Intrepid at AMA: Venimus, Vidimus, Vicimus

13th October 2009


We attended the American Marketing Association’s “Making Business Sense of What’s Next: Marketing Research Conference” last week in palm Springs. We were there as delegates and exhibitors.

We were interested in decision makers of the future, ergo, Millennials/Generation-Y/Net-Generation and the new era of what thinking digitally means for businesses. We took one of our team, Jen Kersey, and transported her life, in two big red suitcases, down to Palm Springs. Jen is classic Generation Y.  We set up her workspace (work and personal) and essentially put her life on display to all the delegates. From her Facebook pages, her Twitter feeds, her LinkedIn profile, and a montage of all of her brand affinities and affiliations, we invited people to poke around and see if they could learn anything about Jen and gain a small insight into Generation Y.

It seemed to work really well – when we did a similar stand at the UK’s Insight Show in Olympia last year, it was interesting to see the British delegates being fairly reluctant to engage with the stand compared to their American peers. Thanks to everyone who had a dig around Jen’s personal life!

 

We also enjoyed the presentations and tweeted in real time about them. You can see what we had to say on our Twitter Page www.twitter.com/Thinkintrepid.

We were especially liked You Can't Be Brilliant Alone: How to Achieve Influence Without Authority Through Effective Collaboration by Chris Frank, VP Global Marketplace Insights, American Express. He delivered a really refreshing  view of how to deliver insight and to inspire action from research.

We also learnt a lot from Tom Laforge, the Global Director of Insights, Creativity and Ideas, at Coca Cola, who presented images and inspirations from his personal, and professional lives from past and present to help us think about a socio-historic approach to illuminate the consumer world. You can read his paper here:  Using Human & Cultural Insights to Anticipate Consumer Desires

So we learned some new things and we shared some new things and in the end we received some really interesting entries to our competition to win a Virtual Ethnography. We will be announcing the winner this week once we have had a chance to ponder the diverse business questions each entry raised. If you’d like more information about this Virtual Ethnography methodology, feel free to drop us a line!