And day two of IIeX 2022 in Amsterdam has come to a close! Though I’m sad to say good-bye to everyone, I am happy to return home with lots of intriguing ideas to ponder (plus a very lovely watercolour produced by Anna Wijnands). Have a read through and then feel free to get in touch with me or any of the speakers with your thoughts. See you on the road soon!
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Inclusive Communities Build on C-Creation, Equity and Collabs

Hayel Wartemberg, Co-Founder, Word on the Curb; Isabelle Cotton, Senior Research Manager, Word on the Curb

• Despite what the media keep on repeating, blanket generalizations about Gen Z are not accurate – not all young people are sustainability experts, not all are activists, and not all even know or agree on what Gen Z is. How much do 8 year olds really have in common with 20 year olds? Remember that cohorts are very broad brushstrokes that only explain a small piece of the puzzle.

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We Better Behave! Why Sustainability? Why Now?

Christian Niederauer, Global Head of Insights, Colgate-Palmolive; Michael Swaisland, Head of Insights & Analytics, Mattel; Andrea Gonçalves da Silva, Senior Market Intelligence Manager, Philips; Anders Bengtsson, Founder, Protobrand; Christian Dössel, SVP, Behaviorally

• Sustainability is not all or nothing. Brands can start small at any stage of the supply chain, energy usage, or packaging, and make bigger changes later. If you can’t reduce packaging, you can use different packaging and make it multi-purpose. Think about what you would do differently if you were starting from scratch and aim for those changes. And, go above and beyond legal requirements.

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We Better Behave! Being Sustainable & Living a Good Life: Can this Unite?

Edwin Taborda, Global Head of Insights, Electrolux; Anna Martynova, Research Manager and Analyst, Protobrand

• Brands can contribute to people having better lives by helping them gain more experiences rather than more stuff. People expect brands to have the minimum requirements (e.g., works well) so now brands can focus on longer lasting products that help people consumer less and live better. It can also include giving people the tools to change long-term habits into more sustainable behaviors (e.g., use more often, recycle more often).

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We Better Behave! 3 Pillars for Brands to Chart a New Course Towards Sustainability

Monica Tenorio, Vice President, Insights & Analytics, PepsiCo Europe; Crispin Beale, Group President, Behaviorally

• Brands that have a direct link to unhealthy lifestyles (e.g., sugary drinks) have a responsibility to help people do better. This can be by focusing on regenerative agriculture, ethically sourced and sustainable materials, and enabling a circular economy. These brands should offer positive choices for people and planet via a balanced portfolio.

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We Better Behave! Looking at the Future of Sustainability

Stephen Donajgrodzki, Director Behavioral Science, Kellogg Company; Philippe Coquelle, Head of Insights, Europe, Barilla; Alex Peters, Global Insights Lead, Purpose, Reckitt; Jennifer Picard, Head of Center of Excellence for Mix Optimization – Global Consumer Insights, Pernod-Ricard; Anders Bengtsson, Founder, Protobrand; Christian Dössel, SVP, Behaviorally

• Philippe Coquelle shared a fantastic story about sustainability. They wanted to switch from an all plastic package for their pasta to a paper package with a small plastic window. But consumers weren’t having it. They’ve always bought a solid plastic bag that let them see all the pasta and nothing else would do. Barilla knew they’d take a hit by moving to a paper package and lose market share. However, as a brand, you have to know what you stand for and what you want to achieve with your brand. Sometimes your insights will say one thing but your mission and vision will lead you in a different direction. And that’s ok. In fact, in this case, it’s great. (This shopper is immensely appreciative!)
  

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Real-Time CX Insights: How IKEA Listens, Understands, and Acts

Olga Smits-Mohlmann, Insights Professional, IKEA; Tim Stierman, Product Owner PulseCX, IKEA

• Dashboards offer massive cost savings over traditional surveys. Where a few people may review a report and then put it away, IKEA sees thousands of people use their dashboard every week. Imagine the equivalent costs of 1 million completes per month. They’re dashboard is a minimum viable product, and they expect to try and fail fast. As their founder says, “Only while sleeping, one makes no mistakes.”

