Agenda

In 2020 amidst well-known pandemic challenges, Joanna Lepore joined a group of curious thinkers to transform how Mars turned foresight into action.

To help the company see beyond 2020, the team made it less academic and complicated with this formula: 1) looking at the crossroads of history x (ever-constant) human motivations x signals of change, and 2) harnessing curiosity.

The result: They drove business action and, most importantly, reinstated the potential power of foresight.

Following her presentation, Joanna will moderate a discussion with fellow insights leaders from Reebok and Kohler to explore how their insights teams are defining company vision and planning.

The turmoil and confusion of the past year have left many brands adrift — wondering how to stay relevant for consumers whose moods and needs seem to change almost daily. By embracing social causes, have they created more problems than they have solved? What do consumers really want and expect for 2021 — and beyond? In this new presentation, GfK’s Amy Wills will draw on two recent surveys to explore how 2020 has changed expectations of brands, what really matters to consumers today, and how the rules of loyalty have shifted — possibly for good.

At Raytheon Technologies, the Enterprise Services User Experience team works each day to invent the future of employee experiences.
This is not an aspirational statement, it’s our remit. Using a variety of design frameworks and experience measurement tools we empower employee collaboration and innovation globally. 

The way we work and engage has changed. Faint, unfocused signals that used to pass as communication and research findings in traditional organizations don’t translate anymore. We meet these changes head on by rethinking the role of knowledge in experience design. Using frameworks from a variety of disciplines, we look to systematically create, measure, and socialize knowledge to future proof the collaboration and innovation experience for 200,000 employees. Through creative engineering we engage with knowledge workers who have historically been difficult to reach and measure. Through strategic, data-driven communication, we socialize and pilot new innovative experience concepts faster than previously thought possible. 

Key Takeaways:

- Learn a fresh approach for tapping into knowledge workers
- Obtain a framework for leveraging data for sense-making
- Learn to leverage "building to think" as an effective socialization tool

In the $140-billion gaming industry, 41% of gamers are women. And yet the industry today still feels very male dominated. From hiding their true selves while playing online to dealing with offensive stereotypes in the gaming community, women gamers still struggle to be taken seriously.

Lenovo, a leading provider of gaming hardware, wants to change the narrative. To meet its commitment of making gaming a safe space for women, Lenovo works with Reach3 Insights to engage women and get a more nuanced and complete understanding of the issues they’re facing and learn potential solutions. Using conversational, mobile messaging-based methods, the company captures candid feedback from women gamers to explore topics that are both important and sensitive.

The result: genuine and actionable insight Lenovo can use to help create a more inclusive culture for the gaming industry.

Conversations with women gamers help highlight and evolve ongoing thought leadership from Lenovo in the gaming industry, specifically through their Legion PC gaming brand. More crucially, this work supports the company’s bigger strategic mission of providing “smarter technology for all.” While Lenovo is constantly engaging consumers to drive smart business decisions, utilizing mobile messaging technologies such as those used here helps better reveal the emotions and contextual dynamics driving behaviors.

Join this fast and focused session to learn how Lenovo:

• Engages thousands of gamers from US, Canada and Germany at scale in conversational exercises that let the company keep its pulse on the gaming community and build long-term thought leadership
• Uses innovative techniques to get people out of “test taking” mode, uncovering richer, more candid feedback in the process
• Captures real-time inputs (including selfie videos) by rethinking email-based methods and leveraging mobile-first research techniques

Voice Assistants/Smart Devices are leading-edge technology becoming more prevalent in people’s everyday lives for information, utility, entertainment, and commerce. 

There is a tremendous opportunity for manufacturers, marketers, and retailers to embrace Voice Commerce & Voice Technology when they are creating their omnichannel strategies.  
However, given Voice Commerce is still in a nascent stage, research methodologies to learn and measure this new technology have not been fully established, so creativity and collaboration are critical between Insights teams and research suppliers.

Getting ahead in Voice requires smart, creative research practices that reveal insights aligned with the opportunities and challenges that Voice brings. 

Mars Wrigley, on the forefront of Voice, along with their research partner, Radius Illumination, offer guidance on how they collaborated to build effective research that easily translated into compelling insights, “aha’s”, and clear direction for future Voice Commerce strategies.

Key takeaways/learnings:

• Where and how Voice is being used today
• How Voice Commerce & Voice Technology may be used to enhance a person’s shopping journey
• What market research tools and best practices can be used to ensure accurate and insightful learning on the complexities of Voice

Jimmy John’s, recently acquired by Inspire Brands, did not traditionally deviate from their core menu. Following the acquisition, a new opportunity for an LTO was presented. Guided by consumer feedback a promising new concept, Smokin’ Kickin’ Chicken, was chosen. Knowing the first introduction of a chicken product was critical to future LTO success they sought Curion’s support to understand the optimal combination of ingredients among other key attributes and communications. Armed with careful product research, Jimmy Johns’ new LTO proved to be a widespread market success and highly lucrative introduction into chicken-based menu items.

Key Takeaways

• Incorporating the consumer voice early effectively guides future research plans.
• Testing LTOs can have a powerful impact on the broader business.
• The importance of weaving in key brand aspects into an LTO.

For the last decade, the Fortune 500 has been responding to a wave of innovative, disruptive startups rethinking the rules of business. 

Now, companies big and small are faced with an entirely new and unexpected disruptor where consumer behavior is dramatically changing and the stakes have never been greater.

In this new environment, Predicting The Turn takes on a new meaning. Today’s environment is one where we must be aware of the danger but recognize the opportunity. 

No one knows exactly what the future will hold and this talk isn’t about bold – but baseless – predictions. 

Instead, Predicting The Turn is about a framework on how we can approach the changes playing out in society, consider the Second Order Consequences for our companies, and recognize the opportunities that may come out of these difficult times.

This one of those moments where everything changes. And so, we need to change how our communications meet the moment in 5 key ways.

Few things have impacted society more than COVID-19. All of us have experienced foundational shifts in how we work, live, and interact. In times of extreme change, how we hear and interpret messages shifts. A message we might have understood one way just a few months ago, will hit us completely differently today. The role we expect companies and certain sectors to play has evolved. And, what we want to hear from companies is fundamentally different today. And so, as researchers we need to rethink how we communicate. Faced with such an unprecedented moment for language, we set out to learn more about how organizations are communicating in the age of the Coronavirus. We pulled together a database of over 600 companies communication starting in February of last year and have analyzed patterns and themes to help others engage with their clients, customers, employees, and investors during this time. In this session, I will break down the 5 areas we need to rethink during this time.

Tomorrow is almost here, are you prepared for it? Our role as insights and analytics practitioners has long been focused on understanding the past (hindsight) or describe the present (insight). The global pandemic, this past year has led many business leaders to demand a better view of what’s coming (foresight). In this session you will learn the critical role of strategic foresight in anticipating the future and how to prepare your business and your skill set. You will learn the key principles of futures thinking and through real world examples, how to create success for you and your team through engaging at a strategic level within your organization to redefine your role as an insights practitioner and a futures strategist. In the words of John C. Maxwell, “If you don’t try to create the future you want, you must endure the future you get.” Join us to be inspired to shape the future of Us. 

Learning objectives

- How to understand and prepare your business and your team for the future
- Create exciting new pathways for your career and professional status
- How to redefine the future of insights to make it directly relevant to C-suite concerns

Learn how to automate behavioral science to provide a deeper understanding of the emotional engagement and influence of advertising. Join expert, Jeremiah Messer as he analyzes ad performance using the advanced behavioral science tool, RAPID Subtext®.   

RAPID Subtext® can quickly provide true implicit insights into the real impact on emotions before, during, and after exposure to an advertisement. This automated platform combines facial action coding and implicit association testing, along with other measures, to pinpoint the emotional moments of an ad that are related to change in attitudes toward brands.   

These measures are commonly used to uncover the real impact on brand appeal and gain insight into how to optimize an ad to maximize impact on demand for the brand."

We often hear the phrase “think outside the box” when we are challenged to find new ways to solve old problems. 
However, in some cases, the best thing to do is to consider your constraints and use an “inside the box” framework for innovation.

In this session you'll discover how constraint-driven research designs can actually help develop new approaches and uncover fresh new insights.
The presentation will include an overview of the “inside the box” mental model and how it can help you navigate by turning your constraints inside out. 

You will see practical examples of three different ways in which researchers have leveraged this approach to design innovative digital research projects.

North American companies tend to employ Americo-Centric thinking and language to develop positioning and then “test” it as widely as they can afford.

Often this testing is constructed on the basis of selecting a preferred message.

In this session we argue for an approach which builds local positioning and messaging within a global concept which will optimally connect with each cultural market.

In this session we will describe how to use psychology, anthropology and linguistics in the design, execution and analysis of international research.

We are conditioned to be experts in our respective roles, but the drive to know it all often results in overconfidence, stagnation, perpetuation of the status quo and a stifling of creativity and innovation.
On the other hand, research has shown just a one-unit increase in curiosity (on a 7-point Likert Scale) has been associated with 34% greater creativity.

Get out of the expert rut with the help of a recovering know-it-all in this short tutorial where you’ll learn about a practical framework to enliven curiosity–the must have meta-skill for creativity, collaboration, and clarity in today’s ever-changing digital world.

Human behaviour is driven by emotion, motivation and context. So being able to track that is a key factor in predicting how they will act in the future.

Vast amounts of unstructured data will pick up on these behavioural insights, but how do you utilise that to plan your future strategy?

Join leading thought experts on consumer behaviour to find out how to:

• Shift your working mindset from consumer insights to human foresights.
• Gain real time insight into behavioural drivers and how to influence them in the future.
• Use foresights to identify previously hidden demand spaces and expose niche markets.

As the business model disruption of the pandemic passes the 1-year mark, companies and consumers continue to debate when we will return to normal. We believe this is the wrong way to frame this question, as the idea of “normal” will be forever different. Too much has changed, and consumers have changed too much. Not to mention that things always continue to advance, innovate, and change even without a pandemic. The question should be – what will normal look like next?

In our upcoming roundtable, Kantar will share a fresh take on how the marketplace will change over the next 5-7 years, hoping to spark a debate about the future. These forecasts will touch on generational challenges, urban planning and development, sustainability, and a few other critical topics to explore together.

Over the last couple of years, the AI and ML communities have been buzzing about a new technology - Language Transformers.
Technology companies have been rushing to compete and produce the biggest and baddest systems – and the results have been staggering.
But don’t take my word for it, let’s ask one of the state-of-the-art systems – GPT-3:

Language Transformer models have the potential to transform the insights industry. The insights industry is about moving from data to insights, and more specifically, from data to insights that are scalable, accessible, and deliverable. In the past, this has been achieved by a combination of three approaches. The first is the use of statistical models, the second is the use of expert knowledge, and the third is the use of domain knowledge…

Yes, the above was written by GPT-3, an AI system. But transformer models go way beyond just producing believable copy, they have the potential to literally transform industries.

In this non-technical introduction, we will explore what the effect might be on our own industry. Are transformer models really gamechangers or are they just hype?
Are they, as some have said, too dangerous to allow or are they just toys? After this presentation you will be able to make up your own mind.

The presentation will include many real examples of the use of these technologies and how they can be specifically applied within the Insights Industry.
I can promise that if you have never seen what the state-of-the-art looks like you will be blown away!

Discover the benefits of fast data connectivity through Google’s ‘Waffle’ (aka Google Workspace Marketplace)
This presentation will detail how data analytics helped boost donations for Food4Kids Halton, a Toronto-area charity that feeds over 830 children each weekend.
Determined to help non-profits providing essential services during the pandemic, Miix Analytics, a startup MR boutique, took a fresh approach to finding ways to drive growth in donations across their multiple revenue streams.

The research included four-phases, enabled by the great integration and ease of use offered by Google:

1. Customer/Donor Analytics via Google Sheets and Data Studio
2. Marketing Mix ROI Analytics via Google Sheets and Google Analytics
3. New Product Innovation Research via Involve.me Survey Analytics
4. Ongoing Monitoring via Google Sheets and Data Studio

You will learn: 

- Don’t be afraid of your data. Explore your data. Experiment with your data.
- Customer Analytics is simpler than you think. There are numerous platforms that enable easy visualizations. You don’t need to be an expert.
- Tech will not replace the need for Human Insights. Tech should offer much faster views of your data, enabling you to extract deeper views and timely insights to action.
- The benefits from data connectivity are huge for any business - clients and agencies alike. Make your data connection simple so that it can be updated continuously and all stakeholders can use it.

Real time ROI should mean Real-Time ROI, as in, “What is my return on investment right now?”.

The tools and techniques used by storytellers have been continually evolving since ancient times, and it’s no different today: research storytellers have a whole slew of new technologies to help present their narratives. 

What hasn’t changed are the eternal storytelling forms that researchers need to be aware of. 

This fascinating talk will trace the history of storytelling and expose attendees to the timeless storytelling structures embedded in the human psyche.

Making new things happen inside any big company is challenging, whatever your title and level of seniority. So how do you overcome the challenges? 

Scott Kirsner, founder and CEO of Innovation Leader, will share data points and case studies from their 2020 and 2021 research that highlight the need for the right mix of innovation metrics — along with vision and storytelling skills.

Email replies that show up a week later. Video chats full of “oops... sorry no you go” and “can you hear me?!” Ambiguous text-messages. Is it any wonder communication takes us so much time and effort to figure out? How did we lose our innate capacity to understand each other?

Humans rely on body language to connect and build trust, but with most of our communication happening from behind a screen, traditional body language signals are no longer visible - or are they? In her interactive session, Erica combines cutting edge research with engaging storytelling to decode the new signals and cues that have replaced traditional body language. In person, we lean in, uncross our arms, smile, nod and make eye contact to show we listen and care. Online, reading carefully is the new listening. Writing clearly is the new empathy. And a phone or video call is worth a thousand emails.

Employee satisfaction has hit all time lows this year. While we assumed much of this data was due to the pandemic, research shows that poor workplace digital communications were actually the key contributor to job dissatisfaction. In this session, Erica Dhawan will introduce you to 21st century digital body language skills to ensure we all thrive, lead and communicate in our hybrid marketplace -- which we all know is here to stay

Learning Outcomes:

● Understand your collaboration style and the digital body language signals you may be broadcasting (even if you don't intend to!)
● Create cultures of maniacal clarity across email, phone, IM, text, video and even live meetings
● Develop a collaboration and employee engagement strategy that fosters valuable relationships, both in-person and online
● End cultures of useless meetings, missed deadlines, and digital misunderstandings

WhatsApp has proven to be an effective way for respondents to express themselves via a familiar platform.

Does it work for B2B audiences as well? 

Find out as new research is revealed.    

Images are now dominating social media: 90% of US marketers name Instagram as the most important social platform for influencer marketing. 500 million people visit Instagram daily, while over 75 billion pins have been upload to Pinterest. It’s estimated that 1.16 billion people can be reached through adverts on Instagram. While the analysis of comments posted with images is fairly accessible to researchers, albeit less so at scale, the analysis of images themselves is a far more complicated problem. How do brands ‘know’ what they are really transmitting through the visual language they are using? How do they know how well that shapes up against the competition, in a consistently measurable way? The talk highlights the issues around image analysis at scale, and describes the application of automated quantitative semiotic analysis to imagery using some well accepted frameworks. The use of Jungian and Schwartz (Theory of Basic Values) archetype analysis applied to images is discussed, along with image emotionality metrics, and direct properties of the images themselves, such as composition and color. Finally the talk discusses how this type of analysis can be used to generate new brand and category insight, and even predictive metrics of engagement.

Ever wonder how co-creation applies to B2B, where we are challenged with complex products, group decision-making and now remote interactions (due to the pandemic)?

See a case study which piloted an online needs-based co-creation workshop using a hybrid Jobs-To-Be-Done and Customer Journey Mapping approach to generate new product ideas and a better understanding of an adjacent market.

This “needs-based co-creation” can be a powerful weapon in the B2B arsenal. You will learn:

- A framework for thinking about what kinds of participants to include in the co-creation sessions

- How to structure co-creation online for maximum engagement and effectiveness

- Tips for planning online sessions to encourage focus on the most important problems

- Suggestions for report-out and archiving so that, as the session outcomes are taken into your organization, maximum use can be made of the session results

- Why it is critical that session outcomes be focused on both the new ideas from participants AND the underlying needs that have inspired those ideas.

While innovation across digital insights tools has made both quant and qual research much more agile and sophisticated, much of physical product research has remained stuck in the past - manual processes of getting products in consumers' hands can make product testing inefficient and sometimes, not even feasible.

There’s opportunity for product manufacturers and developers to test their products earlier and faster, as a critical part of R&D processes. Leveraging the right tools, at the right times, to strategically collect actionable product data is key.

Mondelez, a trailblazer in taking an innovation-forward, agile approach to insights, along with research partner Highlight, a new agile product testing platform, will share their tips for injecting agility into the product research process.

Key takeaways/learnings:

• How COVID has heightened the need for in-home product research, and how the role of the in-home usage test (IHUT) has evolved
• When and how in-home product research can be used most efficiently today
• Best practices to ensure efficient execution of IHUTs