SPEAKER PROFILES

Alina Serbanica, PhD

Alina Serbanica is Senior Vice President at Ipsos, leading the worldwide Total Operations Data Privacy inside the company. She has 30 years experience in market research and her broader expertise on both online and offline, on delivering market research services and on handling global online operations represent her great asset for dealing with the new data privacy environment, under a very dynamic pace technology, big data, social media and passive data collection have nowadays. Since 2010 Alina is the current ESOMAR Representative in Romania and she is co-founder member of the Romanian Society for Marketing Research and Opinion Polls (SORMA), currently the President of SORMA.

Adina Iancu (Bogdan)

With a background in Sociology, Communication & Public Relations, she started her journey in market research 14 years ago. Her career is fuelled by passion for talking to people, immersing in consumers’ lives to create a genuine dialogue, understanding & relationship. Her purpose is to connect the dots in between the consumer, the brand and the client in order to bring insights to life in a meaningful manner, reason why she prefers strategical studies. Over the years, she gained expertise in areas like FMCG, healthcare, services, social and know-how in a wide range of qualitative methodologies, with a soft spot for ethnography and creative workshops.

Her motto is „What makes a human great can make a brand greatly human”.

Andra Constantinescu

Andra is keen on discovering insights about brands and advertising and passionate about creativity.  She has been in marketing research for 17 years, many of which focused on analysing consumers’ response to creativity and understanding how advertising works. MBA graduate, Andra is also focused on making sure that clients get strong return on investment on their assets.

Diana Simion, PhD 

Diana is a playful insights’ explorer, Design Thinking facilitator, and consultant with a PhD in Communication Studies and a strong background in academic & marketing research. She has expertise in brand strategy and is particularly interested in addressing the consumer and employee experience within the broader dynamics of the digital society and socio-cultural trends.

Stefan Chiritescu 

Stefan has an extensive expertise in brand strategy, marketing research & consumer research, communication strategy, digital strategy, business development. Over 70 prizes at EFFIE AWARDS (including GRAND EFFIE), Internetics, Golden Drum. Relevant projects include rebranding and business assets development, reposition and brand launch, employer branding projects for important Romanian brands.

Andrei Elvadeanu, PhD 

He began his career in market research in 2007 and has spent the last three and a half years in the iSense Solutions team. From the position of Quantitative Research Director, Andrei undoubtedly embodies the spirit of the company. He has a PhD in sociology, with a solid academic background, and he likes to combine methodological rigour with the creative spirit of marketing. He loves brand and communication research and is an ardent follower of the school of thought promoted by Byron Sharp. Over the past two years, he has designed and coordinated the weekly Consumer Stress Score study, developed in iSense Solutions as a free tool to help customers and companies navigate the challenges caused by the coronavirus pandemic. In his free time, he likes to unravel the mysteries of civil law as a student at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bucharest.

Daniel Enescu 

Daniel is known mostly as the founder of Daedalus Group, sold in 2014 to Kantar Millward Brown – the worldwide leading company in brand and communication research. 

MEng in Aerospace Engineering, MSc in International Business and MBA with Marketing Concentration, specialized in Total Quality Management in Japan and Human Resources Management in Denmark, Daniel likes to use his complex background to found/finance companies and then grow them.  

Since 2018, Daniel has been CEO at Daedalus New Media Research (Daedalus Online) – one of the largest access panel companies in Central and Eastern Europe. 

Liviu Micu

Liviu Micu has been active for 20 years in Quantitative research. He started his career after getting a BA in Sociology, he spent a few years in various positions at TNS CSOP and then at Ipsos IS, then he switched to the client’s side. A long stint at Vodafone followed, after which he switched sides again and joined Data Diggers as a Senior Researcher.

During all this time, he was involved in both Quantitative and integrated Qualitative-Quantitative research projects, touching many areas such as Consumer Satisfaction, Brand Image, Segmentation or Product Development. Some say he likes to ask too many questions, but he’s driven by the desire to ensure that the right questions are asked and that realistic expectations are set.

Madalina Mirigel

Madalina has over 14 years of experience in Market Research and Project Management. She’s passionate about human thinking and behaviour, patient and likes mathematics. Together with her husband, Madalina volunteers with a group of daring friends, for training Search & Rescue dogs. She makes a lovely team with Tessa, her Golden retriever, who is very spoiled and a couch-lover at home, but disciplined and fierce at work. She also likes nature, horses, driving her car for long road trips, team sports and the Greek islands.