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Kitchen Sink Dramas: Lifting a Veil on Food Hygiene

Daniel Clay, Managing Partner, Basis Social; Darren Bhattachary, CEO, Basis Social; Alice Rayner, Senior Social Science Research Officer, Food Standards Agency; Dan Jenkins, Senior Client Strategy Director, Lifestream; Helen Heard, Senior Social Science Research Officer, Food Standards Agency

• “Always on” video ethnography reveals human behaviors that would never otherwise be captured. People don’t know what their household members did in the room immediately before they did something, nor do they remember all the subtle behaviors that are 100% rote and unattended to. It makes it far easier to identify and consequently prevent safety issues, such as cross-contamination that you’re not even aware of. Obviously, this type of research requires extreme attention to ethics, privacy, and duty of care should dangerous behaviors be recorded.

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Learn more from our other blog posts

• Trackers Suck. Here’s how to fix them.
• 8 Reasons to Invest in a Hybrid DIY Market Research Team
• Everything You Need to Know about Conducting Effective Secondary Research

Hello from Amsterdam!

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I’m thrilled to be back at in-person conferences again. Amsterdam in the summertime is a hard to beat but IIeX offered lots of excellent sessions (and some tasty treats!) today. I’ve gathered just a few of my favourite takeaways below. Enjoy!

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Why Market Researchers Should Embrace the UX Research Opportunity

Mike Stevens, Insight Platforms; Helen Devine, The Economist

• UX research is somewhat different from market research in that it is faster and closer to the end product. The need to be agile is a good reminder that researchers can stray from the extreme structure of formal research and be less polished reports. Good research can use guerrilla recruiting and fast interactions.

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Why We Should Kill NPS (and What to Use Instead)

Nyssa Packard, Senior Director, Insights, Skyscanner

• NPS scores are used widely yet disliked even more widely. No one knows what a good score and those supposedly “good” are meaningless. The same number can be achieved from a multitude of good and bad scenarios, and can represent completely opposite outcomes depending on the cultural bias it was created within. You are far better to use a measure that has meaning for the stage in which your brand lies, e.g., purchase, loyalty, retention. Definitely a talk that is worth getting the paper!

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The New Creator Economy: How Data Inspires Ideas

Steve Phillips, CEO, Zappi; Amanda Seal, Global CMI Director, Mars Petcare

• As behavioural measures have become vastly easier to collect, store, and analyze, methodologies like questionnaires and groups have become less essential. However, there is a place for all types of research. Where transactional and loyalty data are fantastic for post-launch brands, questionnaires and groups are fantastic for pre-launch brands.

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Let’s Talk about the Elephant in the Brain: How Brands Can Tackle Diversity in their Communications

Christian Niederauer, Global Head of Insights, Colgate-Palmolive; Cristina de Balanzo, Board Director, Walnut Unlimited

• Incorporating people with disabilities in your advertising can increase sales and brand affinity. The trick is people feel compelled to say positive things even when they don’t like the ad. Sometimes, simply changing the narrative around the videos (rather than the videos themselves) is enough to shift weak perceptions into positive perceptions.

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The Perfect Glass of Wine: 7 Insights From a Parallel World

Kristin Hickey, Founder, CEO, Kubi Kalloo

• Be open to accidents – when things go wrong, look on the bright side and you’re sure to discover positive outcomes and learnings for next tie. Getting dirty into the details is good – it means you know every piece and can optimize the processes. And, even when you do know all the pieces of the process, let the experts tell the story – they know how to serve up a story that will generate excitement and action. (Plus several more insights. Ask for the paper 🙂

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Navigating the Crisis: Pricing Sensitivity Amid Inflationary Pressures

Joris de Bruyne, Partner, EyeSee; Anne-Lise Flaction, Head of Insights Cereal, Nestle

• Even with higher prices, people are more loyal to brands that touch their skin (e.g., skin cream, shampoo) or go inside their bodies (e.g., food, medication) because the risk (of wasting a disliked product) is too great to try other brands. Decreasing the volume of a package is an effective way to keep a price lower when all the competitive packages are a different size. Bacon is an anomaly because a higher price is associated with better quality.

