Creating a gold standard of LinkedIn networking

LinkedIn has transformed itself into a community building tool that is both, a blessing and curse. It has become a place where reputations are built, conversations begin, and new opportunities emerge. However, it is also a new language to be learnt and best enjoyed with a solid understanding of its full potentials.

LinkedIn has over a billion users worldwide, but only 1% actively creating content… This offers a real opportunity for any company ready to show up, share insights, and build a strong brand presence. With this many users, it is no surprise it has become such an important platform for companies: research shows that 82% of people are more likely to trust a company when its senior executives are active on social media(1) and 70% of employers say that a personal brand is more important than a resume (2) so, a with a cornucopia of branding opportunities such as LinkedIn available for free, you’d be foolish not to use it.

Stop Selling, Start Showing Up

Let’s get started, it’s important to shift how you think about LinkedIn. It isn’t a space for hard selling or cold pitching (is it ever?) – it’s about building credibility by being visible, helpful. Instead of pitching, focus on being visible and valuable. By consistently offering relevant insights, you’ll naturally become known as someone who creates solutions. When you consistently offer relevant ideas and perspectives, people will associate your name with creating solutions to the problems they have.

If you’re aiming to get more out of your time on LinkedIn, the formula is simple: write, connect, and engage. These three actions increase your visibility and help you build a solid network.

If you’re looking for a quick guide on what to do on your LinkedIn, start with these 3Cs:

• Create your own experiences and knowledge – aim to be seen expert in your field on the platform. How can you add value for your audience?
• Curate content from others that you believe your network will find useful or interesting, with your own thoughts spicing up the conversation.
• Converse with those in your network. Ask questions, tag others who might have something to add, and respond to comments. Show people you are an active, curious member of the community.

But how exactly can you approach doing these, you ask?

Write to be seen, share to be heard – just make sure people want to hear it

Posting is key to showing people what you, and your company, is an expert in and why you are distinct. But… How do you find the right subject, tone of voice, and how much information is too much information?

To get answers for this, we must start small. Begin by sharing your insights once a week or a month to build confidence. Focusing on topics that align with your specific interests and areas of expertise. This approach ensures an authenticity and relevance in your posts that’s specific to you. Communicate your ideas with a calm confident expert voice but always make sure you aren’t alienating potential clients with overly complicated jargon.

Aligning your content with your brand is crucial. Here are some key things to keep in consideration when you’re creating content for LinkedIn:

1. Understand your own Identity and messaging: Ensure your content topics reflect your company’s mission, values, and unique value proposition.
2. What are your campaign objectives: Align your marketing strategy with clear business goals, whether it’s building brand awareness, establishing thought leadership, nurturing leads, or strengthening existing client relationships: know what you need before you go in.
3. Know your audience and their interests: Who do you create for, Tailor your content to address your audience’s needs, what are their pain points? Their interests?, when you know position your brand as a reliable resource.
4. Focus on your brand’s actual expertise: Highlight your company’s strengths and repeat key messages to reinforce your brand’s distinct benefits.
5. Choose the right channel: Select content forma

ts and platforms that that work for you, make sure you align with your brand’s tone and communicate this to your target audience.

Delve deeper in our Greenbook ‘Grow your insights business’ article, “Sealing the Deal: 5 Steps to the Perfect Brand-Content Match,” where Colonel Mustard Lucy Davison discusses the importance of this alignment for a healthy brand that keeps you visible and valuable in more detail.

Connections count

Your network also plays a huge part, in not just your presence online but also your company’s – so, it’s worth putting in the effort to grow it thoughtfully. Connect with people you’ve gelled with at events or online, and always send a message when you request to connect – it makes a difference. The more people you’re connected with, the more people see your posts and updates, and the greater the chances that something good will come from it. More on this in the next section…

Engage with consistency

Neither you nor your company page needs to post every day to stay visible. A lot of the value comes from just engaging with posts: like, comment on, and repost your company’s updates – these posts will come up on your connections’ feed! Aim to do this with every post to increase post impressions. On the other hand, you should do the same with content which you find relevant. Sharing your opinion on a subject you’re an expert in will show others that you are active, curious, and interested in what you do! Not only that, it will keep you and your company on people’s feeds (and minds)!

Put the “Pro” in Profile

Before increasing your activity, take some time to make sure your profile is up to scratch. It should be completely filled out: a clear headline, a summary that reflects who you are, and a recent photo, nothing overly fancy, just professional with a friendly tone.

