Many of the predictions were fairly predictable … lots of focus on Social Media and Mobile Research, along with some comments surrounding emerging methodologies like Neuroscience and Gamification. The idea of consolidating data was also frequently mentioned. As a qualitative researcher, the text analytics conversations were particularly interesting, so I took a deeper look into those comments. Roughly 22% of the predictions referenced Text Analytics in some way, (skewed a bit by the fact that over a third of the sample represented Text Analytics companies.)

Many of the comments tied to the larger concept of Social Media analysis, and using text analytic tools to extract insights from this vast amount of unstructured data. Several talked about the need for “education” and focusing on user training to remove the “black box” mystic surrounding many text analytic tools. Sentiment analysis also factored into these predictions for about 11% of the sample.

While many were just general comments on the importance of measuring consumer sentiment, a couple took the idea a bit further, expecting to see some pushback over the next 12 months:

• “It’s not that marketers don’t care how consumers feel about them but that there’s not much they can do with a pie chart of percent positive neutral or negative sentiment. The sharpest marketers will be looking for ways to make sentiment analysis pay.”

• “Businesses who pay for sentiment analysis are going to start asking ‘So what?’”

These comments regarding sentiment analysis were particularly interesting to me given the work we do at Quester. I’ve been asked at least three times just this week about sentiment analysis, and how Quester applies it in our practice. Although we have a suite of text analysis tools called Aristotle to help us organize and process the data, which significantly reduces our turnaround time, the majority of the Quester analytic process is done by hand by our team of linguistic analysts.

Because our analysts are digging into the data, really understanding the key themes and linkages between those themes, they can tell the story of what is going on in the data … not just in terms of frequency of mentions, or by using an algorithm to assign a “score” on the sentiment, but by communicating the nuances in the way the respondents are using language to communicate their thoughts.

It’s this in-depth review of the data, really “listening” to what our respondents are saying, that enables Quester to uncover the key insights within that unstructured data … ultimately making the “so what” crystal clear.

That said, we are always open to the possibility of incorporating new techniques and methodologies, so Quester is undertaking an investigation on the currently available sentiment tools. We’ll be sharing our findings in an upcoming post.

The awards presentation included a series of speciality awards ranging from “The IQ Award: To Recognize the Individual with the Giant-est Brain” to “The Aim High Award: For Work Above and Beyond the Call” as well as the “As-Soon-As-You-Can-Get-That-To-Me Award: To Recognize Excellence Behind the Scenes.” In Andrea’s words:

“While we want to recognize individual achievement, it is important to acknowledge the fact that Quester is truly a team. We are lucky to have such an intelligent, talented and dedicated group of employees – everyone here brings something unique to the group and is a huge asset to our company. We deeply value every person here, and in that spirit, we wanted to spend some time recognizing this fantastic group of people.”

After sharing details on the factors that resulted in each of the unique specialty awards, the coveted Charles E. Cleveland Employee of the Year award was presented. Honorable mention awards were presented to finalists Tim Hoskins, Vice President of Client Relations, and John Mertens, General Manager. And based on the votes, this year’s recipient was Quester’s Operations Manager, Eric Henderson. Andrea shared the following compilation of comments on Eric’s work as the award was presented:

“Eric is methodical, hard working, smart and incredibly, incredibly capable. He’s shown tremendous growth over the last year and can handle pretty much anything. Make foreign languages happen? Sure. Run complex statistics? No problem. Learn and implement a new survey platform? ‘k. Efficiently gather a sample of farmers or insurance brokers or nursing home administrators and coordinate with the vendor to make sure it happens on time and on budget? Yeah, all right. He’s super duper intelligent and educated at what he does and we are very, very lucky to have him.”

The Charles E. Cleveland Award is named in honor of Quester’s founder, Dr. Charles Cleveland, who passed away in 2005. Charles created Quester’s disciplined analytic approach to language, and spearheaded the development of Socrates and Aristotle. He instilled in his team a sense of pride in our work, and the passion to continually advance our methodology. It is this spirit and passion that we recognize in the recipients of the Charles E. Cleveland award, and we are proud to extend this year’s honor to Eric Henderson.

The list has a few predictable careers – Teachers, Artists, and Firefighters, for example, but others, like Psychologists and Financial Services Salespeople were a bit of a surprise for me, particularly in today’s economy.

The list ties into something I took away from the sessions at this year’s TMRE in Orlando as well. In the market research industry, we’re obsessed with learning about our consumers, what drives them, how they make decisions, how to get around the barriers that keep them from becoming our customers. But one of the themes at the conference was the value of tapping into the vast reservoir of knowledge that those who are closest to the customer possess – the front line employees.

