MIE 2020: The key take-outs

Blog Lisette Kruizinga – de Vries & Mark Vroegrijk – Senior Methodologists

Wednesday the 5^th and Thursday the 6^th of February the MIE took place, the biggest Marketing Insights Event of the Netherlands. This year the event revolved around Vitality, with a Vitality square where you could re-charge between presentations. Many of the presentations were focused on the future, when it comes to technology and trends, and on future generations. Two days filled with inspiration on how to gather insights from data to learn as much as possible from consumers.

Programming, tunnel vision & ‘Joyce’

DVJ Insights was once again present this year, both as a listener and presenter. In this blog we will share the most interesting, in our opinion, inspiring presentations with you. Wednesday kicked off with a keynote from Felienne Hermans, Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Leiden. In her presentation she delved into how learning a programming language can make the work of market researchers better and easier. Something we experience daily at DVJ Insights when programming online questionnaires. She showed how you can visualise data easily through programming instructions, and how you can conduct an insightful text analyses on an entire book with less than 15 lines of code. Willem-Albert Bol from DPG Media dived into a few commonly made mistakes among marketers, including tunnel vision among Generation Z and consumers in and around the cities, and the explosive growth of campaigns throughout the year without any correlating consistency. He concluded his presentation with the advice to listen more to scientists such as Byron Sharp, Mark Ritson and Les Binet within practical market research, who from large-scale studies among countless brands and categories have provided insight in the do’s and don’ts in marketing. Tom van Bommel, who works at Unravel, explained how people through combining different research techniques (including EEG-scans, eye-tracking, but also ‘traditional’ survey statements), can predict almost 90% of the variations in sales between different new FMCG-products. He provided a few clear recommendations when it comes to successful packaging, such as making the actual product visible, limiting the number of focus points, and ensuring a good fit between flavour and use of colour/ typography. The morning was concluded by Arno van Welzen from Choice Insights, who talked about a recognisable problem within market research: a dropping response rate for questionnaires, selection bias among respondents who are participating, and the difficulty of gathering qualitative, good open answers. A potential solution, mostly among younger respondents, may be found in the recently developed ‘Joyce’, a chatbot who guides the respondent through the questionnaire through a personal conversation.

The programme continued in the afternoon with two presentations by DVJ Insights. Lucas Hulsebos presented the results of our own Brand Growth Study, where a lot of insights were gathered when it comes to the most important drivers for successful brand growth. Mentioned was; a high degree of consistency in strategy and development, implementation of an ‘agile’- way of working, and a focus on customer acquisition instead of customer retention. Next to that, the importance of a central role for innovation was underlined repeatedly – one of the reasons for the related subject for the workshop by Roderik Sorbi. One of the most important conclusions from the workshops was that many brands still have too narrow of a focus on innovation. Innovating doesn’t just mean introducing new products and/or services, but can also take place when it comes to revenue models, organisational processes, distribution channels and/or customer experience. Secondly, people shouldn’t blindly focus on just one or exactly the same set of KPI’s when it comes to evaluating the market potential of an innovation. Depending on the type of innovation, different KPI’s can serve as optimal predictors of ultimate success.

Student, ‘Loden Leeuw’ & wedding days

Thursday was yet again an inspiring day. The presentation of Validators and XXS Amsterdam showed different insights from academic research, such as research showing that the majority of commercials don’t generate impact or even generate negative impact. This is probably due to the fact that most commercials aren’t creative, emotional and distinctive. Especially for future generations, experience – including that of commercials, is getting more important. Pim Nauts, the lead data scientist of bol.com, spoke on the countless online experiments they conduct internally to learn as much as possible from their consumer. At bol.com they feel that it is worse to be slow than to be wrong, and you can therefore better generate as much data as possible by conducting lots of experiments so the fastest student wins in the end. The next presentation was about the study Spa conducted with Ipsos to learn from their consumers. In different ways the brand association network was mapped out, to look at how Spa is perceived and how they distinguish themselves from competitors.

After lunch, DVJ Insights presented an interesting case with a.s.r. Hella de Weger spoke about how a.s.r. used winning the ‘Loden Leeuw’ in a positive way, and how they slowly turned their communication to something positive. Jori van de Spijker from DVJ explained how we helped them be as visible as possible in the market and therefore be the most visible insurer with the same or even less budget than the competitors. The day continued with IFF (a big player in the market of scents) and how they learn from their consumers through different types of research, ethnography providing them with lots of insights on how the American consumer handles scent. From this, an entirely new cross-category product was developed. The day was concluded by Jeroen van der Boom, who gained success as a teenager by calling the council and figuring out what the days were people got married. He then called those people with an offer and within three months his calendar was full. He still learns from consumers and who they are with his own company, Direct Business, and therefore knows exactly who is in the room during his concerts. He also uses information from social media. Ensuring that his concerts are always sold out.

During the closing drinks we could look back on an inspiring MIE that above all else focused on gaining insights from consumers. Now, but certainly also for the future. We are already looking forward to next year!