Borderless Access Panels expands to South Africa

Borderless Access Panels Pvt. Ltd. today announced the market launch of its proprietary panel in South Africa. The emerging market research specialist expands its capabilities from Brazil, Russia, India, China and Mexico into South Africa, empowering global organizations to conduct research in high potential markets.

Dushyant Gupta, Senior Vice President of Borderless Access Panels on the occasion said, “South Africa the economic powerhouse of Africa is not only in itself an important emerging economy; it is also the gateway to other African markets. Acer, Barclays, BMW, GE, Alcatel all have a presence in South Africa and we see an increased presence of more international organizations setting up local offices. With global players there and a growing market, it then becomes imperative to feel the pulse of South Africa and that’s where Borderless Access comes into picture.”

Ruchika Gupta, President at Borderless Access adds, “Borderless Access is the undisputed leader for online panels in these hard-to-reach markets with a significant representation of its population in our growing panel. With global experience, industry experts who have crossed cultural boundaries and succeeded in building a robust panel, Borderless Access is your one-stop survey partner in the emerging markets.”

About Borderless Access:
Borderless Access is the Emerging Market online research specialist with extensive experience in building and maintaining panels across geographies and cultures. Having proprietary panels in Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC) and Mexico; and partnerships enables them to reach over 100 million consumers across 65 countries.


Borderless Access is the only online panel company within the emerging markets to be listed as preferred vendor for several Honomichl research companies. Borderless Access is the chosen sample provider for select CPG firms & Fortune Top 10 Technology giants.
Know more at: www.borderlessaccess.com

Can celebrity endorsement help your brand?

The answer is yes, celebrities can help endorse your brand.  However, the trick is to identify the right celebrity to embrace your brand and share it with their followers.  Ipsos recently surveyed an online panel to reveal who were the most influential celebrities to help endorse a brand.  Who were they?  Betty White, Denzel Washington, Sandra Bullock, Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks and Harrison Ford were the top ranking celebrities. According to the panel, who are the best celebrities to stay away from when looking for celebrity endorsement?  Paris Hilton and Charlie Sheen.

This celebrity endorsement topic made me wonder about the newer advertising tool many celebrities and companies.  In this article from the USA Today, they cited that only 11% of US adults are on Twitter and follow their preferences.  So when a celebrity tweets, their audience is automatically self selecting.  Many of the celebrities mentioned were similar to those mentioned in the "Least Trusted".

Do you think your audience has respect for celebrity endorsement? Do you trust Twitter as a platform to communicate through celebrities about your products?

Live from TMRE: Reactions from #TMRE 2011

Did you miss anything at TMRE? Here are some of the best recaps of various reviews around the web from this year's event. Don't see one of your favorites? Email it to jpereira@iirusa.com and it can be added to the list!

The Market Research Event: Live Blog Coverage 
PAI Blog: Text Analytics: Summarizing the #TMRE Hashtag traffic
Survey Gizmo: The Market Research Event 2011: Day One Recap
Survey Gizmo: The Market Research Event 2011: Five Takeaways
The Pert Group: Beyond the Traditional at The Market Research Event
Insights Gal: Wrapping Up On TMRE: InsightsGal’s TMRE Top 10
TRC Market Research: Thoughts on TMRE 2011
Affinnova: The Market Research Event 2011 - Recaps & Session Reports
Luminosity: The Market Research Event – A Twitter Review
Gut Check It: Highlights from TMRE 2011
Chadwick Martin Bailey: TMRE Highlight: The Art of Choosing
@LoveStat:  Session Recaps
Tamara Barber: Innovation: Everything Is Incremental
Research Live: The three Cs of TMRE
Food & Beverage: PepsiCo and Sentient Decision Science win award at TMRE
Quirks: Make new trends but keep the old: Researchers reflect on TMRE programming
Sentient Insight: Winners of the 2011 EXPLOR Award
Next Gen Market Research: 2011 NGMR Innovation Awards

Leading Yahoo’s Search for Metrics that Matter

Flush with Data, Web Giant’s Insights Team Seeks Answers

By Marc Dresner, IIR

Yahoo VP Research and Strategic Insights Lauren Weinberg has a very happy problem: Her clients are data junkies and she’s got more than enough supply to meet demand. The challenge Weinberg and her colleagues face is how to make sense of it all.

Yahoo has an astonishing amount of data and information to be brought to bear for both its own advantage and that of its clients, and Weinberg manages a research function whose activities run the gamut from 30K-ft macro views to discrete, custom campaign analytics.

“The biggest thing we see is that everyone just wants more data,” Weinberg told The Research Insighter. “There are so many metrics available, so we do a lot of our own research just to try to figure out what the different metrics mean.”

