By Crispin Beale, CEO, Insight 250
(Photos courtesy of Pixabay)
With summer here, things tend to wind down, with a focus on relaxation and getaways. In this spirit, we reached out to market research and insight experts from around the world to get their perspectives and opinions on this question:
“With the summer season comes vacations. What are the aspects of market research and insights that organizations need to get away from to enhance their efficiency and elevate their impact?”
Tomasz Soluch, Future Insights & Innovation Toolkit Manager, Fonterra Co‑operative Group Limited, New Zealand
“With all the recent developments in market research, it’s a good moment to step away from some habits that quietly limit the impact of market research. In terms of efficiency, organizations need to get away from highly manual, repeatable work that can be better handled through smarter tooling, AI or agency support. Too much effort still goes into mechanics rather than meaning. At the same time, insights teams shouldn’t be treated as research production units. Their real value comes from judgment, interpretation, and connecting the dots. For example, when quality data is already in place, the focus should shift to sense‑making, storytelling, and decision influence. Impact increases when insights are designed to shape choices, not just deliver reports.”
Anita Watkins, CEO, Insights Association, USA
“This summer, market researchers need to take a break from over-emphasizing speed for its own sake. Faster isn’t better if the resulting insights lack depth and cannot be properly sourced or defended. In a world racing forward, our value lies in slowing down enough to deliver real human understanding that provides clarity and meaningful business impact. Be fully present with your stakeholders, intentional in how you show up, and open to the inspiration that comes when the summer slowdown creates space for fresh perspectives.”
Lonneke de Roo, Head of Data & Insights, IDX, Switzerland
“Organizations need to step away from the compulsion to gather more before acting, and invest instead in the judgment to know when they already have enough. Less is more! That judgment is rarely built alone; the best insights leaders lean on trusted agency partners who support framing the right business questions that are most often specific to the context and require custom-built solutions, joint thinking. The future of insights is not about bigger datasets, it is rather about sharper, specific questions, better partnerships, leading to faster action.”
Mary Ann Packo, CEO, Ipsos North America, USA
“You know the best thing about a summer vacation? It's a great opportunity to travel light. So, let's start with what doesn't make the cut. I've got no room in my bags for deliverables that don't drive decisions. Decisions don't live in 60-page decks. They come from clear, well-argued judgment about what to do next, grounded in the right evidence and delivered while the question is still relevant. And vacations don't last forever, and neither do our clients' decision cycles. They're making bigger decisions, with less time, in a noisier environment than ever, and we have to match that pace. The good news is that AI is taking the manual work that used to eat our weeks and giving us back the hours that matter, the ones spent thinking, debating, and deciding. So post-vacation, let's come back refreshed and ready to operate with courage, clarity, and speed.”
Colin Strong, Head of Behavioural Science, Ipsos, UK
“As organizations face more complex and fast-moving environments, I think insight needs to keep moving beyond the idea that more data, on its own, will give us better understanding. The real value comes from bringing things together: different disciplines, different data sources, and different ways of knowing. That means combining behavioural science, ethnography, cultural analysis, analytics, commercial data and lived experience in ways that help organizations make better sense of what is going on. So for me, efficiency is not just about doing research faster or producing cleaner dashboards. It is about sharper synthesis, better judgement and more useful interpretation. Insight is at its best when evidence generation and sense-making work together: helping organisations see what matters, what is changing, what is contested and what to do next. To elevate our impact, we need to keep strengthening that connection.”
Adisa-Simon, Lead - Corporate Research, City of Calgary, Canada
"We need to "vacation away" from transactional research approaches that engage communities only when data is needed. The future of impactful insights lies in building trust, fostering continuous dialogue, and designing research that reflects lived experiences, especially among underrepresented groups. When organizations prioritize clarity, empathy, and action over volume and vanity metrics, research becomes not just informative, but transformative.”
Alina Serbanica, Ph.D., Senior Vice President | Head of Ops Data Privacy, Ipsos, Romania
“Summer vacations are a way of life that has become a culture in some geographic areas. For the research industry, they come with higher-than-average respondent drop-out rates during the year and with reduced time and interest from research survey participants, focused on quality time for relaxation spent with family, loved ones and new experiences, such as sightseeing trips. Some aspects that research agencies should consider when designing surveys during respondents’ vacations. Avoid long and boring surveys administered during summer vacations, which involve cumbersome questionnaires; replace them with agile research, with short surveys aimed at obtaining valuable information and insights about consumers’ experiences during the summer, vacations, etc. Integrate mobile-first and gamification into short surveys, under 10 minutes, for an attractive experience for respondents, which will give them the impression of relaxation during the summer vacation, in addition to the possibility that their opinion will be known and taken into account.
