ESOMAR Congress 2011 reviewed

Really enjoyed the webinar session yesterday and thanks to all of you who joined us

James Lang interviewed myself and Pete Comley about our key take outs from this year’s Esomar Congress. As Pete mentioned in the session, we do enjoy getting involved in Congress and we feel it tends to play host to a higher standard of paper than MRS Conference. In particular we find it’s always worth going through the written support materials as well as looking at the presentations, so we would urge you to get your hands on copies of papers that particularly interest you.

So what did we cover yesterday?

  • Firstly, we spoke about our Punch and Judy session. Our session was an info-tainment summary of the ESOMAR Social Media guidelines – just think lots of ‘that’s the way to do it’ and ‘oh no you don’ts’. We would urge you to read the guidelines as well as take in the end-of-the-pier entertainment.
  • Communication. As winners of AURA’s Clear Communicators award this is a topic close to our heart and there were a couple of really good presentations at Congress on this subject. Interestingly, a couple of the papers echoed each other by suggesting that as researchers we could learn a lot from journalistic principles and Barbara Minto’s ‘Pyramid Principle’.
  • There were a number of papers at Congress under the banner of Gamification . As we discussed at the webinar, there is such an ongoing buzz about gamification that it seems to us that lots of different things are getting lumped under this heading. There was a good paper from TNS South Africa which highlighted what it is and what it isn’t and I think there needs to be more in terms of definitions. By way of example, it’s interesting that the best paper from Jon Puleston and Deborah Sleep was called Game Experiments when Jon and Deb were previously working under titles such as Survey Engagement! (btw this is not to knock their work or paper we are big advocates and admirers of what they are doing).
  • Behavioural Economics another buzz word/phrase! Not a great deal new for us at Congress but much of the same noise about thinking about framing and contextualising when engaging with consumers – to be honest, we need more realistic examples of how research is dealing with the difference between claimed and actual behaviour by way of example. We’re presenting a paper based on a project we did with Metro at ESOMAR Qualitative Conference in the next couple of weeks and I’m going to highlight how we brought behavioural context to this project. So watch this space for an example…

    • Finally, James asked us what one big thing we took from Congress and when I thought about it I found it interesting how many references there were to learning from and engaging specialists from other walks of life. Some examples from different papers: the communication guys talking about journalists and employing designers, the gaming guys looking to gaming programmers, behavioural economist papers referencing psychologists etc.

    If you want to listen to the session, email me g.lawrence@jointhedotsmr.com and we will point you to a recording.