As you may know, the MRA held its Annual Conference and Research Forum earlier this month. Three of our attendees have written a bit about their favorite program from the event.

John:
One of the sessions I found most interesting from this year’s MRA conference was a team-based, case-study exercise where we were broken up into six groups of 8-10 participants. Each group was given the same background information about a research project for a fictional company, “Bunny Burgers”. That’s when things got interesting—each team was tasked with creating a research project that would help Bunny Burgers understand the market, and guide their marketing investments, but each was assigned a different budget and timeline. About halfway through the exercise, each team was thrown a curveball that affected their research window, budget, or overall ability to complete the project (as so often happens in the real world!). It was fascinating to watch the teams, with people from all sides of the research spectrum offer their expertise and experience to address the challenges, and to develop a solution. The teams who were most successful teams treated the exercise as a collaborative project, worked closely with our “client”, and were capable of rolling with the punches and adapting when the process didn’t go exactly as planned.

Laurie:
One of my favorite sessions at the 2008 MRA conference, was the 4pm keynote speaker on Wed June 4. The session was titled: “Quality – What’s Love Got to Do With It.” The presenter was Robin Pearl – VP Market Research, The Estee Lauder Companies. In a very amusing way, she spoke of quality issues that can plague research projects from sample design and survey content to simple typos in reports. Her speech was entertaining as well as a good reminder that all research professionals need to pay more attention to details, both as a client and a vendor. She noted a great line – that when it comes to research we all need a “PHD (passion, heart and drive)” – you must love what you do! And the best part –free Estee Lauder Lip Gloss for all!

Cynthia:
A very interesting session I attended during the 2008 MRA Conference was titled “Mindreading & Measuring Emotion in Quali-Quant Research: It is NOT Smoke and Mirrors!” – presented by Brent Snider, a Client Director with BrainJuicer.
This presentation offered a peek under the tent at one of the emerging research techniques that attempt to measure emotions and validate insights – going a step beyond offering open-ends in an online survey. In other words, exploring another approach to getting the qualitative “whys” behind quantitative “whats”. Check out the website demo and “juice your brain”.

Sounds like the MRA conference was a great success!

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