Stan Sthanunathan from Coca-Cola mentioned that they send out a monthly question to each employee to gain additional insight on pressing issues. Employees are able to share their thoughts, and, perhaps most importantly, feel heard, and see their input put into action. Best Buy was recognized at a conference earlier in the year for their VOCE (Voice of the Customer through the Employee) program, which is completely based on input from Employees following interactions with customers on the sales floor.

In both cases, the employee feedback mechanisms are designed to be very simple for employees, not requiring much effort, but paying dividends in not only learning more about customers, but in increasing satisfaction for employees as well. Having this kind of program in place to capture employee feedback in a consistent manner may not be the silver bullet – but it is definitely a contributing factor for employee satisfaction, and promotes making the employee feel like a valued member of the company. Now, it might not rise to the level of the 10 Happiest Jobs in America, but it could certainly be a step in the right direction.

If you’d like to learn more about how Quester could help design an Employee Feedback program for your company, contact us for more detail at info@Quester.com.

It’s Quester’s new charity event … FAIRY FOC GAD stands for … “First Annual Inter-office Rip Your Face Off Competitive Giving Away Day.” I’ll admit, it took me a bit to understand the concept, and I still can’t pronounce the acronym, but it was a huge success!

As a company, Quester took part in Children & Families of Iowa’s “Adopt a Family” program. CFI is a local organization providing resources to those in need, focused on restoring hope, building futures, and changing lives. Families in need of assistance this holiday season submit an application to CFI, and each family member provides a wish list of items they’d like to receive, along with a brief description of their situation. Quester adopted a family of four: Mom, Dad, and their two teenage daughters.

Now, leave it to Quester to turn charity giving into a competitive sport, but here’s where the “rip your face off” part comes in … we broke into four teams – complete with the captains choosing each team member just like Junior High Phys. Ed … oh the memories! (Only in this case, our organizers were kind enough to provide a small spiff for the last picked team member to take away a little of the sting.)

Each team was then assigned one member of the family. The goal was to purchase as many items on their list as possible, within our allocated budget per family member. The team that was able to purchase the highest number of gifts on each list and save the most money off the retail price was then deemed the winner. There were extra bonus points assigned for “Shock and Awe” value – meaning finding a gift with the biggest “wow-factor” for Christmas morning. The catch? All shopping had to take place within the four hour window allocated on the day of our event (that’d be the GAD – Giving Away Day portion of the acronym.)

Now, you know a company full of marketing geniuses would be pretty proficient at finding deals in the retail world, so the competition was pretty stiff! There was a little friendly debate over the calculations on “retail price” – I mean, come on, when it says “Theirs” and “Ours” we ought to be able to use the “Theirs” price as the original retail price, right? (Wrong! Not under FAIRY FOC GAD rules.) And seriously, if you buy gifts for your own family that are buy one get one free, and donate the free one, should the donated item really count as a 100% savings in the Fairy FOC GAD scoring system? That’s got to be cheating! (Nope, not under FAIRY FOC GAD rules.)

So while the “rip your face off” competition label might have been a little much, it drove all of us to make our dollars go that much farther – resulting in being able to fulfill more of the wish list for this family that just needed a little extra help this year. And – it brought our Quester team a little closer together and made us all feel good about giving back to our community. At the end of the day, I’d call that a win-win … even if my team didn’t capture the FAIRY FOC GAD title this year!

PS: The winning team managed to show a savings of 82%! Their secret? Just ASK! Local retailers were very generous when learning that the purchases were going to charity – across the stores they shopped, they received 10%-30% discounts in addition to the sale prices they’d already found!

If you’d like to learn more about ways to help Children and Families of Iowa, and maybe stage your own FAIRY FOC GAD next year … visit their Adopt a Family Drive page.

I used to be the Vice President here, but that doesn’t really describe my connection to the business. In 2002, I was hired by Dr. Charles Cleveland. Our company had yet to deploy a project with Socrates, but the idea of Quester was still brilliant. We would, as a business, use language to help companies truly understand their customers. What we did and do is innovative, and I believe only the best kind of researchers currently recognize our value.

Through the last nine years, I’ve been afforded a tremendous number of opportunities to do, lead, build, create and consult. Opportunities that would have never been possible in a larger or even more traditionally structured business. And for that and many other reasons, I’m eternally grateful.

