At the end of 2010, we published a blog post about the results of our annual US “Understanding The Need Of The Changing Consumer” report, in which we reported that for the first time ever the average time US consumer reports spending online is the same as what they report spending watching offline TV. As the data is self-reported it's different from the metrics collected by Nielsen or comScore, but it tells a very important story that is coming directly from the mouths of consumers: In their minds, time spent with offline and online media is split equally.

However, this discussion came at a time when the iPad had only been launched for about six months and worldwide there were less than 15 million iPads sold. At the end of 2011, we conducted a quantitative Technographics^® study and ran a qualitative project in our Community Speaks community to better understand: the relationship among tablets, laptops, and TV; how consumers are currently using the Internet and TV; and how they’d like to do so in the future. Forrester's Technographics data shows that many consumers who own a laptop or tablet use that to go online while watching television:

Market insights professionals tend to work long hours, under a lot of pressure, with a need to produce ever more with ever less. Needless to say, this can make us a bit, well, stressed and serious. Sometimes too serious for our own good.

So, every once in a while, it’s good to connect with our inner child — or connect with our real children (who may be wondering why mommy and daddy are working so much). Last week, Forresterites in Cambridge got to actually do both with our annual Bring Your Kid To Work Day. It brought a whole new meaning to multitasking!

Morning was spent balancing serious emails with serious games. The juxtaposition really helped me understand that we don’t have to be so serious to do great work. In fact, being too serious might actually be an impediment to the creativity and out-of-the-box thinking that market insights professionals so need to bring to the position nowadays!

The height of the day for me was when I brought my nine-year old son to my “office.” OK, it’s a cubicle. Nothing to write home about, but he thought it was the coolest thing in the world! Being still somewhat in a frame of mind to play games, I started to see my office in a whole new light!

So what is the deep analytical insight of this blog? Well, nothing. And sometimes that’s OK. It’s good for market insights professionals to take some time off, do nothing, be like a kid (or with a kid), let your mind wander, and do silly things. This is also, by the way, how creative ideas are formed, how innovations are born, and how, perhaps paradoxically, market insights professionals might find a way to do more with less!

The analogy I always use to talk about qualitative research is that it’s the illustration to the quantitative story. What my own analogy assumes is that qualitative data on its own is an illustration. However, it’s really up to the analyst to bring this data to life.

Creating a visual story to display your qualitative data is an equally important part of the research process as the analysis phase, and something that is often rushed and not executed well. In my last blog post, I highlighted the fact that qualitative research is not just “quotes on a page.” You are doing yourself and your respondents a disservice if you rely solely on quotes and text to tell your story. Here are my tips to create an engaging report:

1. Kill your data darlings. My colleague Reineke Reitsma posted about this last month, and I couldn’t agree more. Don’t go overboard with numbers. Especially in qualitative research, too many graphics or percentages only distract from the story. Pick a few data points that strongly highlight your qualitative story, and challenge yourself to display them without using graphs and pie charts (i.e., via infographics.)

We listened to marketers of the world’s biggest brands when they asked, “What’s the impact of Facebook on my brand?” and we decided to take a look for ourselves. We proudly present our latest research, “The Facebook Factor.” In the report, we answer the pressing question, “How much more likely are Facebook fans to purchase, consider, and recommend brands, compared with non-fans?” We used logistic regression modeling to find out. The impact? We call it the “Facebook factor,” and I urge you to read the report to find out how you can leverage our methodology to assess the Facebook factor for your brand.

In the report, we use four major brands as case studies to assess the Facebook factor for Coca-Cola, Walmart, Best Buy, and BlackBerry(Research In Motion [RIM]). Guess what? Facebook fans are much more likely to purchase, consider, and recommend the brands that they engage with on Facebook than non-fans. As the graphic below shows, Facebook fans of Best Buy are about twice as likely to purchase from and recommend Best Buy as non-fans.