The content of your profile should highlight the value you bring. Ask yourself this; what do I do really well? What do people rely on me for? What would a friend say if they had to sum me up in four words? What do I enjoy doing when I’m not working? (Hint: you don’t need to mention all of this in your headline and don’t say your role!) Networking isn’t for bragging about job titles, details like these are repetitive and quickly forgotten. Show your spark to the masses, while also highlighting your expertise, will be what sets you apart. The more authentic your profile, the more memorable it becomes.

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Ultimately, creating strong engagement on LinkedIn is about being consistent. Share valuable insights, build genuine connections, and stay active within your professional community. If you write regularly, grow your network thoughtfully, and interact with purpose, you’ll build a reputation that sticks.

Stay visible, stay valuable, and the results will follow.

(1) https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/why-personal-branding-is-crucial-for-ceos-in-todays-world/468320
(2) https://wisernotify.com/blog/branding-stats/

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Researchers face an uphill battle. Decades of data has proven that companies which listen to customers and markets have the greatest chance of success. Yet, for years, debates have focused primarily on how data and insight can ‘get a seat at the executive table’. Indeed, that’s a position of influence and input, but it is not demonstrative of a culture that is truly customer-centric and which thrives on making decisions informed by insight.

To achieve this, researchers have to be more than good storytellers or compelling presenters. They must be culture and community builders, creating the fabric and rituals that drive informed decisions, even when they aren’t in the room.

Interested? Join Lucy Davison and Paul Hudson of FlexMR on Monday, September 11^th, at 16:15 CET, at ESOMAR Congress in Amsterdam for “Salience and Staying Power”. We have brought together a panel of experts from De Beers, Haleon, and Pearson to discuss how to create an insights-driven culture. Expect an honest discussion on how such cultures are built – and we’ll be destroying a few MRX myths along the way.

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Here at Mustard Towers, we talk a lot about fame. Maybe we are blinded by stardust, but we think there are important lessons to learn from Hollywood about how we go about communicating effectively. And we apply those lessons – good and bad – when it comes to communicating insights.

When we think about bad communication, surely nothing gets worse than the cringe-inducing 2017 Oscars disaster when LaLa Land was inadvertently announced as the Best Picture winner, instead of Moonlight.

Before I come back to that story it’s worth saying that when most people in insights think about good communication, they think about the words we use and the channels we employ, but they think less often about graphic design. However, there are several guiding principles of graphic design that we see in modern communication every day, such as the use of white space, the importance of contrast and balance, which are subconsciously followed by our brains, but rarely understood. We ignore these at our peril!

So what has that to do with the Oscars disaster, you may ask? Well, if you look at what went wrong that fateful night, the reason was a failure in graphic design – a failure to follow those guiding principles.

In case you were not aware or have spent the last five years under a rock, Warren Beatty was handed the wrong card as he went on stage to make the most important announcement of the night. He was given the ‘Best Actress’ card (which had just been won by Emma Stone) not the ‘Best Picture’ card.

But this was just one error. It was compounded was the design and layout of the card itself. The largest text on the card given to the 80-year-old Warren Beatty was ‘Oscars 2017’ – but surely we’d expect Warren to know where he was, and why. The second largest text on the card was ‘Emma Stone – LaLa Land’ – which is why Warren hesitated and his partner on stage Faye Dunaway (a mere septuagenarian), leaned in and read out the name of the wrong movie. The smallest text on the card, right at the bottom, referred to the Academy Award itself – ‘Best Actress’ (not Best Picture). If you look closely at the film of the night, the outside of the envelope is also blank, giving no indication of which award it was meant to announce. For some helpful visuals see the analysis by Benjamin Bannister here:

If the Academy’s graphic design team had thought this through, they would have realised that the hierarchy of the design of their card was wrong.  This is one of the most important guiding principles of graphic design. It directs the audience’s eye across a page, and through the narrative flow. The key information is the award itself – in this case ‘Best Actress’. If Warren had been able to read that easily, or if it had been written (in large font!) on the outside of the envelope before he opened it, he would have known immediately that the card was the wrong one.

Hierarchy is just one of several graphic design principles that we at Keen as Mustard believe researchers need to understand in order to communicate insights effectively (or, for that matter, to design good surveys). We use these principles to guide the design of all our materials, from a single chart to films, infographics and reports, so that they are not only visually appealing but also communicate clearly and effectively. There’s usually a reason why your message is not getting through and it’s often because the design principles have not been followed.

