What have we been talking about – July 2017
A round up of all the e-group chatter, news and views, this month prepared by Mark Lyons.
Despite Wimbledon, unusually, being held from start to finish in July this year, ICG members had their heads down, working hard last month, judging from the overwhelming proportion of practical, project-related requests being served up to the egroup. All but a couple of these requests were returned with multiple replies to all and, I’ve no doubt the others will have been answered offline. Members received suggestions via the group for note-takers in Nottingham, moderators from Australia to the Philippines to Japan, to Spain, to Sweden to Paisley, Yorkshire and North Wales and recruiters from Australia (again) to the Isle of Wight, High Wycombe and North Wales.
One of the easier to identify targets for recruitment this month was shoppers at the Tesco Extra stores in Isleworth and Durham respectively, but it was down to the egroup to suggest the right people to actually go out and find them (it did). Suggestions also came in for help recruiting respondents with disabilities, chefs in their kitchens, people working in higher education, in the UK public sector and healthcare recruiters in the USA and a viewing studio in Clapham.
On the resources front, there was a request for recommendations for good omnibus companies. Courtesy of the egroup, 4 or 5 came along at once (simultaneously prompting a semantic discussion about the plural of omnibus). The group was also variously asked to suggest alternatives to SurveyMonkey, alternatives to Skype for sharing stimulus material, a web designer, a graphic designer, a video editor and a DP house.
In the “Help! My client is waiting/being unreasonable/asking for something different this time!” surgery area egroup advice was dispensed on how to change the colours in a Powerpoint presentation, what is and is not acceptable as a way to pay incentives and good sources for getting up to speed fast in Behavioural Economics. Ideas were also solicited about ideal design for a time-critical online ad testing campaign and the eGroup also helped to disambiguate the possible meanings of “personal care” in UK parlance for a US based member.
With everyone so busy working on projects, this was a quiet month in terms of market research related discussions. Several members chipped in to suggest ways cognitive testing might be used to pilot a project and a question about how best to elicit credible responses about “claimed purchases” also yielded a number of suggestions.
We held our summer party early in the month, at which we also raised funds for (temporarily former) ICG member Paul Hutchings’ refugee charity based in Greece. The feedback via the egroup for both was complimentary.
Last but not least we got quite a few more “how I started in market research” confessionals from members – not enough from my perspective, as they’ve all been fascinating so far. Can the 348 members who haven’t spilled the beans yet about their start in MR please do so soon?