In this episode of TMRE’s executive interview podcast series, The Research Insighter, Lauren Weinberg takes us inside Yahoo’s marketing and sales from a research perspective, shares her concerns about data overload and tackles the question of how to deliver insights in a flux media landscape.

Listen to the interview.

Read the transcript.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR/INTERVIEWER
Marc Dresner is an IIR USA communication lead with a background in trade journalism and marketing. He is the former executive editor of Research Business Report, a confidential newsletter for the market research and consumer insights industry. He may be reached at mdresner@iirusa.com. Follow him @mdrezz.

TMRE Day 3: Youth, Reimagining

The third and final day of The Market Research Event might have been my favorite of all. Folks dragged in for morning sessions, but the prior two days had brains pliable and social creativity was juiced.

A couple of thoughts that really stood out for me for the day:

• -"We benchmark ourselves too much to our competitors." Jeremy Gutsche of Trendhunter kept us engaged and, hopefully, eager to go back and challenge the drivers behind the work we're all doing. It's a dangerous endeavor to simply confirm biases with research. Involving the fringe and trends as a part of every project should be standard rather than a rarity.
• -Christine Stasiw-Lazarchuk of Ford shared that, following Ford's recasting of itself, the marketing had to reduce its headcount by 70% while budget was reduced 40%. Instead of "doing more with less," Her response? "Treat your suppliers as partners...have them feel the success. You won't be sorry." Ford elected to build unique relationships with their suppliers; letting them into the room and to be a part of the conversation rather than tossing insights over the fence and wishing for the best. Those are the kinds of partnerships in which clients and vendors both win and create incremental value for brands - let's all get there.
• -The word cloud for day three shows us a couple of other key concepts: (a) Mobile (b) Gen Y. These concepts share young consumers and leading insights in common. You could say that youth and new-to-world methodologies were the real rock stars of The Market Research Event. Clients consistently share with us that youth are not only a significant target for today, but also harbingers of the future - a living future trend, so to speak. I challenge all of you to consider how a youth lens can reveal more about our efforts - whether we're in advanced planning in auto and consumer tech or media where young peoples' adoption rates can signal success or failure.

Considering all three days collectively I'm equal parts exhausted & thrilled as I know many of you are! And how do we know it was great? Our friends on Twitter had nothing else to say...

@johnmwilliamson: Great time at #TMRE in Orlando

@akpradeep: Terrific time at #TMRE in Orlando. Thanks to @IIRUSA for bringing together such a stellar group of marketing minds.

@ramiuscorp: Back from #TMRE. Had a gr8 time & met a lot of ppl.

@InsightsGal: Just back from #tmre and my just-getting-caffeinated mind is full of great learnings, new contacts, and fresh insights!

@statmaven: #TMRE...was a great conference. Great speakers, high octane contacts, Highly recommended, #mrx, #ngmr

@bakken17: #TMRE was awesome! Thanks for a great time full of learning.

It's safe to say that TMRE was valuable again this year. The weight, now, is on all of us to DO something with these great insights. Perhaps in 2012 will be YOUR year to present on your success applying your 2011 TMRE learnings?

All the best to a great year ahead for each and every one of you.

TMRE 2011: The Trend Report: Clusters of Innovation

This guest post was written by Jeffrey Henning.  He is the Chief Marketing Officer of Affinnova, an innovation software and services firm exhibiting at The Market Research Event.

Jeremy Gutsche, founder of Trendhunter.com and author of Exploiting Chaos, gave the second keynote Wednesday morning at The Market Research Event. His presentation answered some fundamental questions:

• • How do we make market research more successful?
• • How do we get our companies to win based on the work we do?

“Market research makes chaos such an interesting thing,” Jeremy said. “In times of chaos, what people buy becomes a challenge. Chaos creates opportunity, but market research makes success happen.” During times of chaos, some companies topple while “new giants are born”. Peter Drucker said, “It’s not the questions that change, it is the answers that do.”

Jeremy sees two trends in research: the supremacy of culture and the tragic return of gut instinct.

Market research used to be driven by product, but product research is now ubiquitous. “Now research is about experience.” What does Harley Davidson sell? If you ask their head of marketing, he’ll say, “What we sell is the ability for a 43 year old accountant to ride through small towns and have people be afraid of him!”

Jeremy showed a 1950s ad for Old Spice that focused on product, price and maker and contrasted it with their most recent ad campaign.

