The Norwegian Market Research Day, MAD, possibly broke its own inofficial Scandinavian record last Thursday, with 300 participants at the conference. The question is, are they cheating?
One of the few and much awaited breaks in the exhibition area.
First of all, 20 out of the 300 only came to the sold-out party in the evening, but never mind. What makes you wonder most is whether this is a conference about market research or merely an excuse for market researchers to get together, network and do informal business. The presentations are mostly about branding, strategy and marketing, with a slight touch of basic market research thrown in occasionally. In other words: the stuff you would expect to find at any general marketing conference. This is not necessarily bad. Market researchers need this kind of knowledge to perform better as consultants and the possibility to attract new groups of participants increases if the content is less "nerdy". But don't expect to find the latest and hottest research techniques at MAD!
Professor Magne Supphellen from NHH made the best presentation of the day. Did he talk about market research? Well, not really, but he offered ten very insightful trends that market researchers need to look out for.
Most people come for the networking, so why does NMF insist on keeping the breaks down to a minimum?
What you can expect to find and in generous numbers, are the hottest, best and most influental market researchers in Norway (including Ole Petter Nyhaug, pictured in the introduction). This is the place where you find fierce competitors side by side in the auditorium, discussing common challenges over a coffee or even dancing together in the middle of the night. Like one exhibitor arriving late in the morning put it: I don't care much about this day thing - it is in the evening I will do business!
"Look to the left, there goes a Swede!" Mikael Ohlsson from Novus Opinion has discovered the secret that most Swedes prefer to ignore: MAD is a fantastic place to network and pick up trends in the industry.
The Norwegians know how to arrange panel discussions, this time about opinion polls. Too bad only that the three introductory presentations took 45 minutes and only 15 minutes were left for the panelists and questions from the audience.
Gold sponsor Cint had made sure to get the best position in the exhibition hall. This picture was taken before the start of the event - after people had arrived, it was impossibly to get close enough to take a good photo.
The large main auditorium was filled almost to the last seat, a pleasant change to last years half-empty rows.
The other gold sponsor, SAS Institute, had put more effort into their stand than anyone else, including a boxing machine!
Adventurer Randi Skaug, the first Norwegian woman on Mount Everest, finished the day with an inspired presentation about how to reach your goals (not a word about market research of course). Too bad she spoke so fast that I captured less than half of what she said and virtually none of the jokes.
For the first time in many years, the Market Researcher of the Year Award (Årets Markedsanalytiker), was presented to someone I had never heard of before. Since her name was only mentioned once, not presented on any PowerPoint and NMF has not presented anything about the conference on their web site yet (three days after the event), her identity will remain a riddle to me for yet some time. I did capture that she works at Oslos famous business school BI, where MAD was arranged for the third time. This makes the selection even more interesting since she is obviously not working in the industry.
Henrik Hall
JUV