External Speaker - Talk Agenda

Hi all,

Mr Sanjay Dutta of ITC will deliver a talk as an external speaker for the course on Friday 7-Dec from 3 to 5 pm. Attendance is mandatory.

Mr Dutta laid out the agenda for the talk very well in his email, partially reproduced below:

The  perspective  Prof,  I want to bring in is the challenges   Market  Research  faces  due  to  its scrappy  record  of  providing meaningful insights that business can use. For every long, MR has been content  supplying data and answering here and now questions  in  a  mode  of  churning project after project.  That has been their business model. Come to Insights, come to predictions, most MR agencies have  shied away. Even the biggest and best in the field. We work with all of them.

There  are  many  forces  at  work. Little time or patience    for    people    to    answer   survey questionnaires   or  to  attend  focus  groups  to growing  realization  that   decisions we make are mostly   emotional   and   instinctive,  seemingly irrational.  Hence  not  very amenable to question answer  format  where coming across as a rational, logical person is non negotiable self image. Enter ethnography, tracking over the net and analysis of big  data  that  happen  as  a  result, Behavioral Economics, neuro marketing to name a few. Today we know more about a consumer that we could ever know and  we  are  revealing more data about ourselves.

The  analytics  is  a  skill  gap at the moment to convert   this  mountain  of  data  into  business friendly insights.

Research  is  evolving rapidly. Any conference one listens to, or papers you see nowadays shows a new set of agencies and skill sets much different from the traditional players.

We  are  conducting  elaborate  validation studies with  some of those specialists like Neuroscience, Behavioral  Economics.  Emanating  from  these new methods,  the  evidence  of  how  consumer  feels, thinks,  acts  are  quite different than what have been  assumed  so  far.  They  are  scientific and compelling.  Our  research  protocols  may  change after those validations.

Presentation  was  meant  to provide in 2 hours, a peek  into  the kind of role research should start playing  soon  by exposing them the challenges and the excitement of the new that lie ahead.

I hope you are as excited about the talk as I am. I'll provide more detail in due course.

Sudhir