Build interviews based on artificial intelligence, offering flexibility to participants to allow them to answer the research survey questions in their free time, depending on their availability, improving response rates during vacations.”
Mark Langsfeld, CEO, mTab, USA
“Agentic AI is fundamentally changing how organizations synthesize, integrate, and interpret disparate datasets across the enterprise. Yet many companies remain constrained by uncertainty, apprehension, or skepticism. While some solutions inevitably overpromise, the greater risk now is standing still. A ‘wait and see’ approach is already putting major brands across automotive, consumer goods, entertainment, and food and beverage at a competitive disadvantage. Organizations that are embracing AI thoughtfully are empowering marketing, product, innovation, and inventory teams to uncover faster insights, operate more efficiently, engage customers more effectively, and drive measurable growth.”
Christian Dössel, Head of Innovation at Bonsai, Germany
“If market research needs a vacation from anything, it’s from believing that more data automatically means more understanding. As technology and AI accelerate further, the real opportunity lies in getting closer to people: observing behavior, bringing testing into everyday life, and understanding decisions in the contexts where they are actually made. The future won’t belong to those who simply collect answers faster, but to those who test ideas earlier, closer to reality, and make behavior visible rather than assumed.”
Justine Clements, Samsung, Australia
“Stepping away to slow down has provided the time to clarify our insights strategy for 2026. We need to build efficient infrastructure not to produce more or faster insights, but to allow time and space to become an intelligence delivering function and ultimately to integrate insights more directly at the source of decision making.”
Isabelle Fabry, Founder & CEO, ActFuture, Esomar Country Rep, France
“As summer invites us to step back, market research should take a break from a more uncomfortable habit: the illusion of understanding. Too often, our industry produces clarity by simplification—standardized frameworks, overused narratives, and data that confirms rather than challenges. In doing so, we contribute to a broader issue: the intellectual and imaginative flattening of brands. When everyone uses the same tools, asks the same questions, and optimizes the same KPIs, we don’t generate insight—we reproduce sameness.
To elevate impact, we must move away from ‘safe' insights and reintroduce tension, culture, and depth. This means going beyond what people say, embracing ambiguity, and reconnecting with the emotional and symbolic dimensions that truly drive meaning. Because insight should not describe the world as it is—it should reveal what we no longer see.”
Danny Russell, Chief Customer Officer, IDX, UK
“Summer is a good reminder that insight teams need a holiday from a few old habits too. Businesses would do well to leave behind “data hoarding” with endless dashboards that measure metrics that are more important to the company than to the customer. It’s also time to escape painfully long quantitative surveys – remove any questions that have never had a question asked of the findings. Finally, given the better weather, get out from behind your desk/laptop – go do nothing more than watch your customers trying to deal with your product – be curious; simply observe and learn.”
Michael Howard, Founder & CEO, Nichefire, USA
"Market research needs to get away from treating culture as a variable to be measured and start treating it as a signal to be decoded. Consumer behavior shifts in real time. It doesn't wait for your study to close. And it's shaped by niche communities and subcultures that never show up in a focus group. The teams delivering the most impact are those listening to culture continuously and translating those early signals into decisions months before the mainstream catches on."
Constanza Cilley, Executive Director, Voices!, Argentina
“Maybe what market research most needs a vacation from is the illusion that more data automatically means more understanding. We have become extraordinarily efficient at tracking behaviors, clicks, purchases, and attention spans while becoming less capable of understanding the emotional and social fragmentation defining contemporary life. People are not only consumers optimizing decisions; they are increasingly lonely, emotionally exhausted, distrustful, and disconnected from one another. Yet much of the industry still operates with frameworks built for a more socially connected world. In the race for speed, automation, and AI-driven efficiency, there is also a risk of removing the very thing that gives insights value: human interpretation. The real challenge for the industry is not simply to generate faster answers, but to recover the ability to understand people in context, their anxieties, relationships, contradictions, and search for belonging. Otherwise, we may end up producing more information while understanding society less and less.”
