March, 5th: Panel Research revisited – AIMRI Meeting, Rome: Our international Sales Manager and native Italian, Silvia Fracchia, flys to Rome to attend this years AIMRI Meeting on Panel Research.

March, 8th-9th: Mobile Research Conference, London: Our dear colleague and Director of Panel Management Christoph Bender joins this years Mobile Research Conference in London to learn and share insights and latest developments in Mobile Research!

May, 26th-28th: GOR Conference 2010, Pforzheim: Steffi Preiß, Florian Tress and Christoph Irmer will have a nice car-ride to Pforzheim in May to attend this years GOR conference. Next to a lot of interest in exchaning views and thoughts on Online Research, they will bring 2 speeches:

Are well-selected panelists better respondents? Insights into the effect of a master screener on panel performance and data quality – Thursday, May 27th, 12pm

Is the Crowd wise enough to predict the Election Results for the German “Bundestag”? – Friday, May 28th, 2.15pm – together with Thomas Donath, Managing Director of Nordlight Research.

June, 16th-17th: BVM Kongress, Bonn: We’ve still not decided who will attend this year’s BVM-Congress in Bonn but one thing’s for sure: We will definitely be there! Stay tuned for further news

AIMRI (Alliance of International Market Research Institutes) organises 3-4 conferences each year in European countries and each meeting has a core speciality around which topics are raised and members experienced in that specialty give short presentations to discuss with other members.

This AIMRI meeting took place at the very nice “Hotel Platzl” in the centre of Munich and the topic was “Understanding Niche Markets” –> how to reach specialised groups such as consumers of luxury items, certain financial products, etc. etc. It was very interesting to hear the various approaches of panel providers or market research institutes and trying to avoid a biased results in the end.

In summary I would say, that it is and will remain a very tough task to find people from Niche markets simply because it is a minority which will have to be especially recruited.

There is one niche market which was mentioned though, that can already be accessed:

<< Enthusiasts or Fans of certains sports or sports clubs >>

ODC Services owns the first and only Sports Panel which contains all kinds of details around sports and sport teams!

Inbetween the presentations it was a very good opportunity for me to meet new people and potential clients and exchange opinions about the conference’s subject.

We are looking forward to the next AIMRI conference and will definitely join again.