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2022 ESOMAR CONGRESS “The Roaring 20’s Are Coming Back”

KJT’s President & CEO, Michaela Gascon provides perspective on the 2022 ESOMAR Congress

I had the pleasure this month of attending the ESOMAR Congress in Toronto with over 1,400 other market research professionals. Over the course of three days, I heard from multiple presenters about the market dynamics affecting our industry in this post-COVID environment and how these developments over the past two years will impact our industry for years to come.

The keynote speaker was Jeremy Gutsche from Trend Hunter whose presentation, “The Roaring 20’s Are Coming Back,” described what he called the Chaos Framework (Path Dependency, Crisis, Chaos, Recharting). He walked up through the sequence of how crisis leads to urgency, urgency leads to action, and action leads to innovation. The punchline is about how those new innovations will grow the demand for market research and insights over the next few years, and we must seize the day! It was truly an inspiring kick-off to the three days of fabulous presentations showcasing original research and panel discussions from industry veterans on how we can continue to rise to meet business needs. Evidence and, more importantly, insights are craved by our C-Suite and Senior partners to help them make sense of the changed world. We consistently create reports and deliverables tailored for the target audience. It’s just one way KJT embodies user-centricity with our Design Thinking approach.

Another major topic of discussion was about “the human.” The word human was used a lot! Humans are at the forefront; they’re no longer “sample,” “respondents” nor “data.” The COVID shockwave we’ve all experienced has spawned societal-level reassessments and there are more questions than ever to answer. Collecting evidence will be done with a human-centric approach. We now have collective agreement that humans are a limited resource for our industry, and we need to not only treat them with respect and compensate them appropriately for their time – we must create engaging and enjoyable research experiences if we want them to continue to participate. We must have fun and encourage them to have fun through the process. That’s how we get to a sustainable model!

I would lastly like to remind all ESOMAR members to vote in the ESOMAR Council elections which are about to kick off. Voting is open Oct 12th thru Oct 25th so please make sure you vote!