“Popular is not cool, so you are ultimately trying to find what other people can’t see. Cool is unique, cutting edge, the next big thing. Because of that, it generates word of mouth and viral attention. What happens when we hunt for cool?” While new ideas surround us, it is not tough to find a new idea. When researchers think about customers, competitors and strategy instead of innovation, they skip steps and rely on gut instinct for innovation. “People are less innovative and more focused on innovation – we lack the inspiration.”

This can be rectified by following a methodological approach to innovation:

1. 1. Trend hunting
2. 2. Adaptive innovation
3. 3. Infectious marketing
4. 4. Culture

As a negative case study, Jeremy highlighted Smith Corona. Smith Corona had done the market research and knew the trends but they didn’t reinvent themselves out of the typewriter industry. Smith Corona had 100 years of innovation, hitting $500 million in revenues in 1989 while continuing to grow. “Who needs computers?” they might have asked themselves, especially given the example of their competitor, Remington Rand Typewriters. Remington Rand had expanded into computers in 1975 but went bankrupt by 1981. In 1985, Smith Corona had a personal word processor (like a laptop with a built-in printer). “Many people believe that the typewriter and word-processor business is a buggy-whip industry, which is far from true,” their CEO, G. Lee Thompson, said in 1992. “There is still a strong market for our products in the United States and the world.” Smith Corona was focused on being the best typewriter company in the world rather than on serving a broader mission. They had a chance to acquire Acer but declined. Acer is one of the largest PC makers today. “If you don’t fail, you will become the best typewriter company in the world!” Unfortunately, Smith Corona declared bankruptcy in 1995. “Situational framing dictates the outcome,” Jeremy said. And he asked, again, “What are you trying to do?”

“Successful organizations innovate to ‘optimize’ position on their ‘hill’, but to find bigger ‘hills’, most fail.” Because you can become a little bit more successful, you do. Trying to become much more successful risks failure. When Smith Corona tried computers for the first time, it wasn’t successful in comparison to their established business.

How do you succeed in the long term? You have to become obsessed with what customers are about. Iron Eyes Cody (an Italian actor who starred in the America Is Beautiful litter campaign) made an emotional connection with viewers but had no impact on how frequently people litter. Does emotion alone matter? If we are thinking about how to get people to stop littering, what should we do? The continuum of impact is:

1. 1. Function is a baseline. Old-school marketing was about function, telling people how something worked
2. 2. Benefit comes next, motivating people; for instance, pointing out that littering has a fine.
3. 3. Connect is third, making an emotional connection.
4. 4. Culture is the ultimate in impact. You have to create a Cultural connection to empower people to act and change. That is why people tattoo corporate logos on themselves – like Harley Davidson. If you Google “I love ING” you will find many customer stories, because their customers see ING as being part of the same team. “You will set your team on a mission if you can make an authentic cultural connection.”

Back to reducing littering. Who litters? A Texas agency did the research. Young males (18-30 years old) who drive pickup trucks litter the most; they have a “King of My World” culture. So the Texas agency GSD&M came up with the campaign “Don’t Mess with Texas™”. One of their first commercials featured two Dallas Cowboys football players saying to a litterer, “Don’t mess with me. Don’t mess with Texas.” The campaign spoke to people and their culture. It resonated, and Texans actually now go to YouTube and upload their own commercials for the campaign.

“When you think you have done something memorable or remarkable, like that Iron Eye Cody commercial, you haven’t succeeded if it hasn't created impact,” Jeremy said. “Don’t Mess with Texas” had impact. The goal was to reduce litter by 5%. From 1986 to 1990, litter was reduced by 72%!

What lessons can we learn as market researchers? In all companies, observe customers, interact with them, watch them choose, observe usage – not ethnography per se, but spend time with customers so that you can internalize their attitudes and create a connection out of your research. Culture is key. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a sign outside Ford’s Strategy War Room. Ask yourself, “What are you trying to do?”

Live from TMRE: Day 3 Summary

Great sessions and discussions today at TMRE!

My first session today was with Oskar Korkman of Nokia who discussed his approach to assuring that the consumer is at the heart of product development and marketing.

Here are some main takeaways:
1. Focus on shared consumer context… not on the defined segments of consumers
2. It’s about empowerment… not about targeted and pre-defined value
3. What happens between people is more interesting than people themselves
4. It is about everyday life and social change… not about technologies and adoption of technologies

Social connectivity is for a purpose – people are looking for quality over quantity. Korkman describes the types of relationships that exist and they range from public to private:
• Self (private)
• Lifelong (intimate)
• Friendship
• Purposeful (common interests, not really interested in the person - yet)
• Incidental (public; when strangers meet each other)

And when segmenting, he suggests a more robust approach is to split behaviors into groups instead of people. The commonalities will exist despite of geography and will be much more robust!