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Learn more from our other blog posts

• NewMR Webinar with Annie Pettit: Statistics are dead. Long live statistics!
• Getting started with consumer, customer, and market segmentation
• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience

Welcome to Day 2 of Quirks London!

It was another lovely day of meeting new friends and renewing existing friendships. We enjoyed many more insightful and intriguing talks too! Here are a few more AHA moments that made me rethink what I thought I already knew.

Transforming Insight at Carnival
Jan Worsley and James Wycherley; Insight Management Academy (IMA), Carnival Cruise Line

• As important as it is to have a senior stakeholder who will champion a project and see it through to action, agile research, as was essential during the height of COVID, is often too fast to secure a stakeholder before it’s too late. But, having a good team means it’s not always necessary.
  Be sure to celebrate today’s research successes today because they won’t necessarily be relevant tomorrow.

What consumers and shoppers want from brands in the future
Jeannine Ferguson, Lindsay Parry, and BV Pradeep; Nepa, DS Smith, Unilever

• Most retailers are aware of the need for omnichannel services but many have yet to fully achieve it. Depending on what country you’re in, up to 70% of consumers believe ALL their shopping will take place online in ten years. Those retailers that aren’t taking omnichannel seriously will fall behind.Don’t believe 70%? Well, in some regions of China, shop owners catch their fish before 7am, take photos for their e-commerce website, shoppers choose their fish online, and that fish is delivered to their door by 9am. From sea to breakfast table in 2 hours. It will happen whether you are prepared or not. And your competitors are prepared.

Trends in sustainability: Learn from Reckitt, Bimbo Bakeries and more
Martin Oxley; buzzback

• Awareness of the need for sustainability has grown but it needs to be vastly more top of mind. Current trends focus on increased use of recycled materials, reducing and removing packaging, finding plastic alternatives that are perhaps even edible, designing for recycling and reusing, and using single material packages that are more easily recycled. Consumers want to do the right thing and brands need to do a better job of facilitating that. Sustainability is financially advantageous, and can win when brands are otherwise equal.

Don’t get lost in translation: Ad performance in the context of cultural differences
Andy Drake; DVJ Insights

• Countries have unique cultures in terms of individuality, egalitarianism, collectivism, restraint and more that can’t be changed. Because of that, an ad that works in one country won’t necessarily work anywhere else, even among seemingly similar countries. If brands want ads to work globally, they need to focus on creating exciting and relevant ads with both rational and emotional aspects.

Applying science to art: The role of research in a cultural institution
Alexander Wheatley; National Theatre

• Researchers are very used to the traditional research business of consumers buying from retailers, and pollsters predicting elections. But the research skill set can be applied in any niche area of life such as charities and the arts. Those areas may even have other aspects of research beyond traditional audience segmentation and targeting, including academic style research to understand the arts and theatre business. Learn the research process and then find a way to apply it to your personal passion.

It was great meeting so many new people at our booth, and we had a fantastic time at Quirks! We look forward to connecting with you again. In the meantime, feel free to chat with us via email using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. Or, catch up with Rupa, Yogesh, or me on LinkedIn.

Thank you so much to the Quirks team for creating a great event!

See you soon!

Hello from beautiful London, England!

After more than two years of virtual conferences, the E2E Research team is excited to get back to Quirks conferences in-person! It’s been wonderful to see so many friendships renewed and to once again get fully immersed in intriguing new ideas and insights.

