market research : how do Europeans pay ?
My mother-in-law is Italian. She hardly make two payments a year with her credit card. On my way to the University of Mainz a few weeks ago, I met a 64-year old taxi driver of Turkish origin who prouded himself not to have any bank card. I find it fascinating to observe how consumers’ behaviors can vary and have always been fascinated by how cultural aspects affected the way people paid in he European Union. I had the...
Market research : 190000 users surveyed on their connected future
The Mozilla foundation released the results of a worldwide market research on digital lives. The survey was entitled “How connected are you?” and gathered answers from pretty much all countries around the world. In today’s post I chose to focus on some particular aspects of it that relate to articles I’ve published over the past weeks. Contact us to carry out your surveys Customers’ expectations about their future connected life : not so bright It’s clear...
Tips and tricks : using observation as a market research tool
In our latest article we dealt with an experiment carried out by the Virginia Tech University that used innovative observation techniques to study human behaviors when faced with self-driving cars. Today we want to dig a little bit more on observations as a market research tool and highlight settings where such a technique can be useful. At the end of the article we will also give you 3 useful tips. Contact us for your market research...
Market research : how to study reactions to autonomous vehicles
This is one of the most difficult type of projet market research professionals may face: investigate consumers’ behaviors in a situation that doesn’t exist yet. In such situations ethnography (a qualitative market research technique) may be the right methodology to go for. In today’s article we will illustrate how this technique was used in the context of autonomous vehicles. Self-driving car attracts attention in Virginia Virgnia Tech University is certainly one of the most advanced as far as...
Market research : authentication on media website, a growing trend
As announced in an earlier article of this blog, I organized a 2-day conference on Single-Sign-On at RTBF (read more here). From a market research perspective this conference allowed participants to clearly understand that SSO was a growing trend among public service broadcasters. We had the please to listen to 9 amazing speakers from very different organizations and horizons : Tim Rowell (Piano.io), Ben Sekhon (Gigya, leader on the SSO market), David Teague and Maya Ross...
How to write a blog like a pro : my blog routine
People ask me regularly how I manage to publish 3 articles per week in 3 languages. A large part of this is due to my writing routine. Here’s how I manage to get it done quickly Limit your topics and make them categories of your blog I don’t write about anything. My blog is on marketing and within this discipline I handle topics like market research, customer satisfaction, market research techniques, complaint handling and branding issues....
Walmart wants to deliver you IN your home
It should be always easier for people to order online, and in particular the delivery should be a smooth experience. Market researches show that delivery is actually a real pain point and the source of many complaints (delivery times longer than expected, nobody at home to take delivery of the parcel, …) In a attempt to do a thorough market research back in 2014-2015, we reported the huge progresses made by the logistics sector and the...
Market research : hot technological trends for future TV experience
The IBC fair in Amsterdam drives a lot of smart minds together. A lot of market research firms are present to discuss market trends and evolution. This year a debate (“Hot or not: What are the hottest new TV technologies and devices and how will they transform the TV market?“) was specifically dedicated to technological trends that are likely to change the customer experience. Voice recognition was voted the most underrated technology and VT the most overrated...
Market research : how to set up the price of new products and services
In a recent post I told you the story of my friend Patrick who faced the request of a customer not aware of the price oh his high-end services. This turned into a very frustrating experience for both. In today’s post I’d like to come back on this story and digs a little bit deeper into one of the most difficult market research problems : pricing. Pricing has always been a challenge (at least to me)...
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 sector at the time of Covid-19 and our study on the market of organic products. As we detail in our white paper on market research, you will have to rely on many complementary aspects for a...
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 the farest. The concept of “miles” has become synonym of loyalty. Collecting miles was once limited to airlines tickets but has in the meantime extended to other purchases too. For instance, airlines members of Star Alliance...
GDPR : what does data portability really mean ?
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enforces the concept of data portability. What it means remains however opaque for most of us as the concept behind data portability can’t be easily applied and doesn’t really correspond to any expressed or latent consumer’s needs. Portability : a game changer for many industries, pushed by the European Commission The concept of portability is at the heart of the action of the European Commission for the defense of consumers’...
