The So Cal Chapter is pleased to report
achieving its highest meeting attendance
ever at the September 8 Mini-Conference!
Many Members indicated they are looking
forward to the Vancouver Conference.
Jay Zaltzman shared his successful
experience with a new productivity
program, detailed in the book,
Getting Things Done, by David Allen.
Our QRCA notices will surely get
out even faster now!
Long-time QRCA member and The Sultan of Car Consultin,’ Joe Grieco, along with colleague Eric Johnston of Grieco Research Group, kicked off our morning session with a most entertaining and interesting presentation on “Cars Don’t Sell Themselves … or Qualitative Perspective on Automotive Research." Recognized as the expert in automotive research, Joe regaled us with interesting stories, and a rather surprising view of the complexities of automotive research.
Key highlights included:
* Car research often is looking down the road at least 10 years.
* The active planning cycle for a new model is between three and six years.
* Qualitative research in the automobile industry includes focus groups, IDIs,
ethnography, triads, mini-groups, and car clinics.
* The bottom-line impact of car research is overwhelming.
* The challenges of car research are intense: it’s expensive, cut-throat, secretive,
and often difficult to satisfy a many-headed client.
* It is hard to break into automotive research: it takes passion for and knowledge
of cars and all things automotive. (Be prepared for the question “what kind of car
do you own now?”)
* The work involves complicated project management, excessively long hours and
lots of weekend work.
* The best way to enter the field is through the “back door,” advertising agencies
and other large research companies who do not have internal qualitative expertise
in automotive.
And all this time we thought Joe just ran around the country doing car clinics!
Very appropriate for our automotive research topic, we were pleased to hold this meeting one day after the opening of the new AIM Long Beach facility. This facility includes a super-room capable of displaying four (and possibly more) cars or other large items.
Following lunch, Susan Thornhill kicked off an interactive discussion on The Use of Excel for Analysis. Displaying massive spreadsheets prepared in a research project, Susan’s hottest tip was the extreme productivity of using two monitors, simultaneously.
She also shared an experience in preparing a report presentation using primarily graphics on PowerPoint gaining some inspiration from Beyond Bullet Points, by Cliff Atkinson. Interestingly, George Sloan had just written a review of this book – check out the Fall issue of VIEWS.
David
David Kwechansky
This discussion provided a great segue to our afternoon session. QRCA member David Kwechansky, in from Toronto, presented “The Write Stuff,” results of research into effective format and style of Word and PowerPoint reports/presentations that has been shared at two QRCA Conferences.
Chapter members were invited to anonymously submit reports for critique by the group following David’s presentation. Several attendees felt there has been a major shift since David's initial 2002 research, to much reporting being done through “stand alone” PowerPoint decks that are not meant for verbal presentation. These are replacing Word narrative document reports. A show of hands indicated that the majority of attendees present their results in this fashion most of the time.
A great day was had by all.