I was lucky to attend a number of sessions today and thought I’d share a few insights and nuggets that caught my attention. You’ll see an overarching theme of recognizing that both participants and researchers are human beings who need to be treated like…. people, not robots! If there’s a session that intrigues you, click on the link to read a full summary on the Quirks website. Let’s go!

How to shift strategic direction in a commoditized category by using human-centric design
Dan Cooper, Jonathan Stone, and David Watts; Virgin Media O2

• Researchers need to show respect and understanding of everyone involved in the research process. We usually think about consumers in that regard but that is insufficient.We also need to think about the business stakeholders who contribute to the design of the research. They need to know that they are truly heard and involved, and that their input is valued and will be used over the long-term. But it doesn’t stop there. The research results need to be presented back to the business users as relatable stories with easily accessible metrics for tracking the implementation of results.

Navigating the crisis: Pricing sensitivity amid inflationary pressures
Jenny Kasher and Dorte Torpe Hansen; EyeSee, Kellogg Company

• Recessions may last a year or two but the impact on consumers can be as long as five years. Do look at your competitors’ pricing but you need to be bold and take advantage of conjoint and modeling to set your own course.Remember that recessions don’t impact everyone in the same way – for some people, joy and delight comes from tiny things like a new taste from a beloved brand.

How to build consumer empathy that goes beyond your organization
Nadia Morozova – TikTok

• The traditional pyramid of influence is no longer relevant. People don’t want to be nameless, faceless pions who can never reach the top of the pyramid. Fortunately, fame can now manifest as a circle of influence which works from the inside out – it’s decentralized and inclusive, and allows people with really niche expertise to reach huge audiences. Brands need to rethink and reframe their messaging strategies to work within this new framework.

Fit for purpose: Providing consumer meaning to a corporate vision
Joe Goldberg, Tom Scrimgour, and Greg Sill; Santander

• Brand purpose can’t be dictated by the C-Suite. You need to know how consumers interpret the words in your brand purpose so that your messages and images match in a meaningful way. For example, where a bank may envision prosperity as wealth, research shows that consumers understand prosperity as the ability to create the change they want for themselves and loved ones, e.g., reduce debt, time with family, sense of purpose

The art of spectacle: Driving buy-in and action beyond narrative storytelling
Hannah Rogers; Blue Yonder Research

• Create a way to let stakeholders really feel the emotions, the spectacle, that people experience with your brand. This will result in more memorable research results that will drive longer-term buy-in and action.For example, ask people to put on a blindfold and walk around a room to find their favourite scent on different people. Or, ask thieves to show how they break into your cars. Or, use lightbulbs, post-it notes, and real people in a line as more dramatic physical representations of charts in a 50 page ppt.

Eyes on the road! Future-proofed insight in the new and ever-changing world of EV drivers
Lori Beck and Kate Downer; VERVE, Shell International Petroleum Company

• Community panels don’t have to follow traditional rules. Moderators CAN film casual introductory videos of themselves so the community feels comfortable sharing their personal stories with them. You CAN let the community have a section where they start their own threads about any (at least somewhat related) topic to encourage ongoing engagement. And we need to understand that different exercises work with different audiences – what is fun and entertaining for one audience is silly and childish for another. We need their help more than they need us so we need to create a human experience that works for them.

Strengthening our customer intuition: How the John Lewis Partnership is bringing Always-On customer closeness into the spotlight to drive better, more confident and agile decision-making
Ellie Inman; John Lewis & Partners

• Customer closeness is illuminating, feeling, respectful, instinctive, and fuels decisions. It is direct, first hand seeing and hearing, and a creation of memorable stories that enhances understanding.Their customer closeness program includes an intranet site where research is freely available to everyone. In fact, all employees, whether HR or finance, are required to access it and complete tasks to better understand the customer experience. Every company should democratize their insights.