Amazon’s new business move will lock customers further
Amazon looks to me as one of the most innovative companies in the world, far more innovative actually that any of the electronics giants out there which have done poorly at inventing any real breakthrough innovation for the last 10 years. Amazon not only innovates to make its logistics better, but it makes also some very smart business moves to consolidate its position on various markets. Its latest move, in the book edition industry, ressembles one...
Market research : data strategy for European broadcasting organizations
On the occasion of the 2nd annual EBU Big Data week held in Geneva on 21 and 22 March 2017, the results of a pilot survey on the state of Big Data among broadcasters was revealed. The survey results are based on answers from 33 broadcasting organizations. Here are the key results to be remembered : 2/3 of surveyed members say data is important or very important for their organizations only 1/3 say Big Data is...
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 billboards on streets can nowadays be equipped with technologies (sensors) to interact with pedestrians. M&C Saatchi partnered with Clear Channel and Posterscope to launch an artificial intelligence-powered poster campaign. This campaign is not new (July 2015)...
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 understand where medias are heading to. Market research conclusions Let’s start for once with the global conclusions : by and large TV remains the main source for news. Online sources have been increasing steadlily since 2010,...
Amazon Go : this disruptive retail model hides a secret
Amazon Go is a 100% connected store where checkout are automated. Amazon Go is the convergence of at least 3 important trends : the first one is the diversification of Amazon into brick-and-mortar store the second one is a trend to decrease costs in the retail sector to increase margins the third one is the dream to put all behaviors into data to better predict what consumers will buy next Trend #1 : Amazon’s diversification into...
A roll to spread chocolate : really a good idea?
One at food fair SIAL 2016 featured inovations was a “choco roll”. this product had been selected for its innovative packaging. In light of the debate on the failure rate of innovations in the food sector, we paid a visit to the Israeli company that brought it on the market. The idea behind the “chocolate spread revolution” The company which presented this product at SIAL was “choco roll”. The roll was filled with chocolate made by...
Vitality offers Apple watch to monitor your activity : one more insurance into big (health) data
A few weeks ago we were discussing on this blog the trend of the insurance market to collect very intrusive data. I had the opportunity to raise my concerns at several conferences and got the impression that people were not aware of what was going on (especially as far as car insurances are concerned). In particular I gave the example of CSS Insurance in Switzerland which proposed customers to wear a fit band capturing activity data...
Food and drink innovation: what are the success factors?
020At the food fair SIAL 2016 more than 2000 innovative products were presented. In other words some 10% of the world’s yearly food innovation was concentrated in one place during one week. Amazing opportunity for a market researcher like me. Yet 50% of those products will die in the next 6 months. All the money poured in their development, marketing and distribution will be lost. What is innovation? We don’t want to oppose here technical innovation...
SIAL 2016 : first conclusions from a busy week
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 market research on the food sector and trends detection. Here are my high-level conclusions that I’ll complement in the coming days with special in-depth articles on specific products. Let’s get organic 5 years ago, organic food...
Big Data and Ethics : how recommendations work at Meetup.com
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 conference (although Evan is himself a rather technical guy); rather it gave the audience a perspective and a vision on how ethics and Big Data can (and need to) be combined. Evan started by giving examples...
Big Data : why ethics issues need to be addressed urgently
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, what about the concept of freedom ? There is work to be done to teach people the positive and negative sides of AI and even more work to make them conscious about alternatives. Is this a...
Digital innovation: does your market segment care ?
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” ? To illustrate the problem, let me tell you a story. The story of my 80-year old mother-in-law. My mother-in-law writes phone numbers on the back of her cell phone In spite of her age she’s...
Insurances : towards the end of the risk sharing principle ?
There is one very important underlying principle of any insurance : risk sharing. Good drivers cover a part of the risk of bad drivers; people in good health pay for those who fall ill. Americans call this a “socialist” way of doing business. But until now insurances in Europe have always favored a group approach vs. an individualistic one. The data revolution may be the end of this. Here’s why. Customer data will enable user-centric approach...
