Sentient Insight: the business blog for consumer psychology and consumer marketing

The ESOMAR Qual 2010 held in Barcelona – City of Inspiration – challenged us to re-think how we deliver qualitative research findings. Jackie Hughes’s (Kellogg) keynote speech on opening day urged us not to deliver insights, which can be here-and-gone in a flash. Instead she suggested the notion of “continuous, daily enlightened thinking,” which is sustainable and can be built upon, as the way to lead our client teams toward real ‘game-changing ideas’.

After recently attending the Marketing Research Association’s (MRA) First Outlook Conference in Orlando, FL, I was excited to come back to the office to relay the current happenings of the market research industry and to implement the new techniques I learned. I participated in an insightful and useful course on data visualization by Naomi B. Robbins, PhD. Taking a page from graphing guru Edward Tufte, and perhaps the lesser-known William Cleveland, Robbins put her own spin on graphical presentation of data. Naomi walked us through examples of “bad” charts with a special emphasis on 3-D bar and pie charts.