Colonel Mustard Lucy Davison, and Paul Buckley from GSK, presented their paper ‘I’m with the brand’ at yesterday’s BIG Conference in London. They were thrilled to receive the award for ‘Best Business Thinking’. Lucy and Paul’s presentation was very popular with the audience and the judges alike. The presentation focused on market researchers as B2B brands, and proposes that by behaving like true brands with a philosophy about what they do, research companies can escape the commodity trap, stand out to clients and become trusted consultants.
Here is the trophy, now in pride of place at Mustard Towers.
The BIG Conference is an annual event for business to business researchers – sharing knowledge, thinking and best practice. This year’s event was held at the stunning May Fair Hotel in Central London and was a particularly lively and interesting conference with a mix of panel sessions and presentations. We heard from a range of experts including Samantha Smith from the BBC, Matthew Powell from B2B International, James Wycherley from the Insight Management Academy (until recently head of research at Barclays) and Lynne Bailey of PwC. The final session, which included Lucy and Paul’s presentation, was chaired by Ben Hogg of Research Now and focused on bringing emotion back into the mix in order to both understand a business audience better and communicate with them more effectively.
Jon Puleston of Lightspeed GMI and Amy Cashman of TNS presented their approach to surveying small business owners which unlocked their emotions and elicited a rich data stream. Their paper won the award for Best Methodology. Declan Curry gave an inspired final key note on the state of the Eurozone which provided much food for thought and interesting discussion at the party afterwards.
Many thanks to the team at the MRS for organising a great event!