Be Part of the Marketing Research Community: Attend CRC in San Francisco

Three days in San Fran with hundreds of my market research colleagues? Count me in.

The MRA’s Corporate Researchers Conference is coming up September 26-28, and will be held in San Francisco.

Thanks to the CRC’s amazing conference co-chairs, Brett Townsend of PepsiCo, Tim Hoskins of Quester and Scott Baker of Schlesinger Associates, there are over 50 sessions. Here are three of my must-see picks from the program:

1. Get your hands dirty. On Monday 9/28, one option is to gets hands-on. With the help of branding agency Jester & Genius, attendees will put their creative and observational acumen to the test by collectively solving a branding problem for the city of San Francisco. Led by the speakers, the group will examine several of the city’s unique neighborhoods to uncover a new brand story for the city, a story that will then be delivered to key city officials. Work with your fellow Research Rockstars, and practice observation, synthesis and story-telling, using a real case study.
2. Get a new way to deliver research results. Have you been wondering: is it time to forego PowerPoint reports and go to dashboards? Want to find out what a real dashboard deployment scenario would look like? On Wednesday, Jan Vaughn, Senior Research Manager from Charles Schwab and Lori Koski, CEO, of Koski Research will present how they deployed a dashboard, and give you the insider’s perspective on how to get people to transition from slide decks to dashboards. Join the conversation: are dashboards the future?
3. Get your brain tweaked. One of the keynote speakers is asking: is it time to, “ask fewer questions and instead observe more, not to find out what people do, but why they do it”? As professional researchers, we know there are risk and limitations when we over-rely on asking questions (due to various, known self-reporting biases). But how do we scale observing?  Find out at the Tuesday keynote, “Reinventing Research Further”, by Unilever research executive BV Pradeep.

For the full program, visit the CRC website.

I hope to see you in San Francisco!