AURA Insight

Insight and research managers, what are you wishing for this Christmas? As a bit of fun before we sign off for this year, we thought we'd ask the AURA Directors what they're wishing for, and they didn't hold back! All an insight manager wants for Christmas is… 🌠 ...to see our insights go full circles so they are quoted back at us. Ideally accurately. And sometimes with no flicker of recognition that they came from us in the first place. But still, it’s the best compliment we can wish for! 🌠 ...for stakeholders to allow the responses from their customers and employees to speak for themselves and STOP PRIMING! If you don’t really want to know then don’t waste the Insight team's time in pretending to ask! 🌠 ...to be part of planning early on, so I can proactively help stakeholders identify the areas with the greatest insight need where I can add most value. 🌠 ...yet another invitation to an ‘executive round table’ about something to do with CX or AI. With an agency we don’t know, at a fancy restaurant over dinner. Don’t these agencies realise we are mostly introverts who like to go home on time?! Honestly, what’s wrong with a neat little webinar?? 🌠 ...an unlimited research budget! What do you think? Will their wishes be granted in 2025?! Join in the fun! We would love to hear what you're wishing for this Christmas. Add your own wishes in the comments ⬇️ On behalf of everyone here in the AURA team, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Ruth Hinton Steven Darby Tim Steere Maddie Shields (née Horner) Irene Grovenstein Louise Sharpe Richard Drury FMRS Tom Kerr Julia Joskey #mrx #marketresearch #insights

The AURA team held our AGM online yesterday - and as always, it’s a great chance to reflect on the past year. Here is a review of 2024 from our AURA Chair, Ruth Hinton. The Cambridge Dictionary has chosen ‘manifest’ as their word of the year for 2024; the Collins word of the year is ‘brat’; Oxford University Press have gone with ‘brain rot’! But for AURA, I’m going for ‘support’ as our word of 2024. Not so zeitgeisty and buzzy admittedly, and if you’re familiar with AURA - the UK’s biggest community exclusively for clientside researchers - then you’ll probably already recognise some reasons why. Read the full review here 🔗 https://www.aura.org.uk/ So as we head into 2025 - and amazingly, AURA’s 60th year! - I would like to say thank you on behalf of the AURA Directors (Ruth Hinton, Irene Grovenstein, Louise Sharpe, Maddie Shields (née Horner), Steven Darby and Tim Steere) to the literally hundreds of insight folk who in 2024 shared their stories and their learning with our AURA community. Someone said recently that the research sector has ‘always relied on the kindness of strangers’ - in the form of our participants - and this is true of our supportive clientside community too. Long may it continue! Tom Kerr Richard Drury FMRS Julia Joskey #mrx #marketresearch #insights

That's a wrap for 2024! We have delivered our final two events of the year. AURA members, if you missed them, you can catch up now. The recordings and presentations are available on the Knowledge Hub. ✅ An exploration of AI in practice: an extended webinar with 3 presentations from AQR and AURA members Emese Pintér of Asahi and Emma Laney Smith of Syren Insights shared a research study where AI and human efforts are combined, demonstrating how collaboration between the two can produce superior outcomes than either alone. Tom Woodnutt of Feeling Mutual shared a case study of their work with PureGym using the alalogy of olive oil production to explain how AI can enable a 'second pressing' of insight. Lucy Tarrant of Principality Building Society talked us through how the research team partnered with stakeholders to build an intuitive understanding of the First Time Buyer audience. The project has culminated in the creation of an AI tool, developed with VERVE, that facilitates direct ‘interaction’ with the 5 identified FTB personas. Catch up here 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eUkts3_w ☑️ The crucial importance of defining and measuring trust Sam Gardner, Alison Gilbertson and Charlotte Andrews of Boxclever shared their 5 golden rules to help better understand and measure trust, and Sam Riley (Asda) and Rachel Congdon (NSPCC) helpfully gave their clientside perspectives on how important trust is for their brands and commercial outcomes. Catch up here 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eWechvdJ ❗ Not an AURA member? Join us and come along to all events we have planned for 2025. If you're a clientside researcher, discover the benefits of membership here 🔗 https://www.aura.org.uk/ #mrx #marketresearch #insights

