Summary
This paper argues that not only is it possible to conduct market research without asking questions but it's also the best way to understand what people do. It covers behavioural economics, observational and ethnographic research, social media research and innovative qualitative techniques in order to show the possibilities of research without questions. It also provides a unifying framework for considering behaviour and decision making, a series of studies conducted across these areas by BrainJuicer and a selection of cases from Allstate Insurance that work with these techniques.

Summary
Co-creation is a term that is becoming a new business buzzword. The term is not new but has been popularised by social networking. Children have proved to be ideal for some co-creation tasks as they are less inhibited, more honest and more imaginative than adults. This article relates how Kimberly-Clark, the paper products manufacturer, has used children in a market research programme that resulted in a new pleat system being created for tissues. Equally, it discusses how Kellogg and its agency Leo Burnett involved groups of children to create its highly successful 'stolen colours' campaign for its Froot Loops cereal brand.

Summary
Those organizations that exceed expectations know how to change in order to survive. The Lean Start-Up movement, popularised by Eric Ries calls these changes 'pivots': shifting direction in response to a new learning a new normal. Approaches that plan around 'feedback loops', 'journeys' and 'just-in-time' decision-making are better placed to deliver outcomes that help the protagonists learn swiftly. If planning as a discipline is really just guessing, humans must test everything and fail fast.

Summary
Monadic concept testing has become an essential tool in stage gate processes to weed out risky product launches. As an optimization tool, it suffers from measurement error, poor discrimination, and limited ability to test multiple variations. By comparison, conjoint methods can test many variations but make assumptions that pose challenges (e.g. no interaction between concept elements). Evolutionary optimization can test large concept spaces with high discrimination while accounting for interactions. This paper uses a Mars case study and a meta-analysis that estimates the impact of evolutionary computation on the innovation process – specifically the lift in concept scores across 60 consecutive initiatives with different clients. It finds a significant and positive impact.

Summary
Duncan Watts shares insights from his new book Everything is Obvious, including a recent randomized experiment testing online advertising with 1.6 million Yahoo! users. The researchers estimated that the additional revenue generated by the advertising was roughly four times the cost of the campaign in the short run, and possibly much higher over the long run. But what they also discovered was that almost all the effect was for older consumers—the ads were largely ineffective for people under 40. At first, this latter result seems like bad news. But the right way to think about it is that finding out that something doesn’t work is also the first step toward learning what does work.

Summary
While new product evaluation testing plays a pivotal role in the NPD process, there is little empirical evidence on the influence of the virtual testing environment on the evaluation results and the data quality. The present study addresses this gap in the literature by using a split-sample online concept testing-like study to compare the testing results in traditional and virtual environments for five heterogeneous innovations. The findings indicate that both traditional and virtual testing environments yield identical mean scores, while the latter provides higher-quality data given the same sampling design. Early concept or product tests, therefore, may be carried out in a more realistic testing environment using virtual techniques, which could substantially enhance the quality of testing data.

Summary
At the 2002 ESOMAR Congress, a paper entitled The Future of Simulated Test Markets (by Joseph Willke, ACNielsen BASES) made predictions about what life would be like in 2010 and the implications for STM models. 2010 is here, and it is the perfect time to re-visit the predictions of 2002 and to develop new ones. The 2010 presentation will identify which predictions came true, which did not, and which were missed, along with the reasons why. The current presentation will explore new forecasting needs that have emerged – based on interviews with market researchers at leading CPG companies – and then make predictions about how forecasting will evolve over the next five years.

Summary
In practice, product managers have to assume consumer evaluations of concepts generalise from the time (and research environment) of concept testing to the time (and market environment) of market introduction. However, little is known about the temporal stability or generalisability of the results of concept testing over occasions. Rarely have concept-testing studies incorporated testing of the same concepts on the same respondents on more than one occasion. This research investigates the importance of occasions as a source of error variance in estimates of the generalisability of concept test scores for both minor and major innovations within the context of Generalisability theory. The study collected concept evaluations of ten innovations from members of an online panel on three occasions, approximately a month apart. The results show that the three-way interaction among subjects, concepts and occasions is a substantial contributor to variation in concept testing of both major and minor innovations, with the contribution for major innovations even more substantial than for minor innovations. Moreover, failure to recognize occasions as an explicit source of variance in the generalisability analyses will lead managers to overestimate the generalisability of their decision studies. However, the impact of neglecting occasions varies by purpose of measurement and associated object of measurement. This research provides insight about how well concept testing can generalise over occasions. Concept test evaluations provided on an initial exposure are more favourable than will be received on any later occasions, and apparent differences in consumer evaluations of a particular concept in an initial test do not provide a generalisable basis for identifying which consumers will respond most favourably to it on a later occasion. For concept testing to be used for targeting or segmentation, more occasions will need to be sampled.

Summary
According to research from IRI Infoscan, only one in five product launches in the food and drink sector - whether for new brands or brand extensions - can be deemed a success (that is, achieving monthly sales of 80 per cent of the average for their category). Data from TNS also show that only one third of new products are still around three years after launch. While multinationals often fare better than start-ups and independents, data from across Europe show that there is a huge amount of churn across the entire market. In the UK, this is partially attributable to the 'supermarket wars', which have resulted in almost continual rounds of price-cutting. The experience of Coca-Cola's Dasani brand - worth $2 billion in the U.S. but which was pulled from the UK market after only a few months - also shows that cultural differences are important, and market research can thus play an integral part in producing a popular product. PepsiCo is one company with a reputation for successful innovation, while brands such as Innocent and Green & Black's show there is the possibility for success for brands capable of picking up on trends, or even for starting new ones.

Summary
This paper analyzes the main results of the online Product-Test eCMetrics carried out during the first quarter of 2006 to define the colors of Nokia's mobile line. The quantitative research study was performed in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela.