During this search, I kept seeing one word over and over again:  infographic.  When had that term become so mainstream?  I really like these visual depictions of quantitative data – they’re more fun and easier to understand, plus they are often able communicate much more information.  I’ve talked about infographics before in a newsletter piece, but never here.

To give you a couple of fun examples:  the first showcases how restaurant sales went up, comparing chains within the fast food and sit-down segments.  A much more engaging chart than the graphics of yesteryear! (Source:  DesignReviver.com)

This is my favorite recent one, from Shanghai Web Designers.  It visually summarizes what is done every 60 seconds on the Web:  70+ domain names are registered; 600+ new videos are uploaded to YouTube, 1,500 new blog posts go live – just to name a few.  The scope of the Internet’s impact is clearly seen in this one snapshot.

In qualitative research, infographics morph into something else.

• Personas are used to offer a feel for a target audience.
• Illustrations are used to explain a theory or concept, such at the one I used when explaining Situational Decision-Making in this blog post (click here).
• Collages are used to showcase a variety of things, including harder-to-articulate feelings about a brand.
• Word Clouds are created from qualitative answers to highlight which words are used most often.

With the flood of infographics on the quantitative research side, my sense is that on the qualitative side, we need to bring what we’re doing up a notch – we can do better.  So over the next few months, I intend to play when I’m reporting.  I’m seeing some new tools on sites like MakeUseOf.com and, for a nominal fee, Gliffy.com.  Maybe I’ll succeed and maybe I won’t. But it’ll be fun trying!

Any ideas you’d share about how you’re making qualitative research findings more visual – without the use of video?  Would love to hear from you!!

(RSS/Email Subscribers:  Having trouble seeing the images in this post?  Click on the post title and view the blog on the website.)

There are two aspects to this:

• The use of superlatives is becoming (more of) a turn-off in concept statements and advertising.  I am seeing this more with younger participants, but I hear it from time-to-time from the “older” folks as well.   “Best” or “better than” is not the tone they want to hear; using or including the “best of something” (e.g., best quality ingredients) – if the key benefits support the claim – is more acceptable.
• Greater value is being placed on the parts (individual) vs. the whole.  I haven’t heard in quite some time someone say “that’s a great CD.”  They like a particular song.  They download it, put it on their iPod or other device, and customize their listening experience.  That focus on being able to customize experiences is helping to drive how they react to new products and ideas.

For example, I can’t image Pepsi coming out with an ad campaign today saying “The Choice of a New Generation.”  This new generation would blog about the ridiculousness of that claim – “you’re telling us what’s our choice?!”

If this is all sounding very left-brained and logical, that’s not my intent.  I’ve often said that unless there’s a connection between a consumer and a brand, a sale will never take place.  That connection can be emotional and/or rational, but it needs to happen.

And yet, my sense is that there this is an evolution to individuality that’s becoming more pronounced.  Companies need to become increasingly more sensitive when choosing how to position themselves and their products.  Until this morning, the best case example I could give was the “I’m a Mac” campaign from Apple.  As you know, they put it out there – I’m a PC vs. I’m a Mac.  In effect, they’re asking, “which one are you like?”

But just today, I saw a headline of “Design-your-own skincare, including ingredients and concentrations” (via Springwise).  Of course, I had to go visit this site.  Turns out that you can custom blend your own cosmetics from natural ingredients. From the www.mycodage.com/an website:

Convinced that every skin is unique and deserves special treatment, in 2006 Amandine and Julien, with the help of many experts, developed a technology that allows you to customize your product to suit the specific needs of each skin.  Codage was born.  100% made in France, CODAGE today delivers worldwide – from its French laboratories directly to you.

A bit stilted in the French to English translation, but how much more personal can you get than that??

As always, I’m interested in your thoughts!

My top five market research trends moving forward:

• The ability to accurately code open text/real language, which I expect will make great advances in the coming years, will enhance our ability to manage and analyze large volumes of data; the ability to be in touch with consumers’ thoughts/feelings in this way will elevate the role of the consumer researcher within organizations
• More interviewing will be done from remote locations (e.g., mobile, iPad kiosks).  This sounds obvious, but I don’t think we’ve seen the full impact of wireless technology on our industry yet
• MROC (market research online communities) will continue to evolve; for those who can’t afford their own, syndicated services will emerge
• How reports are delivered, and what they include (multimedia, the structure of implications, etc.), may be the way in which companies further distinguish themselves from one another.  (This has always been the case, but with technology, large and small companies will really need to work hard to stay ahead – a dated look will suggest dated thinking)
• The “anyone over 55 isn’t important” mindset (often held among advertising agencies and clients) will be seriously challenged in the next few years; related to this, matching targets to interviewing methods will contribute to even more mixed method studies

My five less-than-hot issues:

• Interest in certain types of social media research may cool among larger clients (just because “we can” doesn’t mean we always get valuable insights)
• Physiological testing, such as fMRIs, may not develop further as there are health/privacy-related issues to conducting this type of testing
• Respondent privacy issues will continue to discussed as the technologies evolve; while this issue isn’t “hot,” it’s still critical
• Back to basics:  it’s hard to find people who really do a great job recruiting for qualitative research and more emphasis will be placed on this by the community overall
• The debate about “the focus group is dead” will die back, as it always does; it’s just part of the cycle of what’s hot and what’s not.  We make it “hot” again by inventing new approaches to answer today’s (and tomorrow’s) questions

A couple of weeks ago, I read an article in Newsweek on Qwiki.  It won the TechCrunch Disrupt award this year and I think it’s well deserved.  It advances searchability in another direction.

