By Lauren Coates

As a market research professional if you aren’t keeping up with new techniques and trends, you probably aren’t very good at your job. The New England Marketing Research Association (NEMRA) holds semi-annual conferences allowing those in our field to connect, exchange and learn new ways of making research useful to our clients.

All of the sessions presented at NEMRA this fall were informative and entertaining, but Steve Kalter’s was the most memorable. His presentation described ten techniques for having an “aha moment” or a sudden understanding of a problem. All of the ideas he shared are projective techniques, which are games or exercise played during focus groups. Here is a sampling of his techniques:

• Role-playing. By getting participants to play different parts, you can probe for reactions from non-playing participants. Some different roles Steve used as examples include a clerk and customer; friends chatting about new product or service; and strangers in front of a new storefront.
• Personification. This exercise links brands or products to famous characters or celebrities in an attempt to uncovering deeper feelings and perceptions. The example Steve used was, “If Best Buy were a person, what kind of person would they be? What would their hair be like? Their clothing?”
• Survivor Island. In this technique, ideas are written on sticky notes and placed on an “island.” After they are generated, one-by-one ideas get voted off the island. Eventually the “must haves” stay on the unnecessary features or attributes are eliminated.

I highly recommend NEMRA’s conferences. If you want to learn more about NEMRA Follow them on Twitter. To check out more news from Anderson Robbins be sure to Follow us.