8:00 Registration and Welcome Coffee

9:00 Opening Remarks by Merlien & Conference Chair

9:15 Opening Keynote: Advancing Insights – How to develop high performance insight habits?
- How to elevate the qualitative research industry in the minds of business leaders?
- Balancing foresight and hindsight to deliver impactful insight
- Getting ahead of how different stakeholders value different outcomes

9:45 Leveraging Anthropology and Sociology to Develop the Future Forward Brand
- Measuring consumer aspirations to forecast consumer behaviors
- How today’s latest technologies are facilitating anthropology driven research methodologies
- Does awareness translate into a change in how consumers engage with brands?

10:00 Past Research, New Insights

- How to structure research so that it is easily repurposed for future use
- Does fresh always mean new? Discovering new insights from past research
- How automated tooling can uncover new insights

10:30 Networking Break

11:00 Humanising Big Data

- Building a qualitative culture around quant heavy projects
- Effectively defining ad-hoc research with mixed and hybridized approaches in a data and
analytics driven environment

11:30 Understanding the Consumer Activist

- Applying ethnography to identify and understand the customer motivations for
sustainability and social responsibility
- How to test the difference between caring about a cause and building brand affinity through
a cause

12:00 Virtual, Augmented and Actual Reality

- Overcoming research challenges when working VR/AR
- How to structure VR/AR enabled research to enhance in-person connectivity and create
authentic real-life experiences

12:30 Fringe Research – Methodologies to Effectively Research Outliers

- Going beyond the mainstream – exploring different ways to approach research design
- How research with fringe users and outlier communities can deliver valuable insights into
consumer behavior; How to recruit respondents from the extremes

1:00 Lunch
2:00 Gender, Emotion and Brand Identity – New Identity Definitions
- How do qualitative researchers navigate changing gender definitions and increased gender
awareness
- Storytelling as an input rather than output to provide greater human context
- Emotional tracking, emotional response over gender segments to enable brands to speak a
more relevant language

2:30 Mature Shoppers in the Digital Age

- Place-based research and best practices for using low- and high-tech tools
- Designing scalable digital qualitative research to obtain emotional insights among a non-
digital demographic

3:00 Winning the Trust and Loyalty of Generation Z and Generation Alpha

- Designing empathy and validation and building meaningful connections through

gamification and augmented/virtual reality
- Semiotics and qualitative insight to understand how these generations value authority,
individuality and brand loyalty

3:30 Networking Break

4:00 The Sharing Economy Meets Qualitative Research

- Why more brands are democratizing data and research and freely sharing intimate insights
- The platforms, tools and structure needed to assure authentic consumer co-creating

4:30 Business Challenge Roundtables

- Recruiting challenges – how to battle respondent fatigue?

5:15 Closing Remarks by Chair & Close of Day 1

8:00 Registration and Welcome Coffee
9:00 Opening Remarks by Merlien & Conference Chair

9:15 Augmented Intelligence in Action

- The qualitative methodologies that complement AI best
- How human context and continuous human input improves AI

9:45 The 2020 US Census and the Role of Qual

The US census occurs every decade and is a massive quantitative data research project. Learn the
important role that qualitative methodologies play and how these learnings can be applied when
justifying and validating your own qualitative research.

10:15 Panel: High Value, Low Cost

The panel will share the low-budget qual techniques that inspired breakthrough ideas, how to make
sure cost doesn’t compromise value and the human focused experience, and debate when low-
budget primary and secondary research should and shouldn’t be used.

11:00 Networking Break

11:30 Authenticity in Digital Storytelling

- The method behind the craft: create an omnichannel experience that provokes emotional
reactions and measures more genuine reactions
- Avoiding brand narcissism, using the language of the consumer instead

12:00 Inclusive Design of Research

- Designing research for accessible experiences and to assure inclusivity

12:30 Culture and Localisation

- Deep qualitative and ethnographic approaches to connect with audiences at a hyperlocal
level

1:00 Networking Lunch

2:00 Qualitative DIY

- The impact of the DIY research trend on client-side and independent research
- When and when not to DIY

2:30 Panel: Why Automation is a Good Thing for Qual Researchers

- Can AI be your friend?
- Humanising automated research – seizing the opportunity for qual to be cool, not old school

3:00 Networking Break

3:30 Virtual Research and Distributed Teams
- Best practices in self IDI, virtual workshopping – how to keep the human element alive
without actual in-person contact

4:00 Testing Influencer Marketing

- Instagram for Qual – how to effectively test influencer marketing
- Online and offline methodologies to understand the user journey, specifically how this
generation interacts with websites and apps to an offline experience

4:30 Convergent research techniques in customer journey mapping

- Getting a relatively new insights team to deliver a holistic understanding of the customer
experience (fast!) using hybrid user and market research techniques
- Training and empowering stakeholders to conduct paired interviews with participants
immediately after workshops
- Bringing together knowledge from other insight generating functions (data analytics,
reactive community feedback) using workshop techniques
- Results: increasing business focus on customer experience
Jemma Ahmed, Head of Insights, Badoo

5:00 Closing Remarks by Chair & Close of Day 2

Sessions to be scheduled:

Going “in the moment” to research hair care products

- Understanding why in the moment is critical for the personal care category
- Analysing the time effect of consumer perception to avoid recall biases
- Comparing in-the-moment evaluation versus recall questionnaires
- Using audio to collect “in the moment” in an intimate, personal environment difficult to
access for researchers
Nima Gohil, Manager Research & Innovation, l’Oreal

Discovering conscious and unconscious perceptions of Gin

- Using psychoanalytics to uncover the unconscious program that drives gin consumption
- Creating a needs hierarchy for gin based on findings from model labs
- Understanding current and potential packaging design through semiotics
- Using traditional qualitative methods, in combination with psychoanalytics and semiotics, to
provide a clear path to launching a global brand
Indira Valencia, Consumer Insights Manager, Pernod Ricard
Jim Peterson, Managing Director, Research Strategy Group