Andrei Postoaca 

Andrei Postoaca, CEO of Ipsos Digital and Global Head of Ipsos Observer, is one of the pioneers in online research and built the global Ipsos online capability.

Author of „The Anonymous Elect and Awakening the Connector”, he in continuous seek to re-invent the research industry through digitalization.  

Ioan Simu, Mercury Research

Ioan has started his career in market research over 20 years ago, worked his way through almost all research jobs, and is currently general manager for Mercury Research. His research expertise is complemented by advertising experience and academic work. Ioan holds a PhD in sociology from University of Bucharest, and specializations in political studies and business management from University of Texas, ASEBUS and University of Washington. He also teaches courses on advanced analysis methods, market research and marketing.

Daniela Hariuc

Daniela coordinates Customer Insights Area in Telekom Mobile. With almost 25 years of telco industry experience and 20 years of market research, she manages all the activities of assessing, measuring and monitoring customers and potential customers’ needs and journeys throughout telco industry. In the last years she focused on developing and implementing new tools to capture the voice of customers and got involved in Customer Experience projects, acting as “Customer’s advocate”.

She is passionate of people and strongly believes that understanding their fundamental needs and their lifestyle will provide answers to all the big questions about how we can grow our business.

Rodica Popescu, PhD

From the very beginning in the BCR Marketing team, meaning over 20 years of experience in banking marketing research, Rodica leads currently the customer insights activity.

Starting with research into customer satisfaction and pain points, she managed to develop and keep the internal interest in terms of insights usage as improvement drivers of the customers experience with BCR, both locally and (since 2006) in the Erste Bank Group.

As an Insights professional she is dedicated to a more involved client approach, her main focus being to assure a true engagement between different teams in the bank and consumer insights business usage.

Rodica holds a PhD in marketing from Romanian Academy (National Institute of Economic Research).

Cristina Burlacioiu, PhD

Cristina has 20 years of experience in data science, competitive intelligence & market research field in various strategy departments in marketing, commercial or digital within telecom and financial industries. She was responsible of business impacts of new products/offers/portfolio launches/reshapes, managing quantitative and qualitative analysis, modelling consumer behaviour and assuring best forecast and budget hypothesis, planning and model building for best customer targeting.

Cristina graduated 2 MSc: International Business (ASE) and Mathematics & Computer science (Bucharest University) in Romania and has a PhD in Cybernetics and Statistics.

Currently, she is manager of Digital Care and Data Analytics tribes at Orange Romania Communications and associate professor at ASEBUSS – The Institute for Business Administration in Bucharest.

Victor Rotariu

Victor is Director of Strategy and Insights at GroupM, where he coordinates strategies and obtaining insights in the group’s agencies: Mediacom, Mindshare and Wavemaker. Throughout the 13 years in marketing, the most important value he considers having brought is an in-depth understanding of what lies behind human behavior. This understanding it fuels the strategies he builds to bring growth to clients. In parallel, he writes a book and a newsletter about how we can build our ideal life in the modern world by solving the conflicts between our unconscious formed by evolution and the modern world.

Parves Khan

With 28 years under her belt, Dr Parves Khan, DG of ESOMAR is an insight leader with executive level experience from a range of sectors, including FTSE 100 companies. Her client-side experience includes leading global insights and analytics across INTO Global and Pearson’s portfolio of services, driving education, technology and product innovation in core markets. During her tenure at digital-first insurance company Ageas, she transformed the insight function into an analytical powerhouse. Khan also brings agency-side experience, running her own research consultancy for six years and supporting a wide array of private- and public-sector clients.

PAPER ABSTRACTS

Consumer purchase behaviour and coping strategies in the context of rising prices