The principles we use most are:

• Hierarchy – as we have just seen, this is the control of visual factors to show importance within the design.
• Balance – the distribution of the visual weight of objects, colors, texture, and space.
• Proximity –items placed closely together are perceived as part of the same group.
• White Space – creates harmony, balance and clarity – using white space also leads a viewer from one element to another.
• Contrast –the use of visually different elements to capture attention and highlight important information.
• Alignment – Poor alignment will make a design look cluttered and unfinished.
• Consistency – an overall visual system making things easier to understand.
• Colour – different colour combinations offer varying experiences and visual contrasts for the viewer.

There were many other design failings in the systems and processes that The Academy and their consultants PWC adopted for the Oscars in 2017. But this simple and expensive graphic design failure in the layout of the card is one we can all learn from.

The graphic design principles are the guiding stars for good communication; they apply to everything visual. But most researchers have little understanding of good graphic design and why it matters. This is why we integrate the principles with our insights communication training. Storytelling is all very well, but if you don’t know how to present your material visually, in a way that is intelligent and clear, then even the most brilliant and interesting message is not going to get through. We’ll be exploring the impact of some other design disasters like this over the coming weeks. So, before you have your very own mortifying Warren Beatty moment, make sure to study and employ the right design principles.

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Specialist MRX consulting firm Cambiar Consulting had a brand and website that had not been updated in years. It felt at odds with the personality of the company and the unique, smart work that they do within the industry.

Through the initial strategy refinement work we did with Managing Partner, Simon Chadwick, we were able to pinpoint the core benefit they deliver to clients – value growth. This is what we call a “single overriding message”, the most important element to communicate and what we should build the brand and website around. Once we have this, along with the company personality and tone of voice, the process of design becomes clearer, less about individual likes and dislikes and more about what is right for the brand. We use the single overriding message to focus our creative brief which means we understand exactly what needs to be done and what the design should look like.

To start the project we looked at Cambiar logo. Using the creative brief as reference we tweaked the logo to bring the value growth message into the design using vertical arrows, whilst retaining the personality of the original logo by keeping the font.

We could now turn our attention to the website. We started by creating a wireframe of the pages, focusing on reducing the complexity of the old site and totally rethinking the navigation and UX – ending up with just four buttons.

Once the wireframe content and layout were signed off, we started the design. We were aiming for a really clean simple site with a focus on imagery around growth, we also used the arrows we came up with for the visual identity to build icons and a background pattern. We designed all the site pages in Adobe Illustrator, sharing PDF files of the design as we moved forward. The final stage was to use Adobe XD to prototype the navigation of the site so we could see how it would flow. To build the site we worked with Cambiar’s developers in Carolina using the Wix website build and hosting system, they translated the design into the drag and drop builder.

The site was launched in July. Simon and his co-Managing Partner, Michael Mitrano were very pleased with the feedback and received many spontaneous positive comments:

“Keen as Mustard not only refreshed our brand and site, they gave new vigour and relevance to both. When we launched the new look on LinkedIn, 10,000 people read the posts and hundreds commented. The sentiments expressed were all highly positive, with many commenting on how clean, modern and alive the site was. With the renewed focus on value growth, our brand is now crystal clear in its purpose and prospective clients can quickly and easily understand the benefits we offer them”

Simon Chadwick, Cambiar Consulting

Take a look at the website for yourself here www.consultcambiar.com

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Throughout the lockdown, customers from across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa had been sharing their experiences and concerns with the insights team at a large FMCG client. As a result, the team had many diverse, engaging consumer vox-pop clips, which they had grouped into six broad themes. But they needed to weave them into a single, coherent and impactful story.

In a challenge that is typical for many insights teams, there was no lack of data. But the team needed a way to use that data to bring the voice of the customer to life for the senior leadership. And they needed it done for an important meeting in two weeks.

Our mission was to create an engaging 5-minute video to kick off the meeting – and then use it to tell the story throughout the organisation. We couldn’t simply string the clips together. It was important to have a structure and a flow to make the video engaging and bring people’s voices and experiences to life.

We agreed a creative brief, which described the project and the expected outcome. Together with the client team we selected the vox-pop clips that best illustrated the six themes and were also representative of the diverse markets that were involved in the project. Then, we drafted a storyboard with the text and flow of the film.

Once we had the storyboard and vox-pops, we wrote an explanatory script for the voiceover. The structure of the video and the story arc was now defined. Customers’ voices were the protagonists, but supporting imagery, film clips and music brought the story to life.

