RecSys 2020 : 4 reasons why social media manipulate us
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
The RecSys 2020 conference took place last week in a new form because of the pandemic. I should have been in Rio de Janeiro with the rest of the scientific community to talk about recommendation systems like every year. Covid-19 changed our…
Qualitative research on Chinese tourists undermines stereotypes
Are the leading museums doing enough to understand the customer experience they offer? In this article, I have looked at the use of Big Data to understand visitor expectations better and increase satisfaction. Even without Big Data, it is possible to…
To study drug trafficking, he met drug dealers in prison
What do Sudhir Venkatesh and Teun Voeten have in common? Both are anthropologists, and both have frequented drug traffickers to conduct research. [caption id="attachment_46094" align="aligncenter" width="838"] A grenade exploded in Deurne, where Teun Voeten lives. This is the umpteenth manifestation…
The case of Arash Derambarsh: this imposture is hiding others
Arash Derambarsh has exploded in mid-air. Lawyer, politician, he had received what he called on his blog the "Nobel Prize for Sustainable Development" (the Win-Win Award) had his doctorate in law withdrawn for plagiarism. His doctoral thesis was 92% plagiarism.…
Electric vehicles: market, sales, COVID-19
Automobile manufacturers are moving towards the production of electric vehicles, which are increasingly gaining market share. Against the Chinese and American giants (to name only Tesla), how is the European car industry reacting? In this article, we detail the European…
Qualitative market research: using the senses in participatory research
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
All market research aims to achieve objectivity. This is, of course, the case with quantitative methods, but also with qualitative research methods. In today's article, we present you with a study that shows why it is necessary to use your senses in qualitative research.…
This is what the post-COVID-19 era will look like: new behaviours and impacted activities
In a previous article, I showed that the confined French were adopting new consumption habits. Their research on the Internet shows this. But how will we react once deconfinement is allowed? Will we go back to our little practices or…
Google Trends reveals our new behaviours during Coronavirus
What are the new habits caused by confinement? How does consumer behaviour change when consumers are stuck at home? Which companies will be the big winners from the Coronavirus crisis? This is what we invite you to discover thanks to…
A study demonstrates the effect of design on customer loyalty
Here is some marketing research that will be of interest to more than one of you. A trio of German researchers has just proved, thanks to four successive studies, that the design of an object has a positive impact on…
Market research: how to conduct a qualitative interview?
At IntoTheMinds, we place particular importance on the development of qualitative interviews, whether face-to-face interviews or focus groups. They are part of the keys necessary for a complete market research study. Of course, they must be part of an overall…
[PODCAST] Future Trends in Advertising with Paul Lee (Deloitte)
For this first episode of the year, we innovate a little and offer you a podcast in English. Our first interviewee of the year is a reference when it comes to the advertising market and the universe of media. Paul…
European GDPR: evolution of the number of complaints per country
How has the number of complaints about personal data changed since the GDPR came into force? We will answer this complex question with unique data, published for the first time. These data were collected directly from the data protection authorities…
Is the younger generation digitally savvier than the old generation?
It is hard to resist the pleasure I experienced during the Keynote given by Esther Hargittai (Zurich Polytechnic School) on the second day of the RecSys 2019 conference (Copenhagen, Denmark). Her presentation on inequalities between individuals in the digital world…
How smartphones have changed our lives and enslaved us
You probably won't read this article up to the end. And that's because of smartphones. Smartphones have changed our lives. For the good but also for the worse. This article is not about the positive contribution of smartphones to our…
EMAC 2019: 5 research avenues for targeted advertising
At this year's EMAC conference in Hamburg, I had been invited by Prof. Bernd Skiera and Prof. Klaus Miller (both affiliated with the University of Frankfort, Germany) to give a talk about online advertising research in the era of privacy.…
EMAC conference 2019 : 5 marketing researches you need to know
The European Marketing Academy Conference (EMAC) is the number 1 marketing conference in Europe for academics. It's a well attended (more than 1000 visitors) 3-day conference with up to 10 parallel tracks and hundreds of highly challenging presentations. This year…
Market research: visualizing the shadow economy
In light of our recent post on credit card ownership, we used once again Tableau to explore data related this time to analyse and visualize the shadow economy. The shadow economy is the part of the economy that runs "off…
Hospitality: why it’s important to answer online customer reviews
Social media is an unmissable way to connect customers and firms. It has also become a privileged channel to raise complaints and engage in positive and negative word-of-mouth. In today's article we propose to analyse one aspect of electronic word-of-mouth…
Marketing research: the 4 dimensions of online customer experience
There is a lot of debate around the definition of customer experience. Despite intense marketing research there is for instance still no valid scale to measure it. Seeing a paper on online customer experiences published in the Journal of Marketing…
The effects of ad frequency and recency on click-through-rate (CTR)
Less is more. This could be the conclusion of a recent marketing research study on online advertising published in the IJRM (International Journal of Research in Marketing ; see references at the end of this article). The authors, Steffen Försch…
Marketing research : purchase drivers of luxury iconic products
An interesting piece of marketing research was presented on the last day of the International Marketing Trends conference that took place in Venice from 17 to 19 January 2019. The research was carried out by a team of 4 researchers…
How do users behave when they can control the Spotify interface
At the RecSys 2018 conference an interesting piece of research was presented by Yucheng Jin (University of Leuven), Nava Tintarev (TU Delft), Katrien Verbert (KU Leuven). Their paper, entitled "Effects of Personal Characteristics on the Music Recommender with Different Controllability" explores…
Mixed research methods for the analysis of recommendation algorithms
The first day of the RecSys 2018 conference was dedicated to tutorials. One of them was assigned to mixed methods for evaluating user satisfaction. It was organised by a team of Spotify researchers (Jean Garcia-Gathright, Christine Hosey, Brian St. Thomas,…
Overview of RecSys 2018 at EBU conference on artificial intelligence
A two-day conference was held at the headquarters of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in Geneva on 8 and 9 November. I had the pleasure of hosting a workshop on ethics and artificial intelligence aspects on the first day and…
Recommendation systems: a scientific investigation of user inaction
One of the most interesting researches at RecSys 2018 was for me the paper on user inaction by Qian Zhao, Martijn Willemsen, Gediminas Adomavicius, F. Maxwell Harper and Joe Konstan (full title: "Interpreting User Inaction in Recommender Systems"). We are so focused on…
We need to rethink how to study filter bubbles: here’s why
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
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…
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