Review of 2024: Research and insight projects of the year
Jane Frost, chief executive, Market Research Society
The industry has produced a huge amount of impressive work in 2024. One that springs to mind from our MRS Awards earlier in December is UKHSA and Basis’ study on the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance in people who are asymptomatic. It’s a unique piece of research that will help UKHSA design its strategy to tackling the issue and hammers home the sector’s power to make a real difference in people’s lives.
Fiona Blades, chief experience officer, Mesh Experience
There are so many! But I found the work on the economic impact of Taylor Swift (Swiftonomics) by QuestionPro interesting because of the way it got picked up by the media.
Tatenda Musesengwa, vice-president of audiences, Savanta and co-founder, Colour of Research (CORe)
I thought UK in a Changing Europe’s project with Focaldata on Britain’s ethnic minority population felt particularly vital. In the past, ethnic minorities were treated as either one block by market researchers or as simply too hard or expensive to understand. That’s sadly still seen as the case by some, and this report was very important in moving the dial – in particular off the back of some surprising results in the UK election.
Ben Shimshon, chief executive and founding partner, Thinks Insight & Strategy
One of our clients is the National Centre for Accessible Transport. To address the fact that lots of research in the sector doesn’t have the budget to engage people with a wide enough range of experiences, NCAT has transformed a load of their evidence about the experiences of disabled people using transport into an interactive database that anyone can use to augment their own customer and service user research. I would love to see our industry think collaboratively and generously in this way to get beyond the status quo for inclusivity in other ways.
Amy Cashman, executive managing director of the UK insights division, Kantar
The work by the Unstereotype Alliance, an initiative led by UN Women, around the commercial impact of diversity in advertising was really remarkable. At a time of huge politicisation of social causes and “woke” culture wars, we need to make sure we’re basing decisions on the facts, rather than on assumptions. The Unstereotype Alliance’s study shows clearly the positive impact which inclusive advertising has on brands’ short and long-term sales and brand equity – exactly the kind of evidence decision makers need to steer the course through the many loud voices in the inclusion debate. It was fantastic to play our part in helping the alliance to undertake this piece of research.
Graham Idehen, senior director, customer experience – international, Dscout, and chair, MRS Representation in Research
Dan Clay and Vic Harkness did some inspiring work on inclusive language and terminology. It challenged some orthodoxies around accepted terms of identification within audiences and will be a valuable resource in supporting researchers who want to implement more inclusive language into their research and enabling brands to actually connect with their audiences instead of guessing their way through ‘sensitivity'.
Paul Hudson, founder and chief executive, FlexMR
I’d probably go with McDonalds’ Trust Neutrals research and strategy, because it was great, bold creative that was founded in a real ‘nugget’ of insight; it’s is a great example of where insight can lead to real creativity.
Research Live’s end-of-year series explores the key trends and themes defining the market research sectoras we head into 2025. The first article explored the standout trends of the year.
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