Highlights of one more year of blogging

It’s now been 6 years I’ve regularly posted articles on this blog (some 2100 articles in 3 languages).

The design and technical changes we made in 2014 and 2015 were fruitful. The audience increases regularly and since we fixed a cache problem this summer, the French version of the blog is hitting almost systematically the 100k unique users mark on annual basis.

The Dutch version of the blog is not doing so good ; despite all my efforts and the money invested in translating previous articles, and cross-indexing them, traffic remains invariably low.

As far as the English version is concerned, tracking got lost after we moved the website to a new server and decided to follow a new structure for the domains. During this move blog.intotheminds.com became www.intotheminds.com/blog/en which allows us to cross reference articles in different languages. You may have noticed that when reading an article, clicking on another language directly brings you to the same article in the language chosen.

Our Top 3 articles of the year

The 3 most successful articles of the year 2015 were :

1. Why focus groups belongs to the past and face-to-face interviews are key in your market research strategy
2. Will market research firms survive the Big Data wave ?
3. The future of radio among youngsters

Our top 3 topics of the year

The 3 topics we covered the most in 2015 were :

1. Our involvement in Big Data naturally triggered discussions on its impact on marketing, market research and consumer behavior research in general. Beyond our high-level post on the future of market research agencies in a Big Data world, we also investigated one particular Facebook’s patent related to mortgages that attracted a lot of press coverage.
2. Our analysis of the future of shared economy brought us many interviews (radio and newspapers). We covered extensively the situation of Uber in Europe but also explained where the shared economy came from and its future challenges
3. As usual retail strategies were amongst our favorite topics. Although we were not able to visit as many innovative stores as in 2014, we were still delighted to report on Heineken’s SubStore popup initiative, on how to cope with Showrooming and the one-of-a-kind Hngry store in Antwerp

Our predictions for 2016 : Big Data and qualitative marketing become best friends

The Big Data wave will probably lead us to cover more of this topic and especially to give concrete example of worthwhile business realizations.

We also think that qualitative marketing will become more and more crucial ; we’re getting so many requests for qualitative projects that we’re forced to refuse most of them. Consumers’ behaviors have never been so complex to decipher and Big Data is not delivering the simple answers most managers were awaiting.

Firms tend to be disappointed by Big Data results; most of the time this is due to the wrong variables being included in the model (or just because the most important variables are missing). Qualitative marketing will increasingly help capture those variables and make sure the right data is collected and included in the model.

This being said, we wish you all a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We hope to see you back in 2016 on our blog for some interesting discussions.

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