Nespresso : the secret behind the new Prodigio connected machine
Nespresso just launched a new connected machine called “Prodigio”. This machine allegedly allows you to prepare a coffee with your smartphone and make sure you never run out of Nespresso capsules. This machine will however allow much more than that … but the customer will probably never get to know it. Let’s have a look behind the scene and discover the secrets of the Prodigio strategy. Churn : the one metric Nespresso is concerned about For...
How a simple law can change market conditions
When you do a market research, it’s important to look at all the exterior factors that can change market conditions. There’s a special little tool to do this analysis consistently: it’s called the PESTEL analysis. The purpose of today’s post is to illustrate how so-called exogenous factors can change dramatically the competitive landscape. Contact IntoTheMinds market research agency Antique books market conditions changed dramatically in Italy As some of you may remember, I talked in an...
How to handle qualitative market research in different countries / languages
Because our market research agency is located in Belgium, we often have to deal with qualitative marketing assignments that require to conduct interviews in different languages. As you may know Belgium itself has 3 official languages (Dutch, French and German) which correspond to different cultural orientations. For firms with a national marketing strategy, it’s therefore important to make sure the market research is carried out taking those cultural differences and the resulting dynamics into account. Two...
Unethical behavior : making money around terrorist attacks
At the time of the terrorist attacks in Paris in January 2015 (Charlie Hebdo) I was asked in a radio interview to analyze the merchandising phenomenon that was witnessed. All kinds of objects with the “#JeSuisCharlie” logo suddenly appeared on marketplaces like Ebay and Amazon. After the attacks on Nov 13, I was once again interviewed by the public Swiss national radio TSR to comment on the phenomenon (the interview, in French, can be listened to from 12:00 by following...
Wrong consumer behavior driven by bad design
I’ve completed a Design Thinking bootcamp in Amsterdam where participants were challenged by the City of Amsterdam to find solutions around a series of waste-related issues (follow this link to learn more about Design Thinking). On this occasion I had multiple opportunities to find out how design influences consumer behavior. Field research in the city of Amsterdam On the first day of the week, during field research, we went in the streets of Amsterdam to better...
What is the future of radio?
The hope we were having a few years ago that younger listeners on the internet would move back to so-called linear consumption, is gone (see our latest article on radio consumption habits). We are currently in a period of transition, as the CEO if the BBC pointed out in a recent speech, and we don’t know where we are heading to. This is a context of maximal uncertainty for the future of radio. Skipping tracks...
How radio consumption is changing among younger generations
I recently gave a speech on Big Data and Data Mining at the Radio Days of the EBU in Riga (Latvia) and met other fellow marketers and head of European broadcasters from all over Europe. There are two big lessons learned that I want to share with you : Radio consumption has been stable for more than a decade, whatever the country Usages are shifting among new generations (Y and Z) Statistics on radio consumptions across...
Probably the best business card ever created
Have you ever realized that business cards are too seldom used to leave an impression on your prospects ? I just found out what is probably the most amazing business card ever conceived. Read further if you want to know more. Leave an impression : get a creative business cards I recently looked at the business cards I’ve accumulated for the last 10 years (yes, I kept them all). Guess what … less than 10 out...
Explore evolving trends with Google Ngram
I was attending a Big Data and BI conference last week in Paris; one of the presenters, Tom McDonnell of Monterosa, presented an amazing graph. It showed the usage of the word “interactive” in books published between 1900 and 2000. This graph showed without much need for discussion that our world is becoming more and more interactive. The purpose of this post is certainly to convince you of this trend, but rather to introduce you to...
Innovation: Is the Lily Camera really a game changer in the drone landscape?
In the many industries that drive innovation, drones seem to attract a lot of attention. Their versatility and adaptability made them great devices in many industries to boost innovation. Just have a look at Amazon’s example below. or this other video displaying Google’s secret program in Australia to test a in-house developed drone. The drone revolution may just be as exciting and promising as the 3D printing revolution that is ahead us. Many of the drone...
5 trends that threaten old broadcasters
Old-fashion medias have never been more threatened than today by new consumers’ behaviors. Television channels are certainly in the middle of the storm and must quickly adapt to consumers aged under 30. Read further to discover 5 trends that will re-shape the business models in the coming years. Trend 1: television is not King anymore Recent studies show that younger watchers between 14 and 25 prefer watching TV on a computer rather than on a TV...
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