at a restaurant. At the event, we had a great discussion about the driving forces behind this behavior: consumer lack of trust and consumer lack of control are generating fear of sitting down inside a restaurant to eat. [Restaurant Behavior]
What Speakers Shared
We also heard more about COVID-19 influenced behaviors from Kaben Clauson at TruePublic where they are seeing some fascinating changes in attitudes toward marriage—and other social behaviors—including how high school and college students really feel about returning to school.
Roger Straus provided us all with some fantastic tips about coordinating virtual focus groups, including simple things like how to work with your team to manage technical issues and get people focused and conversational.
We all learned more about how low-vision/blind people have organized their technology and thus helped us gain new perspectives on caring for everyone in research with Mary Ann Mendez. She talked about “Being Inclusive of Those Who Are Low-vision/Blind in Research”, we are all going to be using #altext and labeling form fields and elements way more often now! It was great to hear some easy steps to take to be more inclusive.
Amanda Durkee gave testimony on how she has used mediation and other relaxation techniques to improve her stress levels. Good advice for all of us who are working in newer, and often more chaotic, environments. We can all add simple daily activities designed to help us relax to stay happy and healthy in our new work environments.
And to top it all off, Brian Fowler provided us all with education we never knew we needed about the ukulele and allowed us to join in a mini jam session.
It was a great session full of new information and new connections. Looking forward to many more!
