This episode of "Now That’s Significant, a Market Research Podcast," dives into the evolving landscape of the market research industry, exploring the dynamics between corporate research teams and industry suppliers. Host Michael Howard is joined by Daniel Berkal, SVP at The Palmerston Group, to discuss their experiences and observations from attending industry conferences.

Here are five key takeaways from their conversation:

1. The Power of Workshops: Both Michael and Daniel express a strong preference for interactive workshops over traditional presentation-style sessions at conferences. They find that workshops offer a more engaging and collaborative learning environment, fostering deeper understanding and connection among participants.

2. Navigating the AI Hype: The hype surrounding AI in market research is undeniable. Daniel, while acknowledging the potential of AI, advises listeners to approach AI solutions with a healthy dose of skepticism. He emphasizes that the industry is still in the early stages of understanding and harnessing AI's capabilities.

3. The Importance of Backup Plans: The recent CrowdStrike outage serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerabilities of relying solely on interconnected systems. This event highlights the need for businesses to have backup plans in place to mitigate disruptions caused by technology failures.

4. The Rise of Synthetic Data: Daniel shares his perspective on the growing use of synthetic data in market research. While acknowledging the potential benefits, he also points out the importance of addressing the perception of synthetic data as being less valuable than "real" data.

5. Maintaining Curiosity and Connection: Both Michael and Daniel emphasize the importance of fostering genuine curiosity and connection within the market research community. They believe that by focusing on shared goals and a passion for understanding human behavior, corporate research teams and industry suppliers can bridge the gap and drive meaningful progress.

How can we create more collaborative and engaging experiences at industry events that move beyond transactional interactions and foster genuine connection and knowledge sharing?

Tune in to future episodes of "Now That’s Significant" for more insights and discussions on the latest trends in market research. Subscribe to the podcast on your preferred platform and share it with your network. Your reviews and feedback are greatly appreciated.

***

Infotools Harmoni is a fit-for-purpose market research analysis, visualization, and reporting platform that gives the world’s leading brands the tools they need to better understand their consumers, customers, organization, and market.

www.infotools.com

Established in 1990, we work with some of the world’s top brands around the world, including Coca-Cola, Orange, Samsung, and Mondelēz.

Our powerful cloud-based platform, Harmoni, is purpose-built for market research. From data processing to investigation, dashboards to collaboration, Harmoni is a true "data-to-decision-making" solution for in-house corporate insights teams and agencies.

While we don't facilitate market research surveys, we make it easy for to find and share compelling insights that go over-and-above what stakeholders want, inspiring them to act decisively.

One of the most powerful features of Harmoni is Discover, a time-tested, time-saving, and investigative approach to data analysis. Using automated analyses to reveal patterns and trends, Discover minimizes potential research bias by removing the need for requesting and manually analyzing scores of cumbersome crosstabs – often seeing what you can’t.

Discover helps you easily find what differentiates groups that matter to you, uncover what makes them unique, and deliver data points that are interesting, relevant, and statistically significant, plus see things others can’t. Add to all this an impending GenAI feature, and you have an extremely powerful, future-proofed tool