We need to rethink how to study filter bubbles: here’s why
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
At the RecSys conference, the last part of my keynote was dedicated to nuancing the myth of filter bubbles and to show the limitations of current academic research and propose a new research framework. Research on filter bubbles has been…
Why recommendation algorithms need to include personality and emotions
At the RecSys 2018 conference on recommender systems, a very interesting tutorial was given on the first day by Marko Tkalčič from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. In his presentation he focused on how emotions, mood and personality shape the way…
IBC 2018 in Amsterdam : the right place to detect trends in the broadcasting industry
I've been attending the IBC show for the last 3 years and, although it's a long and quite exhausting experience (the show lasts for 6 days including conferences and welcomes 57000 visitors), it has proved to be very rewarding each…
Facebook alert: users are massively desinstalling the app in the US
A recent market research report published by the Pew Research Center, one of the worldwide leading market research institutes, sheds light on a phenomenon that may be the biggest threat that Facebook has had to face until now. A possible…
Marketing research: the influence of privacy perception on customer loyalty
What does privacy mean in the age of robots, articifial intelligence and omnipresent algorithms? How do users percive privacy and how is it traded off against other benefits (personalization for instance)? Those are still emerging questions that a team of…
Customer experience : finally a scientific scale to measure it
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
How to measure customer experience? This question has led many researchers on the path to developing scales to quantify something that is highly subjective by nature. [call-to-action-read id="31627"] Yet most customer experience scales were until now limited to one particular…
Market research : the combined effect of music and light in the retail sector
Sensory market research has focused mostly on the effects on consumer behavior of specific cues: light, scent, temperature, ... Some of those cues are always present in a retail setting (light, temperature) and past studies have therefore investigated the effects…
filter bubbles: scientific evidence that algorithms aren’t to be blamed
What can you discover about filter bubbles when you analyse datasets with billions of tweets over a 8-year period ? Some very interesting results for sure. In particular that you don't need algorithms to stay within an echo chamber and…
30 days to read privacy policies: consent fatigue will make GDPR ineffective
It is said that the average American is subject to some 1500 privacy policies on a yearly basis which represent dozens of working days worth of reading. I did a little bit of research to find out where this come…
How to successfuly realize qualitative interviews in market research studies
Conducting good market research often requires to carry our a qualitative study. This is particulary true of customer satisfaction surveys that are often poorly designed and are not based on sound assumptions. In today's article we reflect on some essential…
Face recognition algorithms are biases towards black people and women
Joy Buolamwini, a MIT PhD candidate, presented her research at the inaugural FAT Conference in New-York. She had previously given a TED talk and been invited to the White House to present her work on algorithmic fairness. In the paper…
The history of media resistance : from printing to social media through TV and radio
Throughout history people have shown remarkable resistance to new forms of media, be it books, cinema, radio, TV or Internet. Today social media addiction leads to a new form of resistance. A new book by Trine Syvertsen sums up remarkably…
Market research combines Big Data and qualitative techniques .. 120 years ago
Visualizing data has become a standard task and one essential component of data science today. But, haven't we forgotten how lucky we are to have all that data available and to be able to use it for various purposes ?…
If you are addicted to your social media, it’s because you suffer of FOMO
A recent research (Blackwell et al. 2017) has investigated the antecedents of social media addiction. In other words, what makes us look at Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter dozens of times every single day. Five variables were tested : age, extraversion, neuroticism,…
Marketing research reveals free apps are bad for business
A recent marketing research published in the Journal of Marketing reveals that offering a free version of an app reduces the speed of adoption of the paying version of the same app. In other words, you will reduce the odds…
Consumer behavior : why do we leave online reviews?