With such a tight deadline, this project had to be spot on almost at “first take”, bringing the potential re-editing time to the minimum. So we had meetings with our main client contacts every other day which enabled us to incorporate their ideas and feedback each step of the way.

After the final edits, we completed and shared the video the afternoon before it was due to be presented. This was the feedback from the senior client team:

“Team this is fantastic! Thank you very much, I frankly don’t need you need any revision”

“It is really good 😊 thanks… fresh and fast… and covers all.. brilliant.”

After the meeting where it was shown, the video was sent to 1000+ client colleagues, via email and Yammer.

Do you also have a ton of vox-pops, a tight deadline and no idea where to start? Get in touch with Simon

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Friend of Mustard and insights profession legend Tom Ewing was launching himself as a freelance writer and thinker within the industry. He approached us to develop a logo for his new business.

It’s normal for clients to have little idea of what their logo should communicate, so we go through a process of working with them to define their company personality, values and ambitions, which then translates into an appropriate brand. At Mustard we refer to this process as ‘bringing out the flavour’ of the business.

However, Tom had already come up with a name and had a clear visual brief in mind “I have something quite specific in mind for the logo – the word “Wordbeast” but with the letters making a picture of some large animal – dinosaur, bison, elephant, yak, that kind of creature.”

We immediately got what Tom was looking for and had an image in mind, but before Simon leapt into the design process it was essential to agree a creative brief with Tom. A creative brief is a short document that details everything about the project, ranging from who is the decision maker to the single overriding message of the design. It’s written at the beginning of all design projects, even when the client thinks they know what they want, to ensure that agency and client are agreed on what the objective of the project is from the start. So, if a design meets the brief, it’s ‘right’ even if the client or agency would not want it as their new wallpaper.

Initially we looked into and agreed which ‘beast’ best reflected Tom’s personality. We choose an Elephant; social, very intelligent and gentle whilst still being beast like! We then started drawing lots of sketches, many versions with a lot of refinement (an eraser!) to evolve the fit of the text and elephant shape. An additional benefit in the choice of an elephant was that the silhouette is easily recognisable, critical for a logo.

Tom unveiled the logo when he spoke at our Insights Marketing Day event in London and subsequently launched it on LinkedIn to much positive comment.

As a final step, and because the logo does not work particularly well at very small sizes, we developed a simplified version that does not include text, to use at icon size as favicons and for social media profiles.

Although this was a little project it had a big result and it was great to work with Tom again, to bring his vision to life.

“Simon and the Mustard team did a brilliant job bringing Wordbeast to life! I didn’t think my idea at the start was that clear to be honest – there’s a lot of beasts out there and anything from a dinosaur to a deer could have fitted. In my head I wanted something which could have been an indie record label or comics company logo, and as soon as I saw Simon’s elephant I knew we were on just the right track.”

Tom Ewing. Wordbeast

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So, not sure how many readers will get the Ian Drury reference here, but Behavioural Economics makes me happy! The wonderful simplicity of those insights grounded in a true understanding of what makes us all tick and nudging us unconsciously to change our ways; the stories about how we behave in wonderfully, and at times hilariously, irrational and emotional ways. That reading a book about behavioural economics or about behavioural economists is actually entertaining, and dare I say, enjoyable. All this is so much more interesting than the dull ‘8 out of 10 cats’ quantitative data we see every day. So, I leapt at the chance to help chair the IIeX Behaviour conference in London on 18 November.

But I started the conference with a note of warning. I might be a bit of an enthusiast but looking at the data from the latest GRIT report, it looks like the growth of BE within insights is stalling. It is important that those firms that ply their BE trade within insights do not rest on their laurels, that they do not assume that the marketing or business audience ‘gets it’ now and we are all system one savvy. I’d like to see much more in the general business media about the practical ways the application of BE has changed our lives for the better; it’s time for BE to break out of its academic box.

For me, the best examples are practical ones, such as Hannah Moffat, Creative Director at Schwa who shared a great story about how the impact of a simple nudge like talking about ‘climate crisis’ instead of ‘climate change’ helped turn the world off plastic. Crawford Hollingsworth talked about The Behavioural Architects’ work with patients and dental professionals which gave us a practical behavioural change road map (and had us all worrying about our gums!).

The Irrational Agency’s Leigh Caldwell with his client Jessica Exton from ING gave sound advice on how to create your own nudge unit. I also very much enjoyed listening to advice from Claire Hovey of Copy and TV on applying behavioural insight to communications, which is of course a subject particularly close to my heart.