Adina Iancu (Bogdan), Head of Qualitative Researcher – ISRA Center

Shopping behaviour in Romania has always been in the public eye of the market analysts, especially in the context of shaping comparative trends from the period before the epidemiologic crisis with the current period, marked by increased inflation, rising prices & political & social uncertainties. We have based our analysis on the parallel between two stages that consumers experience with the change of the socio-economic context: the spoilt consumer before the crisis and the cautious consumer post COVID-19 crisis and in the middle of the rising inflation crisis. The results of the trends analysis, on one side, showed that before the pandemic the consumers have focused on the brands, on the accessible luxury products and had a negative perception on promotions. On the other side, during pandemic the consumers have been significantly complaining about the surge in the prices, together with the rising inflation and the decrease of purchasing power. Therefore, they have become more cautious in spending their money and have allocated a specific budget for shopping, unlike the boom period, when they were more care-free. Even though they are more reluctant to spending and are focused on making money reserves for the worst times, their desire to experiment novelty, new products or services has developed lately, even to the detriment of their former brands’ loyalty. These results are based both on qualitative and quantitative research methods: in-depth interviews, focus groups and questionnaires. Gathering both a qualitative, ethnographic perspective from consumers and a quantitative one, representative for a large sample of the population, the results are equally balanced and non-biased. Future developments of this trends analysis will take a closer look into consumer specific adaptation strategies.

Uncovering emerging trends in sustainability and predicting the sales impact of sustainability advertising. An applied case of Digital Analytics and AI on the Romanian market

Andra Constantinescu, Account Director| Creative Domain Lead – Kantar, Insights Division

Making sustainability work well for a brand requires: 1) identifying the sustainability topics that are hot and here to stay; 2) choosing the ones fit with the brand; 3) ensuring that communication does its job, through authenticity and compelling storytelling.

With sustainability being a very broad theme, it is difficult to capture the trends through traditional approaches. Through its ability to analyse billions of data points from search and social data over many years, Digital Analytics can capture the complexity of this topic and distinguish between fads and established trends. Using AI, it identifies the current size of trends and predicts how big they will be in the future.

Another application of AI, trained on tens of thousands of ads from around the world and informed by the biggest ad pretesting database, will help us predict which sustainability ads from Romania have the maximum chances of boosting sales for their brands.

Stay tuned to see how these applications of AI can help along this path of making sustainability work for your brand. First, through insights on trends that are here to stay; then, through predicting the success of sustainability ads in Romania.

The power of co-creation in finding and building on consumer insights 

Diana Simion, Senior Insight Consultant – Exact Business Solutions

Stefan Chiritescu, Chief Strategy Officer – McCann World Group Romania

Challenge 1.0.: Understand Gen Z beyond their consumer behaviour and map the topics that are relevant in brands winning them over.

Challenge 2.0: Provide an engaging and insightful research methodology Gen Z will say “YES” to and stay in for a multi-episode experience.

Challenge 3.0.: Get (Exact) research agency, (McCann) advertising agency (bridge client), and Brand-company (final client) on the same page, willing to explore and invest in new approaches.

Our answer 4.0.: Identify brand communication opportunities not only for Gen Z, but with Gen Z.  In other words: bring them on the same boat with us.

Our approach 5.0.: We used the Design Thinking mindset and framework as backbone in addressing all the above challenges and put together a multi-step research experience based on co-creation. In brief, we covered the problem understanding space with a triangulation of mini online focus-groups, omnichannel consumer diary experience managed by Gen Z insight hunters themselves and calibrated the insights with findings from Gen Z „Teens Youniverse” syndicated survey. Furthermore, we involved Gen Z prosumers in a series of ideation and co-creation workshops, finetuning the insights and stepping into the solution space with them.

This project provided all the stakeholders not only with valuable insights on Gen Z consumers, but also with even more valuable insights on how we can make the most of our interaction with consumers and leverage their input in both the problem, as well as the solution space of our market challenges.

May we have your attention please: Understanding the appeal of short videos (Tik-Tok, Instagram reels, Facebook reels, YouTube shorts)

Andrei Elvadeanu, Quantitative Research Director – iSense Solutions

One of the clearest emerging trends in media consumption today is represented by the proliferation of short video formats (SVF). With the advent of Tik-Tok, all major social networks now offer short videos as a form of entertainment to mitigate for the shorter attention spans of consumers in the 21st century, companies and brands need to adapt to this new media landscape.

Our presentation will focus on SVF consumption habits, exploring the underlying needs that these new media formats are satisfying, as well as on the challenges brands face in grabbing consumers’ attention. The study will discuss the opportunities presented by engaging with consumers in the latest trends by looking at how we can seamlessly integrate our comms with actual SVF users’ behaviour.

Navigating digital communication traps: Pretesting vs. A/B Testing

Daniel Enescu, CEO – Daedalus New Media Research

Advertisers growing enthusiasm when it comes to digital communication, seems not to be backed by the research industry with new tools of advertising pretesting. There are two main reasons for this discrepancy:

1. Digital campaigns budgets are 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than TV campaigns ones. Thus, the ads pretesting tools should be quite inexpensive to justify their usage.
2. Pretesting products for digital advertising have to fight with A/B testing, which is widely used to choose the best option.