This webinar from the New England chapter of the Insights Association included four speakers:

• Melissa Geathers from InnovateMR as the moderator,
• Mujde Yuksel from Suffolk University,
• Owen Jenkins from Protobrand, and
• Kathryn Ambroze from HCD Research.

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Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2

The webinar started with Mujde Yuksel sharing a good overview of Daniel Kahneman’s theory of decision marking. Kahneman is Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He hasn’t been active on Twitter for a year but you can find his Twitter account here.

Kahneman’s behavioral research describes human behavior as having two systems.

• System 1: The vast majority of human behavior falls under system 1. It is fast, effortless, and hard to control. It plays with our subconscious mind and underlying emotions and feelings.
• System 2: On the other hand, system 2 is slow, explicit, and logical. It deals in our deliberate, conscious thinking and is more rational and pragmatic.

When conducting behavioral science research, we need to ensure we incorporate techniques and methodologies that let us uncover both system 1 and system 2 thinking.

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Consumer Decision Making

Owen Jenkins then discussed three drivers of consumer decision making. Specifically, he focused on:

• Functional characteristics: Whether B2B or B2C, consumers consider the features of products and services that help them perform activities. What does the product or service do for you, what does it help you do better, faster, or cheaper. Most traditional research does a great job at measuring these aspects of the consumer journey.
• Symbolic properties: Consumers also consider symbolic features of products and services. For example, there are common cultural or societal understandings around certain brands or products that tell us about the people who use them. For instance, we can interpret that someone who buys Patagonia products cares about the environment, someone who buys a Harley has a rebellious spirit, and someone who buys an Alfa Romeo has style and sophistication.
• Emotional activations: Lastly, we feel personal thoughts and emotions about brands. You might feel good about buying Toms shoes because you know it means they donated a pair of shoes to someone in need. Or, you might feel excited about buying a Prada bag because you’ve always dreamed of having a small piece of luxury for yourself.

Even if you haven’t got access to or the budget for advanced technology like facial coding, eye tracking, heart rate tracking, skin conduction testing, EEG, or fMRIs , traditional online research is still very much an option.

Implicit tests can incorporate things like:

• Imagery: Rather than asking people to describe what they like or dislike about something, they can be asked to select images that reflect their thoughts, feelings, or emotions. Once they’ve selected those images via system 1, they can then try to describe why they selected those images using system 2.
• Metaphors: Depending on the culture or country you were raised in, the complex ideas represented by metaphors can mean many different things. But, it’s still possible to ask people to select metaphors and/or similes that reflect a brand. The system 2 mind can then take the time to explain and describe why that metaphor is most reflective of the brand or product.

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A Continuum of Decision Making

Lastly, using a case study, Kathryn talked about how people see, interpret, and behave in the world not as a binary system of conscious vs non-conscious actions and emotions, but rather as a continuum.

For example, when you are shopping at the store, you automatically reach for the brand you always buy – you don’t think about it. But what happens when the brand isn’t there? Then you become conscious of the absence. You have to turn on your system 2 thinking to figure what’s happened – is the brand in a different place, do you have to identify what the alternative options are, do you have to make a brand new decision based on product features rather than on brand recognition.

Thank you for a great webinar!

Learn more from our case studies

• Improving Sales by Understanding Pain Points of Sales Reps – A home appliance survey case study
• Increasing Customer Acceptance For Controversial Pet Food Format – A survey case study
• Increasing Enrollment Through A More Meaningful Brand Purpose – An education survey case study

Learn more from our other blog posts

• How to Leverage TikTok as a Consumer and Customer Insights Tool
• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience
• Trackers Suck. Here’s how to fix them.

This post is a recap of a September 16, 2021 IQVIA webinar with:

• Michael Lynch, Senior Director of Product Management, IQVIA
• Chetan Yavasani, Senior Director Product Offerings, IQVIA
• Todd Crosslin, Global Head of Healthcare and Life Sciences, Snowflake
• Nicholas Keune, Solution Engineer Manager, Life Sciences and Med Devices, MuleSoft

Please watch the full recording here. Below are a few of the (many!) points that struck me as particularly important.