We also saw some awesome new technology on the stage. Dr Charles Nduka a (real!) surgeon and co-founder of Emteq, talked about using emotion sensors to uncover personalised and predictive analytics and Bart Maskala shared his company Accurat.ai’s approach to integrating data from retail, geolocation and media to understand real behaviour and target consumers appropriately.

There is so much great work going on in behavioural insights, but with the relentless drive in MRX for faster work at lower cost, some feel there is less opportunity to use such a thoughtful, intelligent and crafted approach. But this conference made it clear that delivering actionable, grounded, behavioural insights need not be slow or expensive.

Can we nudge our way to a better world? I hope so. Thank you to my co-chair Alex Hunt of PRS IN VIVO and to the whole team at Greenbook/IIeX for letting me find more reasons to be cheerful.

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It’s freezing out. But inside it’s hot, hot, hot! 870 research and insight people partying like it’s, well, 2019. On Monday 2 December I was lucky enough to join the Quirk’s table at the MRS Awards in Old Billingsgate right on the Thames in the City of London. And a very good time was had by all.

But these events are not only about celebration. While the winners cheered and the champagne corks popped I was thinking about all the companies that were not there. Indeed, without in any way suggesting that the winners were not utterly worthy, after several years of attending these awards it does seem that broadly the same companies – whether agencies or clients – step up to the podium.

So, what is their winning formula and what can others do to join them?

1- No matter what anyone says, winning an award like the MRS (or the ones that ESOMAR give) is in no way related to how much money you spend with the association, channel or publisher. When I have been involved in judging, the decision has always been taken entirely on the merit of the entry, frequently on a ‘blind’ basis.

2- Read the brief. It’s astonishing how little some people answer the questions or fulfil the criteria the judges are looking for. Be precise with this and build the entry from that.

3- Avoid hyperbole. Although the calls for submissions often indulge in this (“we are looking for original creativity, ground-breaking, transformational insights” etc etc), you must have the hard evidence and not just the fluffy language to deliver.

4- If you are an agency and do not have the client example to deliver the data to prove your case, then offer to partner with a client in order to devise an experiment to use in an entry. If you are a client and want to put your team on the map, ask and agency if they are willing to partner on a new project to get award-winning material.

5- Think ahead. You need to ensure you are tracking the data you need over time. You need to prove that what you are doing is working. To get that data you need to put things in place to measure and demonstrate improvements. You can’t do this the week before the award entry has to be written.

6- Get different opinions. It is always beneficial to get several different people to review and read through an entry. Imagine you are a judge and coming to it blind. Is it totally clear? Have you delivered all your evidence in a really compelling way? Can you include visuals and work with the layout to make it even stronger?

7- Finally, do great work! Ultimately the winners are those who have genuinely moved the industry forward, changed insights for better and done it with imagination and flair. If this is you, stop hiding your light under a bushel!

Winning awards really does deliver huge benefits – from awareness and profile to business growth and recruitment. But you are never going to win if you don’t enter, so why not make 2020 your year?

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One of the most common mistakes a business makes when employing a PR agency is, ironically, not communicating properly.

This can be frustrating for both parties, especially when one side is “employed” to communicate the business’ messages to the wider world. The agency is an extension of your business, relaying key information to journalists, shareholders, investors and potential employees.

If your PR agency is not equipped with all the information that they need, they will fail in delivering the messaging that you want, and therefore, not deliver on the established KPIs and ultimately, waste your marketing budget.

In a time when marketing budgets are being cut, it is essential that you are getting ROI, but for this to happen there is a responsibility from the client side, as well as from the agency.

However, before this can start it is essential that all parties sit down and determine what PR success really looks like, what the business is trying to achieve through using a PR agency and a corresponding timeline.

Once these things have been determined, it is essential for the PR agency to undertake a full benchmarking study to understand the business’ current reputation with media, work out how the business wants to change and how this can be tracked.

This is achieved through a series of interviews with clients, journalists, prospects and influencers. As well as an influencer benchmarking study, a PR/ marketing agency should also discuss a number of key indicators for web tracking, SEO, social media and sales conversions. While many clients sometimes feel that this benchmarking process is not required – it is absolutely essential first step in delivering the PR success required for the business.

The benchmarking study ensures that the business understands how it is portrayed and where it needs to improve in order to generate results. This set-up phase also provides the PR agency with a platform to develop a full and accurate PR plan that can be shared across the full business to each and every team (especially the C-Suite). This ensures that any content is not merely getting your name in a target publication, but it is on-brand, on-message and is tied in with your core messages and objectives.