Rob McLoughlin, Founder, DCDR, USA
“Most research still delivers postcard-style reports: static snapshots that lack the depth of the journey and fracture the story. To move beyond this, organizations need to adopt a decision intelligence approach that builds the connective thread, stitching data, analytics, context, and human judgment across time and channels into a living narrative that reveals the full picture, the real choices, and what to do next. Adopting a narrative, long-term lens makes research more engaging, aligns leaders around a shared storyline, accelerates decision-making, and compounds learning over time as each new wave of insight extends the story instead of starting from scratch.”
Melissa McNally, Research & Analytics Lead: SoundInsights at Kagiso Connect, South Africa
“With the arrival of summer- or for some of us in the Southern Hemisphere, the arrival of jerseys and electric blankets- comes a sense of renewal and fresh thinking. Market research is entering a similar moment, especially across Africa, where young populations, evolving digital behaviours and cultural dynamism are creating real opportunities for innovation. The industry has an opportunity to move beyond slower, retrospective ways of working and embrace more agile, connected and human-centred approaches. Increasingly, organizations need insights that combine culture, behaviour, emotion and real-time audience intelligence to help businesses respond faster and more meaningfully. Africa is uniquely positioned to shape this future. Its youthful energy and adaptability allow us to rethink traditional models and build insight ecosystems that are more responsive, inclusive and impactful for modern audiences.”
Rutu Mody-Kamdar, Founder & Managing Director, Jigsaw Brand Consultants, India
"Indian research has been on a long efficiency drive. Faster turnarounds, tighter samples, sharper decks. Somewhere in that pursuit, we have stopped allowing research to be slow. The slow part, where you sit with a contradiction, where a respondent says one thing in the morning and the opposite by afternoon, where the data refuses to converge, that part has been quietly engineered out. Yet that is precisely where insight lives. The summer ask, for me, is to step away from the cult of the immediately actionable. To make room again for the half-formed observation, the inconvenient finding, the consumer who will not be flattened into a forced persona. Efficiency has its place. So does the patience to let people remain a little unresolved.”
Nick Graham, Founder, Vertemis, Portugal
“This summer, insights teams need to escape the endless cycle of ad hoc projects, reactive reporting and disconnected studies. Not only does this exhaust already overstretched insights teams, but it’s increasingly not what the business needs. Instead of focusing on gathering and reporting yet more data, we should reimagine research agendas as continuous learning ecosystems - tightly synced to key business milestones and squarely focused on driving decisions. The future of insights is not generating more information. It’s helping organizations make more informed decisions.”
Sharmila Das, Chairwoman & Founder, Purple Audacity, India
“As the insights industry rushes to embrace AI and new technology tools, perhaps this summer is a good time to pause and reflect on what we need to move away from. Today, there is a temptation to adopt every new platform or AI solution that enters the market. But without thought and discipline, this can create confusion, inefficiency, duplication of effort and even concerns around privacy and ethics. What we need now is not just faster adoption of technology, but better governance around its use. Organisations must create clarity around which tools can be used, in what situations, who should be involved in approving them, how usage will be monitored and who will take responsibility for costs, compliance and data security. These decisions cannot remain fragmented across teams or individuals. Technology will continue to evolve at a pace none of us can control. But as researchers and insight professionals, our responsibility is to ensure that human judgement, accountability and mindfulness evolve alongside it. The future of our industry will depend not only on innovation, but on the wisdom with which we use it.”
Urpi Torrado, CEO, Datum Internacional, Peru
“Organizations don’t necessarily need to 'get away from' market research fundamentals—they need to evolve how they apply them. The opportunity lies in embracing new technologies while building on the expertise and capabilities that already exist within teams. AI, automation, and real-time insight tools should not replace researchers, but amplify their ability to interpret, connect, and act on information faster and more strategically. The future of insights is not about abandoning proven practices, but about combining human expertise with new technologies to create smarter, more agile, and more impactful decision-making.”