Introduction

Historically, customer, marketing, and business data were siloed and disconnected. Today, however, personalized omnichannel experiences that put customer needs first are increasingly essential. Even though new forms of data (e.g., email, text, Rx, claims, media, social, digital) each with their own data formats are added to the business requirements every day, all of that data needs to be well-connected with seamless accessibility. This is the only way that holistic data analytics and business intelligence can be carried out.

The majority of pharmaceutical of pharma leaders believe that improving their ability to connect, share and analyze data is key to their success. Not only do they need to access their own data, regardless of the department in which it originated, they also need to access data from external sources. Done well, these efforts mean that data is accessed more quickly and with fewer financial and personnel requirements.

How to Choose a Data Management Partner

• Great partners are innovative and capable of influencing project or company goals even when your data requirements aren’t innovative.
• They easily accept ambiguity in project requirements and, at the same time, deliver extremely exact outputs.
• Successful partners are always testing new ideas and experimenting at scale.
• They have extensive, relevant experience working with petabytes of data.

Key Future-Proofing Strategies

• Assume a technology project is never complete. Rather than locking up the code, plan on regular improvements and updates.
• Build components that can be easily separated and individually upgraded or improved, in anticipation of when the technology will drastically change – you know it will!
• Know that what worked in the past won’t necessarily work today, and be open to new ways of doing and thinking.
• Seek to understand what other people are questioning in order to drive collaboration. When you know what your colleagues are doing, you can accomplish more together rather than doing the same thing in two silos.

Cloud Technologies Are More Than Storage

• Cloud technologies are the backbone of agility. They permit all the data to be dropped into the same place using the same formats allowing insights to be generated more quickly.

• Cloud technologies aren’t just another place to store data. In the case of healthcare, they facilitate faster sharing of clinical trial data. That drives better lives for patients now rather than 5 years from now at the end of the next innovation funnel.

AI-Backed Technology

• Artificial intelligence acts as an objective, third-party that can bring to light issues a person may not have thought of or isn’t comfortable saying.
• AI is well placed to be an additional opinion or perspective to be considered along side all the other opinions.

What’s Next?

Regardless of your company size, every business has data that can be leveraged to generate better insights and grow a more successful business. From survey and focus group data, to transactional and financial data, it’s time to figure out which of your data sources need to do a better job of pulling their weight.

Learn more from our health care case studies

• Understanding Relative Importance of Healthcare Imaging Features for New Product Development – A survey + MaxDiff case study
• Building a Strategic Business Plan Grounded in Industry Data – A pharmaceutical data analytics case study
• Mapping a Patient Funnel to Mitigate Treatment Barriers – A cancer patient survey case study

Learn more from our other blog posts

• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience
• Everything You Need to Know about Conducting Effective Secondary Research
• 30 Questions Medical, Pharmaceutical, and Healthcare Market Researchers Need to Answer to Help Support a Successful Business

Collision 2021 was a four-day, North American tech conference that drew more than 38 000 attendees. I was fortunate to be one of those attendees this year thanks to a ticket kindly donated by ESOMAR. This year, the Collision Conference hosted more than 600 speakers from all walks of life. Just a few of those people included:

• Celebrities: Cindy Crawford, Meaningful Beauty; Maria Sharapova, Therbody; Ashton Kutcher, Sound Ventures; Ryan Reynolds, Mint Mobile
• CEOs and CMOs from global companies: Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto; Ukonwa Ojo, Amazon; Fiona Carter, Goldman Sachs; Martin Wildberger, Royal Bank of Canada
• Local and global community leaders: Jagmeet Singh, Leader of Canadian New Democrat Party; John Tory, Mayor of Toronto; Katie Porter, Representative at US House of Representatives; Lori Lightfoot, Mayor of Chicago
• And 13-year-old whiz kids whose expertise and speaking skills rivaled the most experienced speakers in attendance!