Using technology on our side, we came with an ad pretesting product that overcome the two barriers mentioned above: is so inexpensive that it worth being used for improving small budget campaigns and at the same time is superior to A/B testing methods. That is because it offers diagnose, is faster and it uses norms. In this presentation we shall talk about optimising creation for banners used in digital communication and we shall present concrete examples of right and wrong approaches.

Dating online – The intermingling of technology and relationships

Liviu Micu, Senior Researcher – DataDiggers Market Research 

Madalina Mirigel, Client Service Representative – DataDiggers Market Research

Target: urban, 18-65 years old

Younger generations feel very much at ease with technology. The mobile phone is practically indispensable.

Even adults are becoming increasingly dependent on technology, including the elderly.

Thus, it’s unsurprisingly that many Romanians started looking for relationships on the Internet, following the global trends.

How widespread is online dating in Romania? How useful in finding a partner is the technology?

Are people feeling that online dating, on specialized or other kinds of applications and websites, is really helping them?

Is online dating trouble free, or is there a darker side of this phenomenon too?

Building multi-dimensional trend analysis

Andrei Postoaca, CEO – Ipsos Digital 

In the era of over information in social media the importance of selecting and curating the right information, we find that the truth in research data can be expanded and explored with a better understanding of the social, search and sales data. We live in a world where trends can be created and may take years before they flourish. Our role as researchers is to understand these trends and consumer views and contribute to make them visible as they happen and grow. We need more than just asking the consumer, we need to listen to what non representative consumers have to say.

We are moving towards a more transactional reality where the client can have access to all our market research tools in a “Do It Yourself” (DIY) fashion and explore themselves more and ask us for validation/sanity check or research insights adding value rather than using the researchers for basic work. The DIY is the optimal way of creating a more collaborating relation between us, the researcher and the clients.

Current technology trends in market research and their potential impact for the future of insights

Moderator: Ioan Simu, General Manager – Mercury Research

Panel’s participants:

Daniela Hariuc, Head of Customer Insights – Telekom

Rodica Popescu, Head of Insights – BCR

The current technology trends in market research and their potential impact for the future of insights. DIY platforms, automated analysis and dashboarding, insights dissemination, social media listening, AI enabled interviewing, text analysis, emotions recognition, and other topics will be discussed among panellists and with interested conference participants.

The panel will introduce new research technologies to participants who do not know them yet and will facilitate the exchange of experience between those who already use or intend to use them.

Keynote Speaker:

Research Futures: A new look at the drivers and scenarios that will define the next decade

Parves Khan, ESOMAR CEO 

I’ll be drawing on insights from ESOMAR Congress (Toronto, September 2022), my own thinking and other thought leadership, to establish the key drivers expected to shape developments in our industry over the decade ahead.

SESSION CHAIRS PROFILES

Andrei Canda, PhD

Andrei has a solid professional experience, working in market research for over 16 years. Throughout his career, Andrei has worked both on the client side (collaborating with one of the largest retailers in the market) and in some of the largest companies specializing in market research.

He has a wide area of expertise, coordinating research projects on e-Commerce, consumer goods, retail, durable goods, media, tourism, automotive, financial services, IT&C, medical services, agribusiness, social, etc.

Andrei has a PhD in marketing, is accredited by the “Word of Mouth” Marketing Association and is a published author, writing specialist material on social networks, marketing, communication or blogging.

Ingrid Lambru

When graduating from Business Administration in “ASE Bucuresti” more than 20 years ago, Ingrid placed marketing as a career option second to last on her dream jobs list. She was lucky enough to join Mercury Research, where she had the chance to understand market research is a dream job for inquisitive people who never settle for the obvious, and where she had been constantly offered opportunities to contribute to the company’s diversification.

Ingrid is currently the marketing director of Mercury Research, proof that priority lists from your early twenties should not guide your career choice.    

Alina Serbanica, PhD

Alina Serbanica is Senior Vice President at Ipsos, leading the worldwide Total Operations Data Privacy inside the company. 

Since 2010 Alina is the current ESOMAR Representative in Romania and she is co-founder member of the Romanian Society for Marketing Research and Opinion Polls (SORMA), currently the President of SORMA.