Jeffrey Henning’s #MRX Top 10: Gamifying, and Gaming, Research and Marketing

By Jeffrey Henning

Of the 1,791 unique links shared on #MRX in the past two weeks, here are 10 of the most retweeted.

1. Evolution of Insight – Vision Critical has the most viral research meme of the year, with an interactive cityscape that takes you from 1890 to the future, highlighting key research milestones along the way.
2. No, Twitter is not more important to teens than Facebook – Writing in Research, Ray Poynter of Vision Critical untangles some popular press treatment of research results regarding U.S. teen usage of Twitter and Facebook and say that when its comes to journalests reporting survey results, caveat lector.
3. Woo hoo! A ResearchGame – Betty Adamou, president of Research Through Gaming, shows off a game featured on one of their client’s homepages.
4. Where Am I? A Meta-Analysis of Experiments on the Effects of Progress Indicators for Web Surveys – Mario Callegero of Google and his co-authors share their research into straightforward vs. deceptive progress bars, and finds that those bars that lie the most improve completion rates the most: i.e., progress bars that inflate early progress and deflate later progress (“fast-to-slow”) outperform standard progress bars. They theorize that respondents’ investment in past answers keeps them moving forward and acknowledge the “questionable…ethics” of such progress bars.
5. Top 10 Insights from TMRE – Julie Kurd of Chadwick Martin Bailey shares key takeaways about gamification, behavioral economics, generational research, mobile and more, from The Market Research Event.
6. Consumer Evaluations of Sale Prices: Role of the Subtraction Principle – It’s rare for an academic paper to make the Top 10, and this is the second paper to do so this time out. Here’s the authors’ key conclusions: “First, we provide evidence that supports the subtraction principle—that is, subtraction is more difficult to initiate when the smaller number [the sales price] appears before the larger number… Second, we show that the subtraction task plays a key role in the evaluation of sale prices by influencing the propensity to calculate discount depth. Third, we demonstrate that not all consumers will initiate the subtraction task, and whether they do so is dependent on the sale price display location. Fourth, … when discount depth is moderate…the use of a sale price display location that facilitates initiation of the subtraction task causes more consumers to identify this larger discount.” Retailers, list the sale price after the regular price!
7. Sorry Forrester but Facebook DOES benefit marketers – Joel Rubinson argues a recent Forrester blog post minimizing the value of Facebook advertising doesn’t hold up to examination.
8. Brands on Instagram see 350% increase in engagement – Writing in Research, Bronwen Morgan tackles another Facebook platform’s effect on advertising, finding that Instagram is the fastest growing social network being targeted by marketers.
9. Mothers with children under 5 most active on social media, study says – An Experian-sponsored study, conducted with 25,000 U.S. adults, found that mothers with children under 5 are twice as likely to comment on social networks as members of the rest of the U.S. population.
10. Gamification to increase participant and client engagement – InSites Consulting argues that gamification is not just a data-collection technique, but a valuable tool for improving analysis, reporting, and client involvement with the research results.

Note: This list is ordered by the relative measure of each link’s influence in the first week it debuted. A link’s influence is a tally of the influence of each Twitter user who shared the link and tagged it #MRX.