With hundreds of sessions running simultaneously (and literally colliding with each other!), it was easy to create a personalized stream of content, particularly since no matter the time, a great talk was always just beginning. The stream I created for myself focused on artificial intelligence, robotics, and innovation. Here are the key themes I took away.

Technology Leaders Must Prove Their Trust

People love their devices. We trust them to help us discover and buy products, make and take phone calls and text messages from our loved ones, and remind us about confidential meetings and doctor’s appointments. We trust our devices will work as expected when we need them to work. However, there is a trust problem and it doesn’t lie with the technology itself. It lies in the fact that we don’t trust the people behind our devices, neither the people building the devices nor our government leaders, to create and hold appropriate boundaries around privacy and security.

Companies build trust by having clear values and a clear mission grounded in being authentic, empathetic, transparent, and relatable. We learn to trust companies that shape our experiences in ways that are personalized but at the same time not creepy. We also learn who trust by witnessing which companies hold themselves fully and immediately accountable when they make mistakes. Companies that abuse these expectations will quickly find themselves speaking to a declining audience. A great way to think about trust is that every interaction a company has with a consumer is either a deposit or a withdrawal. You do good or you do bad. There is no neutral.

Robot, Cobots, and the Inevitable

Did you realize you already have robots in your home? If we follow the strict definition that any automatically operated machine that replaces people is a robot, then your electric toothbrush, your toaster, and your vacuum cleaner (even if it’s NOT a Roomba) are robots. We’re slowly getting used to the idea that robots don’t have to take a human shape to be called robots.

A newer take on robots is the idea of cobots. Unlike a lot of robots that run behind the scenes, collaborative robots are designed to interact directly with or next to people. While you may be nervous that robots or cobots will take your job, there are many good reasons to be excited about working with them. Not only do they easily take on jobs that are dull, dirty, and dangerous, they augment our skills and abilities and help us do our work better and with more agility. Robots make us physically stronger and mentally more agile. If we let them, they help us make truly better decisions.

As in the case of robots and cobots, if something is inevitable, get enthusiastic about it.

The Language of AI

One of the main complaints about artificial intelligence comes when it’s used as a substitute for people. For instance, researchers are actively working on building AI tools intended to serve as personal companions for people who are elderly or disabled, and counsellors for people who’ve experienced trauma. Isn’t that impersonal? Isn’t that disrespectful? Well, let’s consider it from a different angle.

Think about people who’ve experienced a life of trauma, a life wrecked by abuse, trafficking, trauma, or addiction. A life where people have repeatedly let them down and shown that they can’t be trusted. Those who’ve experienced trauma may find it particularly hard to trust new people and may be far more comfortable beginning their healing process by working with AI.

Think about people who have experienced a brain injury or deal with communication disabilities. Or people who aren’t using their native language. Or people who feel more comfortable communicating via email or text. We constantly hear that people should be treated in the way they want and prefer to be treated. That we need to increase accessibility. This could easily be AI.

Regardless of the initial need, we need to ensure that these AI communication tools demonstrate empathy and show respect. AI can’t replace human judgement but it can and should reflect good judgement.

What Does It Mean For Researchers

The research industry talks about trust all the time. We need research participants to trust us enough to share their most personal opinions, their most private click-paths, and their most unusual purchase behaviours. We need research tools that can effectively automate dull and error-prone research tasks leaving us with more time to do our jobs even better and make better decisions.

And we really need to focus on language. So much of our work revolves around language – writing questionnaires with respectful wording that everyone can understand, moderating focus groups that accommodate every participant, making the research space accessible to all.

I may not have attended a single market research talk but I did indeed come away with new perspectives that will make me rethink how I have conducted research in the past, and what I will do in the future.