Future Talent Meets The Industry

Marketing research is facing an environment that is becoming increasingly competitive and faster. As a consequence, data gathering and data interpretation have to be faster and more accurate as well, in order to provide helpful support to manager’s decisions. Another factor of evolution is the development of the ICT and in particular of Social Media. These are new ways by which people could express directly and freely their opinion, without any survey or additional research. The insight could already be somewhere on the net and modern researcher have to know how to grab it. This does not implicate a total abandonment of traditional methods of research but, on the contrary, traditional sources have to be integrated with new meaningful ones, in order to lead to an effective decision making.

The contribution that I could give to this development is related to my knowledge of social network. “Senior” market researchers started to become interested in social media as source of information after realizing their potential in generating customer insights. On the contrary, young generation has a deep knowledge of social media because has grown up with them, they are also a part of their private life. Therefore I could bring this “from inside expertise” into the firms I will work for, in the attempt to integrate my knowledge with the existing research framework.

Modern researcher’s skills are reliable to two main abilities:

• In data gathering, they need to integrate traditional sources with new ones (being then multisource);
• In data interpretation, they have to refer to different disciplines (anthropology, social sciences, psychology), in the attempt to gain a more complete vision of the problem.

Aside from every specific issue, the fundamental mindset in order to succeed in market research is that there is no “one best" approach, but you need to find, for each task, the approach that fits better with the particular case. This means that modern researchers have to know different techniques and, at the same time, be flexible in their implementation.

Currently, I’m attending the “double degree program” of Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi” (Milan) in partnership with the “Rotterdam School of Management”. At the end of this program I aspire to work for a consultancy firm because I like the way they run their business: they are partners to whom firms rely when facing problems or opportunities that they could not solve/exploit with their own resources. Therefore, by working for a consultancy firm, I will have the possibility to deal with challenging problems and to experience different economic fields. For sure it won’t be easygoing but I feel confident that, by expending the same effort and the same perseverance that has characterized and is characterizing my course of study, I’ll be able to face this important challenge.

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