Save the date! We are working hard to deliver a fantastic events schedule for AURA members next year. Here are the key dates of our in-person events for the first few months of 2025. 💫 Sign Salad Cultural Insight & Semiotics Masterclass, 22nd January, The RAF Club (agency hosted and funded) Almost sold out! 💫 Human8 Insight Communities, 11th February, London (agency hosted and funded) 💫 AURA seminar, 18th March, The RAF Club 💫 Quirk's Media London, 7th-8th May, The InterContinental O2 FREE tickets for AURA members (RRP £199) 💫 Insight Impact Award Final, 24th June, The RAF Club 💫 The AURAs Awards Dinner 2025, 17th July, The Kia Oval ...and more dates later in the year to be confirmed! ❌ Not an AURA member? You're missing out! ☑️ Join AURA now to make the most of 2025 🔗 https://lnkd.in/e8-NwskC AURA is the UK's biggest research networking and events organisation exclusively for clientside researchers. Our membership of almost 200 organisations and 900 individuals spans teams of one to 20+. AURA's mission is to deliver events, content and peer to peer support which inspires insight and drives impact within organisations. Corporate membership is £630+VAT for a team of four. Benefits include... ✅ All AURA face to face seminars and workshops ✅ All AURA online events ✅ FREE tickets for Quirks London ✅ FREE tickets for the AURAs Awards Dinner (subject to availability) ✅ Member Forum - seek or share advice and recommendations ✅ Knowledge Hub - browse hundreds of research case studies, event slides and playbacks #mrx #marketresearch #insights

Congratulations to Scott Hinton, all at Fineline Market Research and the team at NFU Mutual. This was a hugely competitive category which AURA Insight are delighted to sponsor, helping to highlight that it's not just knowing the insight but then doing something with it that makes the difference. We had the difficult but enjoyable task of selecting the finalists before the Market Research Society (MRS) judges chose the winner. In both cases the judges were impressed with impact of switching the client- customer focus from seeing their customer as a businesses to flipping this and seeing and engaging with them as human decision makers. Then activating this insight to practically build stronger and more meaningful connections. 👏 #awards #mrx #winners #insight #research

With colder weather and darker evenings drawing in through November, here at AURA we've brought inspirational light and friendly warmth to our members through our online and in-person events, and so much more... ✨ We gathered at the RAF Club in London for a day of inspiration dedicated to Generational Insights. Our speakers challenged what we thought we knew about the generations, and we finished with a heated debate! https://lnkd.in/etr28w8m ✨ Sign Salad's Alex Gordon and Mark Lemon delivered their fascinating webinar on cultural insights and semiotics, sharing a case study of their work with AURA member Keep Britain Tidy AURA members can catch up here 🔗 https://lnkd.in/e32CzZEC ✨ At our second webinar this month, Sam Gardner, Alison Gilbertson and Charlotte Andrews of Boxclever shared their 5 golden rules to help better understand and measure trust, and AURA members Sam Riley (ASDA) and Rachel Congdon helpfully gave their clientside perspectives on how important trust is for their brands and commercial outcomes AURA members can catch up here 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eWechvdJ ✨ We shared a round up of the progress we've made on raising awareness of the Working Well Together Charter this year, including establishing a new WWT team, delivering panels at conferences, and starting work on a new WWT toolkit 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eqmbtJhd ✨ Our chair, Ruth Hinton, talked to Dr Mark Thorpe on Truth Consulting's podcast about the WWT Charter 🔗 https://lnkd.in/e8_2Csuc ✨ We launched our new WWT Club for AURA members - a space to discuss how we are, or could be, applying the 6 principles, and how to overcome barriers 🔗 https://lnkd.in/engCp337 ❗ If you work clientside in research or insight and your organisation isn't a member of AURA, you're missing out! ✅ Join AURA now to get involved in 2025 🔗 https://lnkd.in/e8-NwskC #mrx #marketresearch #insights #WorkingWellTogether

Our first event of 2025 will be a special one. An in-person masterclass, generously hosted and funded by Sign Salad, especially for AURA members. 💫 Cultural Insight & Semiotics: An interactive masterclass 📅 Wednesday 22nd January, 12.30pm to 5pm, The RAF Club Why is cultural insight and foresight vital to successful brand development? How and why is semiotics a powerful methodology to include in the qualitative toolkit? Through an analysis of key cultural meanings, brands can uncover the underlying motivations behind unconscious everyday consumer decision making. Armed with this insight, brands can gain competitive advantage by staying culturally relevant and distinctive. Semiotics is the key research methodology to help achieve this. This masterclass will include an introduction to applied semiotic analysis, as well as highly interactive workshop exercises, in which participants will themselves conduct semiotic analyses, demonstrating its practical application. Participants will leave with an understanding of how semiotics can be applied to commercial challenges, and a practical toolkit to guide and inspire future strategic and creative application, from positioning and NPD/innovation to pack design, comms development, and more. Our trainers are Alex Gordon, Katrina Russell, and Mark Lemon, all from Sign Salad, a leading cultural consultancy specialising in foresight, semiotics and language analysis. AURA members - please note that this event is offered in addition to other AURA hosted events throughout the year. Places are limited to a maximum of 40 attendees. If you would like to take part, please register as soon as possible to secure your place. Register here 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eetAvRw6 #mrx #marketresearch #insights #culturalinsight #semiotics

