Top Things We Learned At Quirk’s In Orange County

EMI was at The Quirk’s Event last week in Orange County, CA.  It was a great event with a lot of good insights from industry leaders. There were several big topics that were discussed this year, including:

Artificial Intelligence

There were a lot of sessions and discussions around artificial intelligence and how it will both impact market research and how to best utilize it. From social listening, to linguistics it seems that everyone is looking to incorporate A.I. into their offerings.

Next Big Tech Breakthrough

An overarching theme of Quirk’s was that technology is going to be more important than ever for the market research industry. Whether its looking for the next big tech idea that will disrupt the industry, to incorporating more technology to make current processes more automated, to using technology for better analysis and data visualization, expect to see more organizations look to make deeper investments in their technology.

Big Data

Along the similar lines as the first two points, big data was a big topic of conversation. There were a lot of discussions on how A.I. and/or other technology can help pull out key finding s from big data.

A few other trends we observed:

• The Research Now / SSI merger was still a topic of conversation among many attendees. Though the conversation has changed since the merger was announced.  Previously, there was more of “Can you believe it?” talk; now the conversation has seemed to have shifted.  There was a lot of talk about what the future of the combined organization would look like, which companies’ management style will become the dominant style.  Probably the questions we heard most discussed was around panel influence at the combined organization and which panels will be combined with others, discontinued, and which ones will still be available in the future.

• Many of the smaller panel players seemed to take a more active role this year, and were more involved in the discussions, sessions and the show floor.

Want to find out more about what went on a Quirks?  Click the link below to request a 15 minutes conversation.