In this episode of Now that’s Significant hosted by Michael Howard, Head of Marketing at Infotools, the discussion features Bob Fawson, founder and CEO of Data Quality Co-op. The episode delves into the challenges and opportunities within the data quality landscape of the consumer insights industry.

Bob shares his insights on promoting transparency and improving data quality, emphasizing the need for structural changes to restore trust between buyers, participants, and intermediaries in the market.

Key takeaways from this episode

1. Importance of Data Quality: Bob highlights the intractable challenges facing data quality in the industry, comparing it to a 'lemon market' where buyers and sellers struggle with trust. He emphasizes the need for a structured clearinghouse to ensure transparency and improve data quality across the board.

2. Role of a Clearinghouse: The Data Quality Co-op aims to act as an independent clearinghouse, similar to credit reporting agencies, providing a broader understanding of data quality and offering a platform for buyers and sellers to align expectations.

3. Market Dynamics and Trust: The insights market is characterized as a two-sided ecosystem with inherent challenges in trust and collaboration. Bob discusses how better communication can break the cycle of competitive pressures and improve industry standards.

4. Optimism for the Future: Despite current challenges, Bob remains optimistic about the industry's ability to address data quality issues by learning from other sectors and implementing solutions that can change market dynamics positively.

5. Preparing for AI Demand: Bob stresses the importance of positioning the industry to meet the growing demand for high-quality first-party data, essential for training AI models, and ensuring that the data used is credible and reliable.

Want to explore other episodes of Now that’s Significant? Tune in on major podcast platforms and stay informed about the latest trends and strategies in consumer insights.

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Infotools Harmoni is a fit-for-purpose market research analysis, visualization, and reporting platform that gives the world’s leading brands the tools they need to better understand their consumers, customers, organization, and market.

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Established in 1990, we work with some of the world’s top brands around the world, including Coca-Cola, Orange, Samsung, and Mondelēz.

Our powerful cloud-based platform, Harmoni, is purpose-built for market research. From data processing to investigation, dashboards to collaboration, Harmoni is a true "data-to-decision-making" solution for in-house corporate insights teams and agencies.

While we don't facilitate market research surveys, provide sample, or collect data, we make it easy for market researchers to find and share compelling insights that go over-and-above what stakeholders want, inspiring them to act decisively.

One of the most powerful features of Harmoni is Discover, a time-tested, time-saving, and investigative approach to data analysis. Using automated analyses to reveal patterns and trends, Discover minimizes potential research bias by removing the need for requesting and manually analyzing scores of cumbersome crosstabs – often seeing what you can’t.

Discover helps you easily find what differentiates groups that matter to you, uncover what makes them unique, and deliver data points that are interesting, relevant, and statistically significant, plus see thing