PR can be an important channel for brand awareness and wider business success. However, internal communication of PR activities is just as important as external comms. Marketing is an extension of the sales team, and some ensuring that the sales teams are fully connected with the PR outreach and coverage can provide great conversation openers, but also prepare for tricky conversations – particularly if the sales teams are contacted about specific PR coverage that they were not aware of.

By sharing coverage across the business, not only does it give other departments an insight into the external communications programme, but also the opportunity to generate further insights from departments that may have great content that has yet to be shared. By doing this you are treating your agency as an external team member rather than a siloed service supplier, meaning you’ll get the best out of your PR spend and any existing content you may have.

The most successful PR coverage reflects the core business offer, and this can only be achieved with buy-in from the whole business. So once you have an agency on board make sure that everyone, not just the marketing team, is involved in any initial benchmarking study and future plans.

For more tips for optimising your relationship with your PR agency, you can download our 6 Tips for Working with a PR Agency white paper here.

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A surprisingly mild mid-November morning in Dublin welcomed the start of ESOMAR Fusion as delegates from over 40 countries descended upon the Irish capital to understand how as an industry, we can marry up the learnings from qualitative and big data to create a better tomorrow.

For someone that is new to the world of market research and the intricacies of big data and qualitative research, the event was perfect to really get under the skin of the topics, network and improve my general ignorance.

Before I get started on the content, one of the best things about FUSION from my perspective was the organisation of the event. Many conferences I have been to provide a 10-minute break for a coffee then straight back in. This wasn’t the case at FUSION, through all four days, delegates had ample time to network, chat and discuss the content they had just seen/ heard. Also, any conference that provides a hot lunch every day is winning in my eyes.

For many Big Data is still a topic that can bring out many into a cold sweat, as an industry it feels like we are still getting to grips with these big data sets, and how to get the best out of them. So, I was interested to discover what the future of big data fused with qualitative research looks like.

FUSION, however, set out it’s stall early. All of the speakers over the first two days provided real world analogies that really brought the data to life. One of the best examples of using big data to solve a real-world problem (first world) that stands out from the first two days for me was the Demystifying Machine Learning session with Sjoerd Koornstra of The House of Insight, and Wim Hamaekers of haystack International on how to use big data to pick a drink flavour in a specific market. This talk caused a lot of debate amongst the audience with many asking why not just use qual research. The response was simple – cost and time.

There were plenty of other examples of how big data is transforming our world, whether that be the “dreaded Blockchain” topic, in which Clint Taylor at RDM provided an extremely accessible way of explaining it, to Hans the clever horse, who was able to understand body language to solve complex mathematical problems. Along with Jonathan Mall of Neuroflash with his presentation (one of the highlights of the entire week), which demonstrated how by using big data, brands can understand the sentiment and resonance of each word on their website, to drive greater customer interaction.

After two days of APIs, coding and heavy tech, it was time to hear about qual. It was very interesting to see the distinctive change in styles of presentations and the way in which the qual researchers presented their information and papers.

The two days of qual papers called for a lot more audience participation with many of the sessions requiring the audience to split into small workshop groups to solve specific problems. One of which is how can a US cinema chain win the battle against streaming films at home and what research would need to be done in order to solve this challenge.

My group, which luckily for me consisted of many qual researchers decided to take a different approach to many of the other groups within the audience. Many felt that by fusing passive data such as social listening with qualitative research was the way forward (embracing the theme of the conference). We however, took a different path identifying how US cinema chain could collaborate with wider partners to use existing data to entice customers back, and marry this up by using qual to see which collaborations and partnerships consumers really wanted at their local cinema.  All the points made for a really strong discussion in the networking break that followed the session.

One of the main highlights personally was the range and breadth of approaches that researchers can use to get qualitative insights. Shell for example, decided to pay homage to James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke as a way of getting to understand their customers better, while alcohol brand Suze proved that not all hipsters truly are unique, and many have the same opinions when it comes to individuality, a result that really shocked those within the panel.

So, after four days of presentations, debates and a couple too many Guinnesses with a few of the delegates – it was time to head back to London.  The biggest thing that struck in my mind when sitting on the flight was actually how important qual is to big data and big data is to qual. Both are sides of the same coin. Researchers are starting to get to grips with the fusing of these two data points, but there is still a way to go before the potential is fully realised.

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