Mustard in The Big Apple

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Mustard in The Big Apple
Posted on November 11, 2015 by Lucy Davison

Reading Time: 2 minutes

IMD

Monday 21 September was a beautiful day in New York as Mustard directors Simon Dunn and Lucy Davison left their digs in Long Island City and headed to JWT’s swanky new offices in Manhattan to speak at GreenBook’s second annual Insights Marketing Day. Sadly, we didn’t get to experience much of the city as we were totally absorbed by the flow of great content, interesting presentations and friendly networking that was on offer all day.

Dana Stanley, GreenBook’s director of marketing, produced and hosted #IMD2015 where 16 brand marketers from inside and outside of the industry shared insights with more than 100 marketers from market research agencies and suppliers who were eager to achieve excellence in their marketing. Although a few had attended the inaugural event a year earlier, most were fresh to IMD and eager for inspiration and practical tips.

Padmini Sharma, president of Jester & Genius and a veteran market researcher from PepsiCo’s Frito Lay business unit, presented the first key note. Padmini encouraged the audience to talk less about what they do and more about how and most importantly why they do it.

Following this excellent kick off, my presentation then focused on the five most important things I have learned after 15 years in marketing for market research (you can find out what they are here). After further inspiration – in particular a great session on story telling from Kristian Aloma from Brandtrust.com – Mustard’s Simon Dunn gave a fascinating presentation about design principles. The audience lapped up Simon’s insights and notes were scribbled furiously (you can see Simon’s presentation here).

As with all GreenBook events, IMD2015 was slickly organised with great, well-structured content. There was a lot of interactivity, with questions flowing freely throughout the day and many interesting discussions taking place. Better marketing will not only benefit individual companies within research but will benefit the insights business as a whole, enabling us to improve understanding of the work we do, attract the right calibre of candidates and improve our influence with clients. Delegates left with practical guidance on what they can do next, as well as inspiration on how to communicate and market the diverse and dynamic industry we work in.

We are hoping to support GreenBook by extending the reach of IMD to other markets in 2016 – so watch this space!