QSP Summit started to debate "understanding consumer"

The 11th Edition of the QSP Summit started today, March 23rd, at Exponor Congress Centre, in Porto, with the support of Porto City Hall.

The aim of this one-day conference is to address issues related to understanding consumer.

The world class line up panel of invited speakers is one of the most relevant in the industry and adds experts such as Harper Reed, Li Huang, Thomas Ramsoy or Paco Underhill, among others.

Rui Moreira, Mayor of Porto, welcomed the speakers at Casa do Roseiral - Mayor's Official Residence - the day before, and today joined the audience for the conference kick-off.

Harper Reed is one of the stars of this year's edition. The tech wiz who launched Barack Obama's digital communication is a master at managing communities and driving technology to meet people's needs.

For this Social Media guru, "technology needs to be like faster roller skaters or a faster car. It just pushes us a little bit further. But we, as the people, we have to be the ones that get there, not just technology."

Harper says that "when you're at a conference like this and you look around and there's all these amazing people, and tomorrow there's going to be all these amazing people that have done businesses and they're entrepreneurs or they just work at big companies and I can get on stage and talk. But the important thing is to listen. I get to learn from all these people that come from all over Portugal.

"Smaller countries still have to compete to biggest countries and so they end up doing really amazing work. I really want to see how Portugal is identifying and standing up", Reed concluded.

Li Huang, addressed the 1.500 attendees to the summit and talked about sarcasm in her presentation. She is a specialist in organizational behaviour. The researcher defined her field of expertise as "essentially a field that studies individual behaviour, group behaviour in the contact with organizations, so it would be a profit organization or it could be a non-profit organization. Essentially any kind of large group of people."

In respect to the emergence of creativity, Professor Huang states that "there are many causes and many precursors to creativity so, one of the things that I look at is very cognitive. It's about how our cognitive processes would allow us to think more creatively, come up with novel useful ideas. So, one of the things is called abstract thinking." 

The researcher added that "one of the things I am going to talk about at the QSP Summit is sarcasm. Sarcasm is a way of contradiction between what we say and what we are actually trying to convey. This kind of contradiction allows you to trigger this kind of abstract thinking that helps people to think more creatively."

The world authority in the field of Neuromarketing, Dr. Thomas Ramsoy, one of the most awaited presentations of the day, started to follow his interest in business economics but soon discovered areas such as philosophy, psychology and neuro sciences are all connect when it comes to map the human mind.

The Professor says that "there is all coming together if we try to understand the human mind."

For Dr. Ramsoy, "if we try to understand the human behaviour and human decision making there is an economic perspective too, there's a psychological perspective too, there's a neuroscience perspective and also philosophical."

Regarding the next steps in his research, Thomas Ramsoy advances that it is linked "to trying to understand creativity and innovation."

Thomas Ramsoy and his team work closely with companies in Silicon Valley and also in Europe, to boost creativity and understand creativity.

The first presentation of the day was by Paco Underhill, who devoted the past three decades to studying behaviour consumerism.

Underhill says that "one of the things I love about my job is that there are biological constancies that have been the same for centuries and there are things that make us behave differently."

"If you think of it, what made a good store 10 years ago and what makes a good store today are different. And these are a reflection of the evolution of us."

He is the author of best seller book "Why We buy", which was translated to 27 languages.

The brand Porto. is represented at QSP Summit, this year by Porto Innovation Hub.