Read my reports from day one and day two of ESOMAR Congress 2012, and browse all of the available papers from ESOMAR Congress 2012.


The big data trend was a major focus for the third day of ESOMAR's 2012 Congress, held in Atlanta. There is still a gap between gaining more insights and translating this knowledge into winning concepts and successful new products. The problem, so the authors of What's a Nice Insight Like You Doing in a Concept Like This is a lack of foresight and their paper aims to bridge the gap between initial insight identification and subsequent development of new concepts, products and communication ideas.

The authors of In 2030 the Best Market Researcher in the Organisation Will Be the CEO invited the audience on a journey to what market research might look like in 2030. It started with today’s key challenge, that is to turn the “quintillion bytes of data created every day into user-friendly business dashboards and easy to understand visual solutions that pop up on an iPad” and then offered ideas for particular developments that will take market intelligence to new levels between now and 2030. By then the bulk of delegates to the 83rd annual ESOMAR Congress will be made up of CEOs, as they are now directly in charge of customer insight and relations.

Which probably sums up nicely the underlying story of the conference: the future of MR is consumer insight driven, the old data centric market researchers are confined to history – or are they?

One last piece of business remained: the awards for the best papers presented at Congress. This year, the prizes went to: