Call for contributions: Cultural Insights Conference 2027

We’re looking for research that shows how cultural understanding has shaped a real business decision. We want to explore new methodologies for uncovering culture in greater depth, at speed and at scale, and hear how practitioners are turning cultural meaning into insight that businesses can act on. 

Please send in your submissions on:

Fragmentation of culture
Understanding subcultures, communities and increasingly fragmented consumer identities, and what this means for brands

The craft of cultural understanding
Ethnography, netnography, semiotics and other approaches to understanding cultural meaning, context and behaviour

Always-on cultural intelligence
How brands are monitoring and responding to cultural change in real time

AI and synthetic data for cultural intelligence
How AI and synthetic data can be used to generate and scale cultural insight, including frameworks for deciding when and how to use them

Embedding cultural intelligence
Democratising and socialising cultural insight, and making cultural intelligence more accessible and actionable across organisations

Turning cultural meaning into commercial value
Translating cultural insight into strategy, innovation, communications and business decisions and demonstrating its commercial impact through attribution and measurement

Influencing stakeholders
Communicating cultural insight in commercial language, building the case for cultural intelligence and getting it acted on

Help us build a practical toolkit of the commercial, technical and craft skills needed to become an effective cultural insights practitioner.

Submission guidelines

If you have new and compelling work to share, please submit a brief synopsis by Friday 23 October 2026 via our online form, specifying the preferred format for your session.

• Case study (30mins) – Agency / client joint presentation of a recent research project. Please highlight the remarkable elements of your case study and the impact of the research.
• No-slides panel session (30mins) - Convene and lead a panel discussion that will generate a meaningful debate with outputs that all delegates can benefit from.
• In conversation with… (30mins) - Lead a one-to-one interview style session which brings together an agency and client to discuss how they’ve embedded insight within the organisation or tackled a specific research challenge using a fresh, innovative approach.
• ROUND TABLE SESSION (30mins) Propose an interactive and practical session for hands-on learning and collaboration

A quick note on our selection criteria:

We give priority to:

• Client-side speakers or client/agency co-presentations
• New research, hot-off-the-press findings and pioneering methodologies
• Practical case studies with clear business impact
• New and diverse voices
• MRS Company Partners

MRS is committed to equal gender representation on the conference platform and strives to achieve a minimum of 15% of speakers from ethnically diverse backgrounds.