Currently in Alpha (you have to apply or I can invite you to join), there are a few (expected) bumps, but what they’ve done is pretty amazing.  Each “video” pulls together information from different Web sources on a given topic; over time it’ll include more sources.  The video talks and shows corresponding pictures to help explain the who, what, and where.  At the end of the video, it recommends other, related videos to watch.

I explored Los Angeles, my hometown, and learned a few new things about our weather patterns. Want to see a comic book example?  View the video below.

With this advancement, the Internet opens up the world to people in new ways.  Certainly, if I were planning a vacation to a new city, a resource like this would be useful.  But imagine its potential for interactive learning, for people who aren’t as computer savvy, for people with motor or visual impairments, etc.

I’m very excited by this advancement and look forward to what’s next.  It also makes me a little sad that my grandfather is no longer with us:  if he thought a fax machine was nifty, he would have loved this!!

Let me know if you’d like me to send you an invite.

In case you missed the dustup, here’s an excerpt from the WSJ.com article:

At 1 a.m. on May 7, the website PatientsLikeMe.com noticed suspicious activity on its “Mood” discussion board. There, people exchange highly personal stories about their emotional disorders, ranging from bipolar disease to a desire to cut themselves.

It was a break-in. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was “scraping,” or copying, every single message off PatientsLikeMe’s private online forums.

Bilal Ahmed wrote about his health on a site that was scraped.

PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online “buzz” for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says.

I felt totally violated,” says Bilal Ahmed, a 33-year-old resident of Sydney, Australia, who used PatientsLikeMe to connect with other people suffering from depression. He used a pseudonym on the message boards, but his PatientsLikeMe profile linked to his blog, which contains his real name.

After PatientsLikeMe told users about the break-in, Mr. Ahmed deleted all his posts, plus a list of drugs he uses. “It was very disturbing to know that your information is being sold,” he says. Nielsen says it no longer scrapes sites requiring an individual account for access, unless it has permission.

Coincidentally, the 11/1/10 issue of Newsweek has an article entitled “Privacy is Dead.”  The author, a young woman, describes a new “score” created to help employers understanding social media behaviors of potential employees.  For this article, she hired a company called ReputationDefender (who works to clean up online reputations, but has a mixed reputation themselves) to see what they could learn about her (a job they usually don’t do).  As she said:

Three Silicon Valley engineers, several decades of experience, and access to publically available databases like Spokeo, Facebook, and LinkedIn (no, they didn’t do any hacking) – and voila.  Within 30 minutes the company had my Social Security number; in two hours they knew where I lived, my body type, my hometown, and my health status.

As she points out, it’s one thing if employers get this info; another if it’s a credit-card company or data aggregator who is turning around and selling info on you to other companies for a profit.  And maybe these companies aren’t talking about what they’re doing;  end-clients may not know (or don’t ask) how these companies are so effective in reaching a marketer’s  target audience.

The “debate” centers on several factors: 

What is “Public”?  I think we all believe that if we post something to our own public blog, or to a public LinkedIn or Facebook group, or Twitter, there’s the expectation that people can “take it” for analysis.

The Gray Area.   I was never naïve enough to believe that sites weren’t using our information for profit in some way.  However, I did assume that there was a gatekeeper in place: 

Case 1:  Amazon makes recommendations to its own customers based on past shopping and purchasing behaviors.  This is a closed system; I know I have a relationship with Amazon.

Case 2:  Site A describes its user profile to Advertiser B.  Advertiser B says they’d like to reach just those who are, let’s say, unmarried women under the age of 30.  Site A says no problem, send over your ad, and using an ad-server engine delivers the ad to just the desired target.  (Okay, a lot more complicated than that, but similar to how magazine lists were “rented” in the past.)

The Ugly Underbelly.  But what’s going on is often ugly and/or dishonest:  lying to join sites to scrap content; changing a privacy policy after someone has signed up to create a loophole for selling what had been private info.  Facebook’s privacy issues over the past year is the most well-known example of this right now – and Congress continues to investigate. 

Nielsen is a very large and respected media research company.  However, this Nielsen case, in my opinion, is just another part of the ugly underbelly – “mindless parasites” that weren’t programmed to consider the ramifications of their methodology.    Nielsen joined PatientsLikeMe.com with the intent of eavesdropping, not participating as a member.  Not okay – and I respect them less for having done so.

The good companies doing social media (text) analysis will seek permission from a site to analyze its content for a client (who’s likely to be a potential advertiser).  You might ask why a company would agree to have their content scraped.  It’s simple:   It’s another revenue stream.

Setting Some Standards Today. 
There are many aspects to this debate and I really urge you to think about what the possible solutions might be.  The leading market research organizations around the world, including ESOMAR, are dealing with these topics right now.  In the meantime, here are my initial thoughts:

• If a comment was made on a public blog, it can be quoted in a report delivered to a client.
• If a quote was made by a member of a private site, with the permission of the site owner to look at the data, those findings should not be quoted, but can become part of the aggregated analysis.
• Reporting is a greater challenge for qualitative approaches which tend to rely on quotes. 
• Finally, Terms of Service will need to evolve so consumers have greater buy-in when they sign up and as policy changes are made.  Easy to say and really hard to do. 

Clearly this is a topic I’ll continue to watch closely as it impacts marketing research, including qualitative analysis of social media content.

Your thoughts?