We are now 5 days after the conference and so the time is right to make up the evaluation of the evening. Despite the snow blizzards, a lot of people made it to Ghent to the wonderful location of the Marriott Hotel and the view on the snowy landscape of the Ghent city center was wonderful! But of course, we were not there to enjoy the view but to get inspired!

In his opening session, Tom presented the audience with 10 challenges that lie ahead of us in 2010! Next, Rolf Verlinden from Keystone made the journey from data to insights and convinced us that 95% of our decisions are unconscious. Think about it next time you try to explain to your boyfriend why you bought yet another pair of shoes! It was an unconscious decision, I just needed to have them! During the gold rush, our partners explained how they dig for gold in their day-to-day business and this within a one-minute timeframe! After the break with some refreshments, our keynote speaker Tom Anderson presented different cases dealing with text analytics. According to him the customer satisfaction survey of the future is just one question: “Is there anything we should know?”. The answers to that question can then of course be analyzed using text mining! The last speaker of the day was Sarah Van Laere and she discussed the problem of bad debt (and IT) at Nuon and how a predictive model to score customers can help to reduce this (first) problem!

I think the program was very interesting & inspiring and also, all our speakers respected the timing very strictly, which was one of our main attention points this year! Thanks again for your efforts!
During the closing session, the first SMART (Student Marketing Analysis & Research Trophy) award was offered to Katrien Van Hecke for her research on the inconsistency between intention and behaviour. And last but certainly not least, there was the performance of the “Guitar Heroes” (a joint effort by Erik from TNS Dimarso & Tom from Insites) – already the most downloaded movie on Facebook (within a specific target group:-)).

All this was under the professional guidance of the one and only “Gentse Belleman” who coordinated the entire evening with extreme precision! Like every year, all conference participants received a goodie bag before going home that was again filled with lots of gadgets and goodies. We already heard that some of you won a nice amount with the lottery ticket sponsored by one of our partners! And of course we want to promote our BAQMaR gadget – the golden post-its, for all your golden ideas!

We hope you all enjoyed the conference and of course that you’ll be coming back to our events next year!

Happy holidays from all of us @ BAQMaR!

Tags: 2009 BAQMaR Conference

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