Experiences of Quirk’s New York
Quirk’s Event New York offered another great opportunity to re-connect with leading industry colleagues from around the world. Tuesday evening saw a packed Women In Research welcome reception alongside other gatherings that carried on through the night, while Wednesday and Thursday were the full conference days. Enabled by the Klik app at the enormous yet easy to navigate Javits Centr, over 1,400 attendees gathered at what truly was an insights summit.
Global business strategist and qualitative research guru Susan Fader, owner of Fader Focus, would contextualize that my attendance of IIeX, Collision and Quirk’s Event New York this su
mmer has provided me with the “contextual intelligence” needed for this post-pandemic conference overview! Fader is a strong advocate for checking to see if baseline assumptions have changed prior to jumping into a business challenge. She is a strong believer in pre-research project preparation and her work often focuses on filling in the gaps in AI- and tech-powered data sets with listening and framing tools she has developed over her career.
There were several client-supplier teams and solo presentations. Themes that stuck with me from some presentations and conversations were as follows.
Don’t ignore technology
It is only going to keep rising and digital illiteracy is the one metric that is holding your teams back. The richest market researcher in the world is Ryan Smith, founder of Qualtrics, according to the Market Research Institute International's Executive Director, Stephen Kraus’ #MRX Survivor show and the balance sheets. ResTech is a powerful force and will only keep pumping investment into research to scale insights more accessibly, cheaply and with accuracy. You can join the movement for better technology in research and better research in technology by “taking both sides” (agency and client) and understanding the strengths and limitations of working across all sides of a problem argued Jacob Jacobson, director of consumer insights at Woodside Homes. Your personality and inclinations can help you master the “psychologies of uncertainty,” but your knowledge of technology, curiosity and learnability, will only help you lead as an insights professional. The rise of future-thinking/foresight and scenario planning to deal with rising ambiguities globally are also complementary trends to the rise in tech-enabled research, said Kraus.
Build on your deep expertise and brand
This theme will help harvest the universe of your skill sets and stand out as a T-shaped professional. In our multifaceted data and insights profession, there is always more room to broaden your impact across sectors and disciplines and grow your hard skills while anchoring to your core expertise. Vital Farms and Numerator shared an excellent example of using segmentations that incorporated self-reported and transactional buyer data to understand egg consumer types in their presentation on the BFY (Better For You) or sustainability-conscious consumer. They demonstrated how their own internal training/upskilling with segmentation practices while relying on their knowledge with their client of the BFY market and consumer produced a fruitful collaboration with strong outcomes.
Embed a culture of sustainability and long-held purpose in your organization
The future belongs to those who are intentional. Those who take great care to listen and empathize to innovate to the changing needs of their consumers and audiences. MasterCard, a technology company for the electronic payments industry, has a simple goal – to ensure their products get adopted and used, and all of their actions and campaigns are designed to support that mission. As a B2B2C company that needs to appear like a B2C company, a lot of their work to stay client-focused and consumer relevant is reliant on a whole lot of UX and their employees’ core understanding of and evangelizing of their mission as a for-profit company.
Differentiation is about diversity
Understanding your niche and not piling on to the “sea of sameness” requires a sharp self-awareness of the competitive set. The Collage Group’s multicultural communities lens was a compelling way to engage a hyper-diverse America more authentically. Brand voice on social media has hit a terminal low from the Twitter feeds analyzed by Pulsar Intelligence, Sparkler and Twitter Marketing. This also spells big opportunity in reclaiming your brand narrative. People like to hear from distinct brands on social media and people like to engage with brands of character that are willing to take a stand on issues of importance to their diverse audiences. A panel from Colgate-Palmolive, GfK, Nissan and Brother International discussed how purpose-led brands were leading the charge on sustainability initiatives and discussed how to master the fine line between high stakes and vast business consequences for taking decisive action with messaging and campaigns, including insights on how to align social purpose with growing their bottom-line. Voxpopme and New York Times Advertising shared how they combined first-party data with reader segments to deliver the most engaging stories to disparate audiences in polarized times. 
Show your talent and spread yourself in growing industries, client sectors, ancillary trades
It is helpful to keep your eyes on the horizons of the fast-growing future advised Stephen Kraus of MRII-UGA, in their presentation. Industries like cannabis, privacy enhancing technologies, blockchain and metaverse, offer tremendous opportunities for insights professionals. Canopy Growth’s Insights Manager Jessica Chee-Hing’s presentation with Explorer Research’s Partner and President Anne Stephenson offered new insight on the highs and lows of mapping user journeys. They used a mixed methodology behavioral science-powered approach, segmented shoppers on experienced users versus inexperienced users and tapped into their unique needs from retailers and budtenders to leverage shopper insights across cannabis formats.
Knowledge is an industry too. It is the god of all industries and the backbone of all culture, operations, technologies and people
Lucy Davison, CEO of Keen as Mustard and her client BIC demonstrated the importance of pointing to a single source of truth and democratizing insights so they are more inclusive of the needs of all the relevant stakeholders in timely and enduring ways. Because of the increasingly information-powered societies we live and work in, Alex Dimanche had observed that the most important role post pandemic was that of the CIO. This value in understanding the business of knowledge, intellectual property and the effectiveness of privacy-metrics as benchmarks of our profession is evident in the complex times we live in. David Abbott, CEO of TakeNote, a Verbit company, focused on secure transcription services in the U.K., was the sole presenter who discussed privacy concerns around the world and how data breaches and fines were all too common and occupied the major share of news when there was more to the story in maintaining checklists for clients, vendors, suppliers and partners. That same afternoon’s CASE session on sample industry trends and ways to mitigate fraud was a strong refresher in how the data-quality needs of our industry remain at the heart and center of a respectable profession and that collectively a lot more can be achieved to mitigate bad data. 
Memories from a marketing research industry conference
I enjoyed being in fuzzy photos with colleagues at the welcome event, being a Market Research Survivor along with fellow islanders at the MRII-UGA session and throughout the conference earning a total of U.S. $25 in Starbucks credit and a big roomy Explorer bag.
The emerging powers of emotional and behavioral technology was in public sight to be leveraged. I enjoyed for example, the IVP Research Labs’ President, Bob Granito’s “neuro-challenge” battle of focus/concentration. A session I had to miss was J.P. Morgan’s Michael Rosenberg's “How to outperform as a corporate research professional in 2022,” which sounded intriguing for his big consulting perspective, and one that later Lucy Davison of Keen as Mustard confirmed was a popular presentation.
For those into personality types, another interesting session was by Vanguard’s Manager of Market Research Communities, Clint Jenkin, about the five most frustrating client personas at the table who will derail your next project. The profile types he mapped came from his observations as a “social anthropologist” and lived experiences. He did not attribute the five (internal or external) client personas to any formal research, and even bravely self-identified as “Scandric the Scout,” the one whose exhaustive data sets come from "something his brother’s cousin said once that stuck with him." Through each of the five personas, Jenkin did a great job of explaining the concept of Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) or the tendency to nurture personal blind spots while blaming others’ personalities and behaviors without understanding their contexts and environments.
Looking forward to being back on the fall conference circuit with more news and data stories! 