Market research news
The blog of the market research agency IntoTheminds lists opinionated articles, examples of alignment with marketing theory, highlights and bad buzz, carefully selected by Pierre-Nicolas Schwab, his team and influential experts.
SIAL 2016 : first conclusions from a busy week
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Like every 2 years I spent a few days attending the world's biggest food fair : SIAL 2016. Each and every year this fait gets bigger and 2016 was no exception. SIAL 2016 remains a primary source of information for…
Made.com : retail innovation at its best
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Want to experience a truly innovative store : pay a visit to Made.com, a brick-and-mortar shop which offers a truly unique customer experience. Introduction Made.com is an online brand offering design furniture at democratic prices through bypassing intermediaries. Their Parisian…
Big Data and Ethics : how recommendations work at Meetup.com
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
There have been many interesting talks at the RecSys 2016 conference in Boston. Yet, the presentation given by Evan Estola of Meetup was especially inspiring to me. It wasn’t the regular technical speech you may expect in that kind of…
Big Data : why ethics issues need to be addressed urgently
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Artificial Intelligence is increasingly present in our daily lives : speech recognition, automatic translation, personal assistants, chatbots, recommendation algorithms. These technological advances are also subject to criticism and questions on ethics. What happens with our data, will algorithms govern us,…
Predicting consumers’ behaviors: the importance of explicit feedback
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
In today's article I'd like to present a new perspective on the evolution of consumer behaviors' modelization in the last 30 years or so. These modelizations are windely used in today's world of Big Data and recommendation algorithms. Introduction Understanding…
Banks are laying off : only because of digitalisation ?
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
ING : 3500 jobs cut. Axa : 650 jobs cut. BNP Paribas Fortis : 1000 jobs cut. As the Financial Times pointed out, some 100,000 jobs will be cut in the banking sector in 2016. Read again. One hundred thousands.…
RecSys 2016 conference : trends in recommendation on TV
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
The ACM Recommender Systems conference opened on 15 September 2016 in Boston (MA) with the RecSys TV workshop, one day dedicated to recommender systems in the broadcasting sphere. Presentations by Verizon, Comcast, Netflix, the University of Lisbon were the highlights…
Road trip in west and south Iceland: an incredible experience
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
This long post is a short report of our recent trip to Iceland. Making this trip was part of the good resolutions I took in 2016 and I'm so happy I did it. I've already explained briefly what I learned…
My summer readings : the outstanding, the good and the worse
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Summer is usually the time for me to rejuvenate my creativity and get prepared for the second part of the year to come. I love to chain-read to encourage ideation. This year I packed my beloved Kindle with a few…
Why you should not wear health devices
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
So far insurances had to rely on your declarative questionnaires to evaluate the risk you represented. Those have been found to be very intrusive; so intrusive in fact that Belgian consumers' defense organization Test Achats has urged insurance companies to…
Users change their behaviors to please algorithms
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Technology and especially algorithms have invaded the public space. According to Alain Damasio “Freedom is not a desirable concept anymore”. Security and ease-of-use now comes first, as the success of recommendation engines tends to prove. We are surrounded by computer…
Facebook : how do people perceive NewsFeed curation algorithm
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Curation algorithms aren’t fundamentally different from recommendation engines (see the article we just published on the latter here). They select what you ought to see, for instance on your Facebook Newsfeeds. Two studies have addressed customers’ perception of automated curation…
Retail design : beautiful optician store in Paris
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
We are always attentive to innovative retail design (read for instance our report on the recently opened Joe Sayegh store) and we found a store that is worth a visit . Parici is an optician store located 14 rue du…
Recommendation algorithms : how big is the Filter Bubble in actuality
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Recommendation algorithms have been accused to trap users in a filter bubble, to promote the balkanization of information and hence to reduce serependity. The biggest opponent of recommendation engine is probably Eli Pariser who invented the very term of “filter…
Big Data: let your customers improve your segmentation
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Companies are keen on obtaining as much data as possible on their customers to improve behavioral profiling. Yet, few companies harness the power of their customers to enrich their data with new types of data, allowing new segments to be…
Joe Sayegh opens amazing new store in Paris
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Joe Sayegh just opened a store at 29 Rue du Roi de Sicile in Paris. This is the first B2C store of this brand which was long reserved to architects, designers and … very rich people. We couldn’t resist visiting…
1 month using TOR : it ain’t easy to protect his privacy
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Those of you who watched Ed Snowden’s movie “Citizen Four” are certainly aware of privacy issues that come with the use of the Internet. Privacy was first a value of the internet and progressively became a myth. The initial libertarian…
Digital innovation: does your market segment care ?
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Tech-savvy entrepreneurs love to imagine solutions to digitalize our world and change consumers’ usages. Adoption is usually the problem that occurs. It’s therefore essential to ask you this question beforehand: “do your target customers care enough to change their habits”…
Let’s reinvent recommendation engines
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Recommendation engines (a series of algorithms aiming at targeting what you'd like best to see / get / purchase / you name it) are everywhere. You use them without knowing it. The first recommendation engine is actually Google (or any…
Great promotion for Canada at Lyon (France) airport
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
While traveling in France I spotted a very nice communication campaign at Lyon Saint-Exupery airport on the occasion of the opening of the Lyon – Montreal connection. To celebrate this new connection, passengers were invited to discover North American culture…
Pokemon Go: what does this game reveal about ourselves?
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Newspapers and magazines have been quick to celebrate the amazing popularity of Pokemon Go. The stock market followed quickly and Nintendo share sky rocketed as a result of an excess of enthusiasm, before investors that Nintendo was not at the…
Liberals share less serious content on Facebook than conservatives
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
In my quest to understand how algorithms limit our freedom, my attention was caught by a piece of research published in June 2015 in Science. This research was funded by Facebook (which is an important piece of information) and aims…
How I got in the TOP10 of Linkedin’s most viewed profiles
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
8 weeks ago I started an experiment. I wanted to jump into the TOP10 most viewed profiles of my Linkedin network. I succeeded. Read further if you want to find out how I achieved jumping from the 100th place to…
The economy of the attention ensures a world of mediocrity
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
We live in a world of mediocrity. We are more than ever bombarded with stimuli of all kinds and our brains are about to explode. We are hardly able to concentrate on one task at a time and are constantly…