Lucy Davison, Founder and CEO, Keen as Mustard, UK
“This summer, ‘vacate’ what isn’t working! The best way to deliver great insights is for agencies to build strong client relationships. Our research shows this requires a shift in how we start building those relationships. If insights organizations want to establish trusted partnership status with their clients, they need to step away from relying on cold sales outreach. It’s inefficient, transactional, and at odds with the trust and credibility our work depends on. Remember, 95% of the time your client is not in the market to buy. Instead, suppliers should invest in earned attention focused on thought leadership, building reputation. At Keen as Mustard we use PR and storytelling, creating relevance and value, consistently, over time. When organizations prioritize relationship‑led communication, they don’t just improve efficiency. They elevate their influence, strengthen their partnerships, and ensure they have the right relationships to deliver valuable insights.”
Alexandrine de Montera, CPO & ISO Quality Officer, Full Circle Research, USA
"Market research organizations need to stop treating data quality as a downstream check and start prioritizing it system-wide. Quality must be engineered end-to-end, from panel recruitment and identity validation to survey experience design and incentive fulfillment. What’s more, behavioral fraud detection is no longer an optional afterthought. It must be embedded within our ecosystems. Equally critical is recognizing that data integrity is a shared responsibility. Sample providers, research agencies and end clients collectively influence outcomes through their design choices, security standards and tolerance for risk. Efficiency and impact don’t come from faster fielding alone. They come from building a defensible data supply chain where quality is continuously enforced and never assumed.”
Shafali Arora, CMI Director, Personal Care, India, Hindustan Unilever Limited, India
“As organizations embrace agility, market research and insights teams should take a vacation from rear-view mirror gazing —lengthy research cycles, legacy trackers, and excessive data collection. And we need to cultivate the art of identifying emerging signals, embrace a degree of ambiguity, build reliable models to predict the future. We van help organizations plan for multiple future scenarios by combining foresight, behavioral intelligence, the deep understanding of culture through the power of AI. This is a great opportunity for the Insights function to evolve into being the strategic partners that shape resilient, future-ready business decisions.”
Michaela Gascon, CEO/President, KJT, USA
“Too many organizations still confuse proximity to research with value creation. Sitting in on live interviews has become a default behavior; well-intentioned, but often inefficient. The reality is that not every IDI yields breakthrough insight, and asking stakeholders to observe hours of uneven conversations rarely adds proportional value. If we’re serious about elevating impact, we need to move away from performative research rituals and toward disciplined synthesis. The better use of client time isn’t passive observation, it’s sharper engagement upfront and downstream: pressure-testing hypotheses, refining the business questions, and interrogating implications. Let researchers do the work of finding signal in noise and bring stakeholders in where their thinking compounds the outcome.”
Sidharth Chaturvedi, CEO, Third Eye Integrated Services Pvt Ltd, India
“Market research perhaps needs a vacation from the belief that more data automatically leads to deeper understanding. Increasingly, organizations often confuse dashboards for depth and speed for clarity. As consumers become more fragmented, culturally fluid, and generationally layered, the role of insights cannot simply be to report behaviour. It must uncover the emotional and cultural tensions shaping change. Markets across the globe are in the middle of a cultural potboiler. The role of insights is to help businesses find meaning in the mess. And that, more often than not is a task of decluttering as opposed to accumulation. More data can identify patterns. Human-centred insighting shaves those patterns and chisels them into meaning. Perhaps the industry also needs a break from performative certainty. In a volatile world, the value of research is not artificially precise answers, but helping organizations navigate ambiguity with greater curiosity, cultural intelligence, and conviction.”
Mariela Mociulsky – CEO & Founder, Trendsity, Argentina
“We live in a culture obsessed with speed, yet understanding people has never been so complex. The paradox is that while AI multiplies our capacity to process information, it also increases the anxiety of having everything now and with it grows the risk of mistaking time-saving for good synthesis and genuine understanding. Perhaps this summer, organizations need to take a holiday from something very specific: the voracity to answer too quickly. Because the differentiator for future researchers will be developing something far scarcer: cultural judgement, contextual sensitivity and the ability to detect human tensions that aren't yet visible in dashboards. The most valuable research won't be the kind that confirms the obvious faster, but the kind that helps interpret what is emerging before it becomes evident, what truly enables us to work towards building possible futures. That's why the challenge is to recover something deeply human the capacity for sharp vision, better questions, reading contradictions and translating them into planning and creative ideas, together with our clients.”