Most people that work on the corporate side or even in large research companies don’t truly understand how a small business works. If run well, a small business operates like most businesses, however what is different is that the people you work with become a family. So my leaving feels, at least to me, like I may be leaving home for the first time. It is scary, it is exciting and it is fun. This job was the perfect job for me, uniquely suited to my traits and my growth as a professional, because it allowed me to be creative, work with supremely intelligent researchers and huge multi-national companies that care deeply about strategy and serving their customers.

The work that Quester does is good work. The people at Quester “get it.” And, if challenged, they will rise to meet those challenges head on. What Quester is able to do is unparalleled in the industry. My name is Thatcher Schulte, and I wholly and completely recommend working with this business.

Here at Quester, as we reflect over 2011, we have a great deal to be thankful for. We’ve had a year of development, introducing our Socrates OnDemand service, and expanding our language capabilities to include Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and Portuguese. We’ve made countless updates to our system focused on building efficiencies, all with the goal of enabling our team to focus on what counts – drawing actionable insights from the qualitative stories shared by our respondents.

This year Quester has opened new doors by exhibiting at multiple conferences, such as the MRA, the IIR Shopper Insights conference, and most recently the IIR’s TMRE in Orlando. We had the opportunity to speak at the SymphonyIRI Group Summit 2011 at the beautiful Fountainbleau in Miami. In addition, we’ve launched a webinar program and are building solid case studies to demonstrate the value of Quester’s techniques. We welcomed new colleagues into the Quester family this year, and are thrilled with the skills and passion that they bring to our team.

Looking back, it feels as though things are really falling into place. And the beauty of it all is that it’s truly been a team effort. Everyone at Quester played a role in the new developments in 2011. Our team truly is our greatest asset, from Sales & Marketing to Research to Operations to IT – and we’re grateful everyday that they choose to call Quester home.

A few hours before we were scheduled to leave, we learned that our flight had been delayed – which would’ve meant another night away from home. So we scrambled to get to the airport to make an earlier flight, only to reach the security line at a standstill. Four lanes of TSA agents were funneling passengers into a single entrance to the actual security line. After our IDs had been checked, we literally stood in the same spot for over ten minutes. More and more passengers filed in around us and the space got smaller and smaller. Some managed to laugh it off and make jokes, but grumbling was heard in every direction … “this is ridiculous” … “what a mess” … along with various much more colorful ways of articulating frustration.

We finally made it to the actual structured line, but it still moved only at a crawl. As we continued to inch our way through the line, we heard a voice from the end of the line, “Hey guys, we got a soldier on leave and he is gonna miss his flight. Can we let him through?” Near the front of the line another passenger heard and stopped his portion of the line. The crowd parted and somehow found room for a clear path right to security. The soldier took the path, humbly thanking each of us as he passed. The crowd thanked him as well. One man patted his back and said, “Happy Veteran’s Day.” At that point, the tension cleared, and the mood completely changed. Maybe it made us all much more aware of the reasons for the security measures, or maybe it was just about giving a little something back to someone who has given so much for all of us. Either way, we were all proud to have been a part of it.

However, when they tested two samples, both filled with Coke, respondents preferred the sample that was labeled Coke over the unlabeled sample. They also noticed that the part of the brain that responds to rewards lit up, and other regions involving memory and cognitive control lit as well, when respondents were drinking the labeled Coke. This indicates that the brand name has established itself as a specific identity in the minds of consumers.

Neuro-science can help us identify when consumers are excited, but we still need to talk to people to figure out why. To understand a brand’s essence, we recommend a throwback … we ask respondents to think outside the box and qualitatively describe a brand, product, or retailer as a person. It’s the easiest way to understand the brand’s definition away from the product’s attributes.

We don’t stop there. We’re always sure to probe individual personality attributes to delve into whether the personality of your brand helps create a connection with your customers. We may even probe to tie traits back to the functional or emotional benefits of your brand, creating a laddering effect and figure out what attributes drive the strongest and most meaningful emotional connections.

We think this is the simplest way of communicating in the language of your customer and truly understanding your brand identity.

Cheers.

We had the opportunity to attend last year’s event, and can’t even describe the influence it had on us and our thoughts about the industry … We found recommendations for approaching issues in a new way, gained familiarity with emerging methodologies, and felt genuinely inspired and grateful to be a part of this amazing industry. Looking forward to another enriching experience this year!

Quester will be making a new product announcement at this year’s event as well – be sure to stop by our booth to learn more about where Quester’s innovation team has been spending it’s time this year!