I have started this blog for several months, but I have not brought it to life actually, as I had many other things on my urgent to-do-list… Actually all of them linked to on-going professional status changes.
In fact, after 4 and a half years at GfK spent on designing new digital initiatives, my position was suppressed. They told me they had decided to re-organize some innovation activities, thus closing the Network Intelligence Solution office in France as of 2013. Finally, as no other relevant opportunity in the company has been proposed to me, I had to leave. Considering that GfK is claiming to focus on innovative digital services, my lay-off was rather unexpected. Especially for economic reasons, knowing their very solid growth and substantial margins…
So it took me a few weeks to decide how I shall manage this change on my own. Now I am ready.
Despite the circumstances, I do want to stick to my agenda, and I am willing to use the blueprints that I have always been upholding, so as to achieve really innovative digital analytics… As a market research expert, with an ever stronger digital inclination, I have decided to reinforce my digital professionalism. In the near future, I shall then offer a full digital experience, by adding digital features to my acknowledged market research competencies. To be followed during the summer…
I shall also explain later why I believe that understanding one’s competition through the prism of key content categorization features may be a good way to target consumers (beyond the point of understanding consumers themselves), especially in those times of acute concerns with privacy issues. This may well be my full-time business as of the Fall of 2013.
In the meantime, I want to validate my digital competencies, thanks to my extensive experience in using network-centric data, expelling these data from their “noise”, enriching them with meaningful content, and trying to decipher trends out of these flows. Therefore, I am going back to school…
I am starting soon the “Award of Achievement in Digital Analytics” at the University of British Columbia (UBC), a 4-course curriculum that should keep me busy until August. And, as a member of the Digital Analytics Association (DAA), I shall pass the certification exam, in the following weeks.
September 2013 will see me start anew, as a digital re-born…
Data Elicitation 