Here is the third installment of our series covering emerging roles in the market research industry. Job Muscroft, the Face MD in London, kicked it all off in his post about the various roles that are changing the face of market research. In this post, we’ve interviewed one of our co-creation consultants here at Face, Research Director Esther Garland, to learn a bit more about what it’s like to work in qualitative market research as a co-creation consultant.
How would you describe your role?
My role…. Part planner, part creator, part trainer, part performer, part researcher. To do co-creation successfully you need to be many things at any one time. It’s not the same as running a focus group – you still have the insight objectives but actually your role is to create an immersive, inspiring way of getting to those objectives. If I could make a rule in co-creation that you are not allowed to ask direct questions (as you do in more traditional methodologies) I would.
How did you become a marketing research co-creator? What’s your background?
I started in market research for a publishing company so I have an appreciation of product development, I then spent some time as a planner for a couple of above the line and digital agencies giving me an appreciation of the creative process, ideation and strategy. I came to agency side qual research to be closer to consumers again, and this is a great place to get an appreciation for managing clients and stakeholders, and deadlines (both of which are big parts of co-creation).
Any tips for how to stand out from the competition when you’re trying to get a job in co-creation?
Like any qual research, co-creation is about a balance of people skills (being able to engage people, being able to elicit information and shape conversations) and analytical skills (being able to judge information, get behind the words to the meaning, find the underlying assumptions and unstated beliefs). However it’s the creative and performance bits that are different from traditional research – anything that can demonstrate you think about problems differently and design creative solutions to those problems, and any skills you can demonstrate in performance will set you apart.
What are the top three rules you have to follow as a co-creator in market research?
- Make it fun – create the right environment, gamify the session, set the right atmosphere
- Make it creative – design exercises that use different parts of the brain, do things that feel challenging or strange, think laterally about how to get to your objectives
- Make it physical – vary the pace, get people moving about, change the scenery
Where do you see your role going in the next five years? What’s the future for marketing research co-creation?
It’s worth noting that increasingly I think co-creation will be adopted as a core part of the qual armoury (if it isn’t already) so really this question doesn’t make sense – additionally I’m not just co-creator, I’m an Insight and Strategy specialist. Co-creativity is a philosophy rather than a tool – so in fact for us, I see principles of co-creativity (creating immersive environments, building long term mutual relationships between clients and consumers, sharing the responsibility for success) governing all the research activities we do.
Increasingly though I think it’s going to be about how you layer co-creation with other tools and data sources – whether that is social media insight, crowdsourcing or social media monitoring.
What’s the biggest mistake you most often see in co-creation? What’s so bad about it?
Just treating it like a souped-up focus group – albeit with clients in the room asking the questions as well. This is just lazy and not harnessing the full power of the approach – you won’t get better ideas or insight from just doing the same thing in a bigger room.
Learn more about our co-creation process here.
A little over a year ago, our Francesco D’Orazio presented this slideshow at the WARC‘s “Online Research Now and Next” conference. Since then it has been one of our top presentations on Slideshare. Augmented Research is still relevant, which makes this presentation another installment of our Top Posts of the Past Series.
One of the challenges of the research profession is to present data and insights in easy to understand and engaging ways. Often the answer is data visualizations. Since infographics are getting ever more popular, this post from 2010 seemed appropriate as the second installment in our Top Posts of the Past series. Though the post is about two years old by now, these 5 tips for creating easy beautiful data visualizations are still quite relevant.
As part of the onedotzero season at the BFI in November I attended a fascinating forum on Data Visualisation on Friday night. There were a number of speakers who showcased their work the highlight being David McCandless the author of Information is Beautiful.
The key themes from the event can be summed up as follows:
1. We live in an era of of information overload and huge complexity we need help to make sense of it all.
Continue Reading the Article Here
As part of a new blog series, we’ll be reposting some of the most popular blogs from the last three years. Though much has changed, a few things are bound to remain the same, and relevant, too. To kick it off, here’s a post we published last June as part of our Glasto Goes Social blog series. In this post we answered a common question: how do researchers go about doing a social media monitoring or insight project? We outlined the steps that we use at Face to set up and analyze social media searches, using the project we designed in order to predict fashion trends at Glasto, the UK music festival, as an example.
credit: El Bibliomata Flickr
Last week we launched our Gasto Goes Social project, where we are testing the usefulness of social media monitoring in predciting future behavior. We thought we’d describe how we at Face go about doing a social buzz analysis project, and social media research in general. Most market researchers understand focus groups and surveys, but social media research is still new to many. The 5 steps are:
Step 1: Create Your Lexicon
This is telling your social media monitoring software what to look for. It is similar to a very complex Google search. The Glasto Goes Social Lexicon contains 324 separate searches capturing different ways of referring to the festival and different fashion brands and articles of clothing. The lexicon must be specific enough to target the particular question at hand, but also open enough to allow for the unexpected. This last is particularly important with prediction projects, like Glasto Goes Social.
We build lexicons by focusing on how the consumer talks. We start off with a simple Google search. Even the prompts from Google Instant can help us see what syntax the consumers are typing in. Google Real Time Search is also very handy when immediacy is important. Even simple Twitter Searches can be quite useful. These tools not only show us how a particular word is being used, but they also help us see similar words that we should try out next. Building a lexicon is a detail-oriented and iterative process.
…
That is right! So if you want to join a team of innovative researchers, please send your c.v. or resume to team@facegroup.com. Please include the reference code and then your name in the subject heading of your email.
UK Roles we are currently looking to fill in our London office are:
- Community/Panel Research Director – Code UK-CRD
We are looking for a strong researcher who can pioneer the use of Community Panel research with our growing list of clients. With at least 7 years experience (ideally quant and qual mix) they must be able to help pitch and oversee the implementation of ongoing Community/Panel research projects
- Qualitative Research Manager – Code UK-QRM
We are looking for a qualitative research manager with at least 4 years experience to join our excellent qualitative team. They must be strong project managers with an appetite for working on global projects using a mix of on and off line methodologies.
- Social Media Analyst – Code UK-SMA
We are looking for a quantitative researcher with an unhealthy passion for social media to join our fast growing social media research team. They must have at least one years experience dealing with quantitative data and have the ability to uncover and communicate insights.
US Roles we are currently looking to fill in our Manhattan office are:
- Qualitative Research Manager – Code US-QRM
We are looking for a qualitative research manager with at least 3 years experience of working with CPG clients to join our growing team in New York. They must be strong project managers with an appetite for working on projects from start to finish using a mix of on and off line methodologies.
- Qualitative Research Director – Code US-QRD
We are looking for a qualitative research director with at least 7 years experience to join our growing team in New York. They must have experience of running and developing client accounts, building and managing team and delivering projects from pitching to final debrief. Experience of working with CPG clients and using a mix of on and off line methodologies would be beneficial.
connect