Tal Oren, Head of Growth & Learning, Talk Shoppe, USA
"The industry needs to move away from the put-it-in-a-deck-or-it-didn't-happen attitude. We agonize over making things look pretty, professional, and official, yet often a coffee and a conversation could have more impact than any polished slide. Not to mention, be more fun. We can tell such riveting stories to our friends about what we read in the news or did over the weekend, yet we choose the dullest ways to communicate information at work. Let's bring that same natural storytelling to our clients when possible."
Debi Hart, VP of Product Market Research, Forsta, Netherlands
“Summer vacations are a great reminder to let things go. Market research has spent years chasing big data, but volume without value serves no purpose. The real opportunity lies in doubling down on clarity: Fewer, sharper insights that directly tie to decisions that make sense and drive ROI. That also means moving away from fragmented platforms that scatter data, slowing teams down. When workflows are unified, insights become easier to connect, faster to action, and far more impactful. In a market where speed and precision win, the organizations that thrive won’t be the ones with the most data, but the ones who know exactly what to do with it.”
Carol Fitzgerald, President & CEO, BuzzBack, USA
“Summer for me incorporates visions of the beach, seashell hunting, a good podcast. It’s a chance to depart from day-to-day AI disruption all around us. Today’s client conversations include questions on AI-moderated qual, synthetic twins, and what integrity really represents in research—focusing mostly on automation. Back in 2000, when I started BuzzBack, the big ask was ‘how representative is the internet?’ LOL, but it was real, and today we return to that same focus on integrity and quality with a new perspective. And as we think about AI and how we’ll deploy new efficiencies and agentify our approaches, we need to ask ourselves: what’s our trust stack? Our trust in AI is powered by humans and the emotions that help us create impact. We won’t need to ask whether we trust the sand between our toes, but we do need to bring back emotions to elevate our impact.”
Dana Kim, Founder & CEO, Highlight, USA
“To truly elevate our impact this season, we must trade data accumulation for building decision systems. That means avoiding a few common pitfalls:
- Data Hoarding: More data isn’t better; clearer data is. We’re ditching 50-page reports for "so-what" summaries that drive immediate action.
- A Rigid "Data Requirements" Mindset: Sometimes, an 80% certain insight delivered today is far more valuable than a 100% certain one delivered too late. Other times, one-way doors mandate rigorous validation.
- The "Report for Report’s Sake" Culture: We must stop producing exhaustive decks that sit in inboxes. If an insight doesn’t trigger an immediate strategic answer or decision, it’s noise.
By avoiding this research debt, we free ourselves to focus on what actually matters: making smart data-driven decisions by listening to our customers.”
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Thank you, everyone, for sharing your views. The voices gathered here, spanning continents and disciplines, point toward a surprisingly unified direction. Whether the message comes from New Zealand, Argentina, India, or the UK, the refrain is consistent: more data is not the same as more understanding. The industry's most urgent challenge is not speed or volume, but the harder work of synthesis, judgment, and human interpretation. AI and automation are genuinely powerful allies, but only when guided by researchers who ask sharper questions, embrace ambiguity, and resist the seduction of the immediately actionable.
The other thread running through these perspectives is courage — the courage to simplify, to challenge comfortable frameworks, to engage communities beyond a transactional exchange, and to deliver insights that shape decisions rather than just fill decks. Efficiency matters, but not at the cost of meaning.
So, as summer offers a rare moment to step back and breathe, perhaps the most valuable thing insights professionals can do is resist the urge to fill that silence immediately. Some of the best thinking happens in the pause. Come back refreshed, ask better questions, and remember that the ultimate measure of this industry is not how much it knows — it is how much it helps the people and organizations it serves to see the world a little more clearly, and act a little more wisely. Have a great summer!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Crispin Beale - Chief Executive, Insight250, Senior Strategic Advisor, mTab; Worldwide CEO, IDX
Crispin is a marketing, data, and customer experience expert. Crispin spent over a decade on the Executive Management Board of Chime Communications as CEO of leading brands such as Opinion Leader, Brand Democracy, Facts International, and Watermelon. Before this, Crispin held senior marketing and insight roles at BT, Royal Mail Group, and Dixons. Crispin originally qualified as a chartered accountant and moved into management consultancy with Coopers & Lybrand (PwC). Crispin has been a Fellow, Board Director (and Chairman) of the MRS for nearly 20 years and UK ESOMAR Representative for over 10 years. Crispin is currently a Senior Strategic Advisor at mTab as well as worldwide CEO at IDX.