Guest Speaker: James Armstrong

“practical market research tools to discover what customers really want”

On the very first day of semester two, I am pleased to announce we have a guest speaker, James Armstrong. He is the Professional Market Intelligence Manager at Philips, and former Associate Director of Client research at top global marketing research firm, Taylor Nelson Sofres, is going to tell us about market research in practice.

Based in Amsterdam, James has been doing research from the client side for a number of years. In this session, he will be sharing his experiences and perspectives about market research, addressing particularly its pitfall in the attitude-behavior gap: that people don’t do what they say they will do!

This is particularly pertinent to the practice of communications research since advertisers are always desperate to find out what consumers think and what they will do in future. In practice, marketing research is a subtle “crystal-ball” art that follows no hard and fast rules and requires, believe it or not, as much creativity and quick thinking as it does rigor. Client market research has always had a bad rep among advertising agencies - James is going to offer a voice from the other side of the fence. Should be interesting!