Quipper Research makes India proud; wins ESOMAR Excellence Award 2012

Pia Mollback-Verbic and Piyul Mukherjee of Quipper Research have won this year's ESOMAR Excellence Award for their paper titled 'Water Wows'. This is the first time an Indian research agency has won this award.

For the first time ever, an Indian research agency has won the ESOMAR Excellence Award 2012. Pia Mollback-Verbic and Piyul Mukherjee of Quipper Research pulled in the award with their research paper titled 'Water Wows'. The duo presented the paper at a conference held by ESOMAR at Vienna last November.

The result was announced at the annual ESOMAR Congress that was held this year at Atlanta, USA. The winning team has been awarded 4,000 Euros.

The winning paper speaks about the need for a paradigm shift when 'Western' companies conduct qualitative research in the 'East'. The paper argues that traditional 'Western' formulas for conducting qualitative consumer research needs to be tweaked in 'Eastern' markets, and suggests that research professionals must adjust their qualitative approaches to the local culture without simply replicating assumptions and research traditions from 'Western' markets.

The paper deals with the broad aspects and challenges faced by the market research industry today, when conducting research across different nations and cultural domains. "This paper takes cross-cultural research to a new level. They (Mukherjee and Mollback-Verbic) nicely link the specific challenges of the research (for example, public versus private behaviours) to at least one of the paradigms for understanding cultural differences," says a member of the international jury at ESOMAR.

"This paper illustrates far better than most how decision-makers can be misled by what consumers say in more traditional research when there are cultural sensitivities not accounted for in the methodology," reads a statement issued by the ESOMAR jury.

According to the international jury from ESOMAR, the team's analysis of the five paradigms is one of the factors that helped the paper clinch this win. The research was deemed to be an eye-opener for 'Western' managers.

"To optimise the insight mining process and overall research findings, the standard research practices need to be carefully re-evaluated and sometimes flipped or reversed,"

says Mukherjee.

"Extensive experience from different markets has taught us about the impact of, for example, a collective versus individualistic culture, different levels of tolerance of conflicts and confrontations, and different modes of operating in hierarchical versus egalitarian environments, all having significant impact on how we should execute research," says Mollback-Verbic.

The ESOMAR Excellence Award is a benchmark for accomplishment in the world of market research. The Excellence Award for the best paper is selected among all the papers presented across all ESOMAR conferences held globally throughout the previous year.