The Chair of Marketing Management (IfM) was delighted to welcome Susan Choi for an interview. The interview was part of this year's Market Research class, and it perfectly connected the lecture's learnings with valuable insights from practice.

Susan Choi is the newly elected Vice President of La Futura, a global trend network that brings together forward-thinkers and integrates global and industry-crossing perspectives. Additionally, Susan Choi founded her own trend consultancy a few years ago and now successfully consults leading companies.

As someone who has dedicated her work life to trends, and thus, ultimately to market research, she vividly gave our students valuable insights on the importance of market research for the success of businesses. For Susan Choi, the key to identifying trends in culture is going through life with an awareness and appreciation of one's surroundings. Importantly, those observations made in culture then have to be translated into business-relevant insights, and those have to be applied to business-relevant strategies.

The Market Research class provides students with an introduction to the field: how to identify a research problem, how to decide on an appropriate research design to solve the problem, and how to finally implement the research project. Susan Choi argued that knowing and being able to apply those basics is vital for the success of businesses. She posited that the better you understand trends in culture, the better you will be able to ask the right questions. Thus, the interview complements the learnings of our students regarding exploratory research. Exploratory research aims to address ambiguous problems, and thereby, to understand or explore specific underlying topics (for example, trends). The guest interview clarified that this is a vital step for transforming ambiguous problems into more clearly defined questions and getting closer to solving a market research problem. For that, asking the right questions is critical.

We want to take this opportunity to thank Susan Choi once again for her amazing insights and hope to welcome her again in next year's Market Research class in Münster, hopefully in person.