After spending three exhausting days in Berlin we are finally back in London. The congress was great in several ways…

The sessions

Although not entirely relevant, Florian Henckel was great. But James Surowiecki was absolutely brilliant. His “Wisdom of Crowds” theory challenged a few market research paradigms and left a lot of people thinking. I strongly recommend his book. The most interesting comment, I thought, was that about how the traditional market research approach usually asks the wrong questions, I can see how the question “Do you think this product will succeed?” may be more relevant than the “Do you think you will use this product?” version of the same problem. Also cool to see a speaker engage the crowd so well without the aid of slides.

The Exhibit

The area for stands was a bit weird as it was distributed in different rooms. It was great to see some companies trying to attract visitors with innovative techniques like… uh… using a Nintendo Wii (and priceless seeing middle aged men and women trying to master it).

The Spot Me device

How cool is this thing? Just thought it was worth mentioning as I hadn’t seen the new version of it, and it’s great. The old one was a bit lame. A pity speakers didn’t use the “voting” feature more, would have been great to have James Surowiecki prove his point with it.

The Entertaining

The gala dinner was actually fun. The venue (an old fireworks factory) was a bit out of the way but guess it’s not easy to fit (and feed) 1,300 people. The food was actually very good. The show, a couple of dancers with some sort of fan below them, was quite impressive.

The conclusion

All in all, it was an interesting couple of days. We had a good time, learned a bit, met very interesting people and hopefully generated some business :-).

Some more photos here:

Esomar Berlin Congress 2007 [Flickr]