Intuify's Learnings From TMRE 2025
- egonzalez267
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
By CEO, Kevin Karty
I was planning on writing up the top presentations from TMRE, but there were way too many sessions. Instead, here’s a review of some sessions I found particularly thought-provoking and along with what I learned from each. If your presentation isn't here, it's probably because I met an old friend on the way there and got sidetracked.
Thought 1: Deep Understanding Matters More Than Ever
Years ago, Procter & Gamble pioneered research methods like deep ethnography to really understand consumers’ needs, wants and fears. Sometimes, consumers had needs and wants they simply could not express or did not even recognize themselves.
The research team at Sekisui – which has quietly been growing into a home-building powerhouse – reminded us of this truth. Things like measuring the size and number of cubbies for storing kids’ backpacks when they come home for school. Or learning that big walk-in closets sound great, but actually experiencing them can be a different story – they can become an invitation to create more clutter and anxiety.
These are not things you learn on Google or ChatGPT.
Thought 2: Focusing on Big Opportunities
When McDonalds launched its anime-themed marketing campaign, it took some big risks. Those risk paid off in a big way – like 500% better performance than a standard campaign.
The presenters did a great job walking us through the impact of the campaign and the challenges of convincing senior leadership to place a big bet like this. In particularly, how do you convince them that this kind of campaign won’t backfire and disenfranchise non-GenZ?
Or even, how do you know that it won’t backfire with GenZ themselves if that community thinks the campaign is not authentic?
This was a great reminder that Customer Insights exists to help companies make big decisions and find big opportunities. (Though, being the geek I am, I’d have liked to see a bit more of how they did the research.)
Thought 3: Marketing to Stakeholders
TurboTax has been on an innovation streak for the past several years, and that was not simply a happy accident. It was the result of carefully planned execution of a broad and coherent insights program. If anyone is building or growing an internal insights team and wants a game plan for how to do it, I suggest reaching out to the presenters and getting their deck.
Of the many excellent points of advice, however, ONE thing stood out most: laying the groundwork for success with stakeholders. For many of us, when we get the big finding, we immediately want to share it with stakeholders. However, that might not be the best thing to do for us OR for our stakeholders.
The TurboTax team used a ‘drip campaign’ approach where they branded their key finding – the “Confidence Gap” – to create buzz about it internally. After weeks of this, they had internal stakeholders coming to them asking about this “Confidence Gap”, and they had laid the groundwork for a successful internal campaign to senior management. By the time they presented their findings, leadership was already on board with the outcome.
Thought 4: Truly New Approaches vs. “70% as good but fast and cheap”
No picture here, sorry. While I said I wouldn’t focus on AI-moderated qual, what I liked about this presentation was that it was looking at ways to make research BETTER.
Most of the AI stuff out there is about fast/cheap. Certainly most AI-moderated qual is in that bucket, and Synthetic Respondents are too. (For those of you who didn’t catch other posts, the research-on-research for synthetic respondents is not compelling so far.)
The idea here is instead to truly use qual-at-scale to change the entire measurement system. At Intuify, we’ve been doing this for years and it’s nice to see that it’s catching on!
I have only one critique - really more of a request. From this (and other) presentations, it’s pretty compelling that we get more depth and story-telling. I am looking forward to more evidence that qual-at-scale is more predictive than cheaper/faster quant methods.
Thought 5: Everyone Else Is Just as Confused As We Are – But Most People Are Still Kind
I sat in on several panels covering a wide range of topics. It was great to hear all the views – including some areas where everyone agrees and others where people have differing opinions.
Throughout everything, there was one common thread – everyone knows we’re in an era of change, and no one knows what the outcome is going to be.
What impressed me the most about the senior leaders in our industry is the profound sense of humility and humanity. Leaders talked about how they implemented training programs on AI prompting, only for AI to start writing its own prompts. How much they need help from partners who deeply know their industries and their companies – not just at a surface level. How quickly their own roles and organizations are evolving.
Throughout all of this, I was impressed at how considerate leaders were in talking to people they had never even met and engaging with kindness. The conversations at TMRE were deeper, more human, and more thoughtful than I had expected.
On that note, looking forward to next year!
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