Be it organising my friend’s hen (bachelorette) weekend, or choosing a new mobile phone, I always seem to have something I’m researching.

Were you ever talking to someone when all of a sudden you thought – maybe even said out loud – “Gee, I sound like a commercial”? It happens to me reasonably frequently, most recently when I was extolling the virtues of my favorite sandals.

While reading a popular food magazine, I came upon a question from a reader that made me think about role of social media in customer loyalty management. The reader asked whether online restaurant review sites like Yelp and Chowhound were the future of restaurant criticism. The author's answer was 'yes' and 'no'. Yes, online reviews are changing the way people decide where to eat. But no, it does not negate the relevance and importance of the traditional restaurant column. The author went on to say what's important is that we understand the difference between the two and use them accordingly. This is good advice for market research professionals focusing on loyalty.

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” -- Vincent Van Gogh

"All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope." -- Sir Winston Churchill

This concept can easily be applied to the notion of employee engagement. What are the simple things we can do each and every day to impact how employees feel about coming to work? Here are the simple things I do to engage my team.

• Business Immersion: Knowledge of the client’s business and priorities
• Knowledge of other industries – close in and far out (innovation often comes from observations of related categories)
• Knowledge of Broader Social and Cultural Trends
• Listening, observing, and talking to your consumers
• Making connections among various data sources

• Consider what’s relevant, exciting, and resonates with consumers
• Have a well developed plot, with vivid words and pictures to stimulate the senses
• Use analogies, suspense and humor as applicable

 More specifically, the following tips were shared:

• What metrics are stakeholders judged against? Use the CEO language
  • Focus on business performance; ROI and revenues, opportunities and risks

• Keep the big picture in mind. What’s the client’s key objective?
• Provide a roadmap:
  • Theme = Situation
  • Objective or Question
  • Plot = Answer
• Develop a framework/narrative to facilitate understanding of the results.
  • Have a Beginning, Middle, and End
  • Set the stage for the sequel

• Present your thinking so clearly that the ideas jump off the page and into the reader’s mind.
• Design is Key. Show/Tell.
• Distill to real nuggets. There are various diagrams to do that
  • Example: SCQA (Situation, Complication, Question, Answer)
  • Example: Pestel Tool & SWOT
  • Remember: Less is More

• Visuals which help connect the dots 

• Humor, suspense, tease before you tell
• Have POV, challenge their thinking
• Voice: with confidence, authority, inspire

Call it the "It Takes Two" principle (with respect to the old Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell Motown tune). Consumers are responsive to more than one idea about food. Three in four Food Influentials, for example, describe themselves as very interested in foods from different countries. But two in three say they're always looking for new snacks, like to be among the first to try new food and beverages, and "make a real effort to eat healthy" as well.

And Food Influentials are much more likely to describe themselves in these terms than the average person (by 14 to 30 points) -- suggesting these cross-currents won't be going away anytime soon.

If healthy eating is to grow, then, it should be "healthy-plus" -- a healthy nutritional take combined with another food interest.

For some time, we've talked with clients about the importance of healthy foods tasting good and being convenient to on-the-go lifestyles. But our research suggests now that's just the starting point. Healthy foods need to be interesting -- offering people new tastes from other cultures, in new forms, with new formulas.

"It takes two" may not explain everything -- for instance, the Trisha Yearwood recipe "Garth's Breakfast Bowl," named for her husband, country singer Garth Brooks, and combining eggs, frozen tater tots, sausage, bacon, packaged cheese, and garlic tortellini ("not for the faint of heart or high of cholesterol," Publishers Weekly tactfully notes).

But I think "two" does offer a growth path for healthy foods. What's next? How about healthy eating ideas from China, Thailand, Africa, or Latin America? Acai, from Latin America, this year's hot antioxidant ("promegranate is sooo 2008"), may point the way. Or maybe healthier, international evolutions of snacks from energy bars to TV-viewing treats?

It just takes two.

(For more on Influentials, including details on the new Global Influentials research in the new 2010 Roper Reports Worldwide survey, which delves into influencers in a variety of catgories, click here).

When millions of people in Central and Eastern Europe sit in front of the TV every day, GfK knows how they receive their favorite programs. In Austria for example, around 52% of private households receive their TV channels via satellite, and 38% via cable. This means that the small satellite dishes on roofs, balconies and in gardens are most widespread in Austria, in comparison with the other countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Croatia, where 31% of TV viewers use a satellite dish, comes a distant second, followed by Slovakia with 27%.

GfK Business & Technology's ‘Connected Life’ study, carried out in China, France, Germany, UK and the USA, found that despite considerable fragmentation in providers across such services, these six brands are prevalent internationally.  That said, there still exists opportunities for smaller brands to make their mark with specialist services and challenge the established providers with some healthy competition.

GfK Business & Technology has been developing a wide range of ways in which technology can be used to generate completely new ways of conducting research.  Here are a few of the latest highlights.

GfK Business & Technology often uses ethnographic approaches with our clients. In our view, it can play an important role in facilitating greater customer-centricity within organizations. Like any other methodological approach, ethnography provides a set of tools to be applied where appropriate and relevant.

A couple of stories in the news lately have reminded me of a question that we have previously asked consumers in our GfK Roper Reports® Worldwide study – namely, who ought to be shouldering the responsibility for environmental issues.

Everyone agrees that insight is valuable, but too often it is not effectively used. Part of the reason for this is that ‘insight’ is a fuzzy word. As an industry, we’ve failed to nail down the precise meaning, so it’s much harder to know when insight has been truly delivered.

In today’s fragmented marketing world, segmentation is one of the best tools we have to target the right products with the right messages to the right audiences—regardless of whether that audience is a consumer or a business.

First, the challenge: Larger banks are bearing the brunt of consumer discontent, and it is leading to a disproportionately large number of Exit Bound customers. Three of the five largest banks face a significantly greater challenge than smaller/regional banks or credit unions. 

It is an oft-spoken cliché that British people love to queue. The author George Mikes, best known for his humorous commentaries on various countries and their citizens, said, “An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.”

The recent UK General Election saw the highest turnouts for 13 years, which resulted in long queues and, in a number of cases, people still queuing by the time the polls closed, meaning they missed out on their vote. One wonders whether people would have patiently queued (in the rain) past the deadline in other countries. That is not to say that there weren’t angry scenes when the truth became apparent, but there weren’t reports of people forcing their way in or worse still, queue-jumping. 

I recently found myself musing on this topic when supporting some friends at a battle of the bands contest, where, after the last band finished their set, the crowd of thrashing metallers* formed an orderly queue on the dance floor to place their vote. It seemed an unlikely sight, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised.

"America's love affair with the automobile has a new spark — a renewed affection for U.S.-made cars after a long dalliance with foreign automakers. Slightly more Americans now say the United States makes better-quality vehicles than Asia does, with 38 percent saying U.S. cars are best and 33 percent naming autos made by Asian countries, according to an Associated Press-GfK Poll."

As MSNBC reports, this represents good news for US car makers and the automotive industry in general.

In GfK Roper Reports Worldwide, we ask 30,000 consumers around the world about the issues that concern them most. We ask about recession and unemployment. We ask about crime and lawlessness. We even ask about climate change and global warming. We do not ask about disruption caused by volcanic ash, but that has been at the foremost of millions of people’s minds around the world since last Thursday.