On the occasion of the RecSys 2017 conference I was fortunate to attend Prof. Lowenstein's inaugural talk that offered an inspiring overview of behavioral economics applied to recommendation systems. In particular Prof. Lowenstein explored the psychology of information sharing which…
Market research : evolution of food purchasing behaviors on the French market
What are the significant trends in the food market? What is consumed, and how? In this article, we return to the evolutions of this market. Discover also the prospective study that we carried out on the future of the retail…
Airlines loyalty programs : different countries, different benefits
Loyalty cards have been an important innovation when it comes to increase customer loyalty. It ll started with American Airlines and the least we can say is that the airline industry is the one which has probably pushed the concept…
Facebook doesn’t tell you really why you get targeted advertising
In the data world, the topics of transparency, privacy and ethics are more and more discussed. As we predicted a year ago, this may well be the next revolution in data science. We ran an experiment to understand the level…
Ugly vegetables look more natural and give stores a better image
Consumers perceive "ugly", misshappen vegetables, as more natural. Moreover communication campaigns promoting these "abnormal" products benefit also the stores , such campaign convey indeed a positive image in the minds of the customers. Those are the results of a study…
Recommendation algorithms : the myth of filter bubbles at stake
We've already discussed filter bubbles on this blog, a rather technical term that describes the negative effet of algorithms on our digital life. For more information read this thorough article. Whether or not filter bubbles really exist is still debated…
Artificial intelligence: are algorithms biased by nature ?
I attended a workshop at the Maastricht European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity where I met Prof. Alessandro Mantelero of Polytecnico di Torino. Prof. Mantelero is well known as a specialist in the protection of personal data, which has become…
Retail : the role of packaging on in-store purchase decisions
How to drive more in-store purchases ? This is the $1m question every retailer relentlessly tries to answer. Recent scientific advances in the field of consumer behavior give us some insights on this, especially on the role of packaging. How…
Emotions detection in advertising: consumers still reluctant to give their data
Advertisers have always been among the most creative professionals; not only on the content part but also in their use of the newest technologies to make their advertising messages more efficient. The use of eye-tracking dates back to decades, whereas…
Market research : Norwegians don’t want personnalized insurance
Insurance companies are getting increasingly personal and thanks to digitization they are proposing new tailor-made products. Two main applications can be found : Personalized health insurance Personalized car insurance We have explored in recent articles the different aspects of such…
More debt leads to lower customer satisfaction
It is well known that firms in the US use mainly external financing (debt) to finance growth. It actually is believed to account for 80% of financing. Yet, this external financing puts pressure on the firms and studies have revealed…
Can Big Data become a technique to promote transparency and equity
On this blog I often took a pessimistic look at Big Data, asking for a revolution in how firms build and use their algorithms. I called for instance for opening up the models behind recommendation algorithms and wondered whether our…
How data vulnerability affects firms’ performance and how to remedy it
Everyone talks about privacy. But what is it really ? A recent article in French economical journal "La Tribune" built upon two recent BCG reports (here and there) on data protection and privacy to question firms' practices around data privacy…
Academic research debunks the myth of filter bubbles
The interest for the "Filter Bubble" phenomenon reached an all-time high after 2016 US presidential elections (see our article). The existence of filter bubble was hypothesized by Eli Pariser in 2011, yet it remains at the center of debate on…
How US elections shed light on the filter bubble phenomenon
Just do a Google search on "Filter bubble" and you'll be surprized of the many results returned. The recent US presidential elections have shed light on this phenomenon first hypothetized by Eli Pariser in 2011, and subject to much debate…
Market research : how news consumption is evolving
You know we love market research and in this article we'd like to discuss and comment the latest results published by Reuters in their worldwide market research on news consumption and mix them with some EBU media intelligence reports to…
Customer experience better than customer satisfaction to predict loyalty
We discussed recently the links between customer satisfaction, loyalty and customer experience. One of the conclusions was that, as of today, no reliable scale exists to measure customer experience. This doesn't mean however that nothing has been done on this…
What are the latest conclusions of academics on customer satisfaction and customer experience ?
In the Journal of Marketing special issue " Mapping the Boundaries of Marketing: What Needs to Be Known", Lemon & Verhoef (2016) deliver 5 very useful conclusions on the state of customer experience and satisfaction research. These 5 conclusions, taken…
The role of Big Data on society : EBU conference
With fellow colleagues of EBU, I organized last week a conference entitled "Big Data and Society"at RTBF, the French-speaking public broadcasting organization of Belgium. As I wrote on EBU website, this event aimed at gathering together professionals from the broadcasting industry…
How novelty and serendipity improve customer satisfaction
Product recommendations have enabled E-commerce websites to become a place where mass marketing converges with niche marketing. Recommendations are pivotal in enabling less popular products to be discovered by people who are the most likely to like them : this…
Facebook : how do people perceive NewsFeed curation algorithm
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…
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