An open letter to the consumer insights industry with Keith Rinzler artwork
Now that's Significant

An open letter to the consumer insights industry with Keith Rinzler

  • E150
  • 45:21
  • March 5th 2025

Welcome to the 150th episode of Now that's Significant, a market research podcast hosted by Michael Howard. In this special episode, Keith Rinzler, a seasoned marketing and media entrepreneur, joins to discuss the pressing issue of data fraud in the market research industry and the necessary steps to combat it.

Key points of discussion include...

1. Open Letter to the Consumer Insights Industry: Keith discusses his open letter aimed at addressing the prevailing data fraud crisis in the market research industry, emphasizing the urgency for reform to restore the industry's credibility.

2. Impact of Fraudulent Responses: The conversation highlights how fraudulent responses are a result of systemic issues within the sample industry, including the commoditization and mistreatment of respondents, which have led to a decline in data quality.

3. Role of Synthetic Data: Keith explores the potential shift towards synthetic data as a cost-effective alternative, while cautioning that it cannot fully replace human responses due to its reliance on historical data.

4. Push vs. Pull Model: The push model, as advocated by Keith, is presented as a solution to reduce fraud by eliminating the incentive for respondents to take multiple surveys, contrasting with the pull model that contributes to fraudulent activities.

5. Steps for Industry Improvement: Keith outlines actionable steps for customers, market researchers, and sample providers, including the importance of forming 100% guaranteed human panels and reducing reliance on marketplaces to ensure data integrity.

A question to consider...

How can your organization contribute to the integrity of market research data and what measures can be taken to ensure respondents are valued and incentivized appropriately?

Thank you for tuning into this milestone 150th episode of Now that's Significant. If you found this discussion valuable, please subscribe, share it with others, and consider leaving a review. Listen to our other episodes for more insights into market research.

Now that's Significant

Now that's Significant is a podcast focused on inspiring and educating Market Researchers as they seek to tackle pertinent challenges impacting the insights sector, as well as make the most of the many opportunities we're facing to deliver greater value to our stakeholders.

The team from Infotools rotate the hosting responsibilities to bring a range of passion, experience, energy, and views to the show.

Check out transcribed episodes on our website at Infotools | Podcasts

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Infotools Harmoni is a fit-for-purpose market research analysis, visualization, and reporting platform that gives the world’s leading brands the tools they need to better understand their consumers, customers, organization, and market.

Established in 1990, we work with some of the world’s top brands around the world, including Coca-Cola, Orange, Samsung, and Mondelēz.

Our powerful cloud-based platform, Harmoni, is purpose-built for market research. From data processing to investigation, dashboards to collaboration, Harmoni is a true "data-to-decision-making" solution for in-house corporate insights teams and agencies.

While we don't facilitate market research surveys, we make it easy for to find and share compelling insights that go over-and-above what stakeholders want, inspiring them to act decisively.

One of the most powerful features of Harmoni is Discover, a time-tested, time-saving, and investigative approach to data analysis. Using automated analyses to reveal patterns and trends, Discover minimizes potential research bias by removing the need for requesting and manually analyzing scores of cumbersome crosstabs – often seeing what you can’t.

Discover helps you easily find what differentiates groups that matter to you, uncover what makes them unique, and deliver data points that are interesting, relevant, and statistically significant, plus see things others can’t. Add to all this an impending GenAI feature, and you have an extremely powerful, future-proofed tool.

Feel free to check out our platform and services at www.infotools.com