We had a packed agenda and a packed room of AURA members at The RAF Club for our Generational Insights event last week! 💫 First up, Laura Mucha and Jenny Lindsay of buzzback set the tone for the day by busting some myths about different generations' views on wellbeing, comparing the UK and US 💫 Coco Ravan of Magenta Research brought us right up to date with the visual aesthetics of brat and talked about the predicted future behaviours of Gen Alpha 💫 After the coffee break, Pauline McGowan and Lucy Foylan of The Nursery Research & Planning got us all involved by voting with a Millennial 🫶 or a Gen X 🤘 to predict which stereotypes were proven to be true or false in their large scale study 💫 Lisa Edgar of the Big Window introduced us all to the 'megatrend' of longevity and described the four very distinct life stages from age 50 onwards 💫 Following on from Lisa perfectly, Barry Clark of Related Stories, brought the older generation right into the room with his emotive documentary style video of Norman, aged 74, telling his story in his own words and captured in Barry's beautiful photography 💫 After a buffet lunch, Stephanie Holland of HUSH RESEARCH AND STRATEGY helped us to understand Gen Z new parents and talked about the '5 shifts' including rising individualism and how and where they access support 💫 Finally, we hosted a heated debate! 'This house believes that generational cohorts are good for research' In the blue corner, Oliver Sweet and Chloe Combi were in favour, arguing that there are huge differences between the generations and brands would be foolish to ignore them, while keen that we must never essentialise nor ignore the differences within gen cohorts. In the red corner, Lucy Davison and Danny Russell argued that 'we can do better' than a single variable segmentation which encourages lazy stereotyping and even discrimination. Were AURA members persuaded? Results of the 'hands up' poll were inconclusive! The debate rages on! Thank you to all our speakers for thought-provoking and challenging takes on what we thought we knew about the generations. As always, thank you to our warm and welcoming host, Tom Kerr. ❗ AURA members, if you couldn't make it this time, you'll be able to view the presentations on the Knowledge Hub 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eyGWBbBP ❌ Not an AURA member and feel like you're missing out? Try us for free at our next event 🔗 https://lnkd.in/e5vwTg6x Steven Darby Viv Harrison Richard Drury FMRS Julia Joskey #mrx #marketresearch #insight #generations #genalpha #genz #millennials #genx #boomers

There's no need to venture out in the cold! Join us online for a warming dose of inspiration at our final two events of 2024. ✨ The crucial importance of defining and measuring trust Wednesday 27th November, 9am-10am, online Boxclever and special guests delve into the critical role of evaluating trust through the lens of market research. ✨ AQR & AURA: AI in Practice Wednesday 4th December, 9am-10.30am, online An extended webinar with 3 case studies from The AQR and AURA members focused on combining AI and human research for superior results. With Asahi Group and Syren Insights, Feeling Mutual and Principality Building Society. AURA members can sign up here 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eHHjemxX Not an AURA member? Clientside researchers can attend one of these events for free! 🔗 https://lnkd.in/e5vwTg6x #mrx #marketresearch #insights #trust #ai

New! We've launched a brand new way for AURA members to get involved with our Working Well Together Charter - the WWT Club. The best thing about AURA is the support we get from each other. The purpose of the WWT Club is to provide a space to discuss how we are – or could be – applying the 6 principles, and how to overcome barriers. Our thanks to Nick Rich for volunteering to host, this will be a discussion exclusively for AURA members. We would love for you to bring an example of how you’ve applied one of the 6 principles – and a challenge you would like to overcome. The first WWT Club will take place on Thursday 28th November at 11.30am, online. AURA members can register here 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eFjQ8xGA Not an AURA member? You can find out more and sign up as a clientside or agency supporter of the WWT Charter here 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eN2swCMp #mrx #marketresearch #insights #WorkingWellTogether #wellbeing Ruth Hinton