Julia Oswald of Domino’s Pizza held a captivating session explaining the role of insights on the company’s recent turnaround of quality, transparency, brand equity measures, and (most importantly) sales. Specifically, Oswald explained her teams’ use of foundational research (using mixed quantitative and qualitative methods).

The foundational research includes:
• Market Mix modeling
• Occasion-based segmentation
• Consumer trends framework
• Industry growth
• Brand DNA and Equity

And the insights derived?
• A brand DNA
• A consumer trends framework that compares the brand experience attributes to macro consumer trends.

In combination with a reformulation of the chain’s pizza, research-driven advertising that showcased their once problem areas proved to be effective with increases in brand equity measures, and highly resonate ads with consumers. A true success story with market research at the core!

My final session for the day was with John Wright of Safeway. He brought us through his teams’ findings of the low-income grocery shopper. (Cue the bullet-points!)

IRI defined lower income shoppers as:
• Under 35 and over 65
• Families
• Hispanic and African Americans

Financial worries
• Twice as much financial anxiety as their high-income counterparts
• 77% say they generally live paycheck to paycheck
• 6 in 10 worry about having enough money to put food on the table

Impact of the recession
• Effects them today, but also their expectations for the future

Health & Wellness
• 2/3 satisfied with current health (slightly less than population)
• Less likely to engage in preventative care
• Over-indexes on stress, anxiety, depression, lack of energy, and memory (perhaps b/c of age)

Food trade-offs
• Low price tends to trump trade off decisions for the segment, frequently at the expense of nutritional content. Price, taste, nutrition.
• Heavy on center store, light on perimeter
• Mac Cheese, chips, soda, bottled water, hot dogs. Low cost, and other heavily promoted items
• Do not believe their diets are healthy
• Strong interest in fortified/functional foods

Grocery Shopping
• Spend less per trip, make more trips
• Bump in first week of the month (when government checks are dispersed)
• Big on circulars (they have an internal gauge of an acceptable price)
• Plan their meals using weekly circulars
• Create list to stay on budget
• Will shop multiple stores, use coupons, buy in bulk and the store brand on their lists
• Preparing meals – cook from scratch because it's cheaper
• They make plans for their leftovers
• Income is sporadic and uncertain
• Buy seasonal, local, and bulk to save money

While the information shared is specific to grocery, I found a deeper meaning in the session: We have to understand our shoppers’ struggles to understand their capabilities. When we can submerge ourselves in our shoppers lives, we can also better understand our data and provide much more meaningful, and actionable research recommendations.

Thank you all for reading! I look forwarding to see you at TMRE next year back here in Florida!

Garrett McGuire (@GJMcGuire) is a Consumer Insights Analyst for a major retailer. His areas of focus are advertising research, brand equity, and providing consumer insights for many marketing initiatives. Prior to his current position, he was a graduate student at Michigan State University where he began his blog, "The Journal of a mAD Man," that explains the theories and methods of advertising.

Live from TMRE: Day 3 - what a day wth Intel, Disney, YouTube and Microsoft BING (and CIA)...

Could there be another TMRE day tomorrow? Should there be one? Hmm, I think we all have to go back to work and do interesting research stuff and thinking.

But I will bring a lot of interesting thoughts back with me to Germany. I saw a lot of interesting sessions and talked to a lot of interesting people (some which I only knew from Twitter). But before I’ll have to leave I would like to share my thoughts on this third day of TMRE.

I started the day with the two keynotes, “Why Bad Behaviour Is Good Politics by Bruce Bueno”. 

He started with some interesting sentences:

“Earthquakes are deadlier in Iran or China than Chile, Honduras or Italy”

“All of the world’s top universities are in democracies”

“Iraq exported baby formula and food in the 90s while over 500.000 of its children died needlessly from malnutrition and disease”

Then another quiz:

You want job security? Huge income? The need to do want you want? Everyone should praise you? Looking for perfect job privacy balance? Become a dictator! :-)

Bruce drilled it down to five rules, applicable for all organizations (families, charities, companies etc.)

1. To be a successful dictator rely only on as few people as possible, only use a small coalition of supporters

2. Get a small “coalition” of people and drawn them from a large pool of people, the larger the better. It is important that they know that they can be are easily replaced.

3. Tax max! Get out of customers as much as possible.

4. Pay your coalition just enough so they don’t think to switch to the other side. But don’t pay more than that.  If you pay them too much, they are able to gain wealth and spend the money and at the end fights you.

5. Don’t waste money on improving the lives of the people you rule. They aren’t important because you don’t benefit from them at all

Very charismatic speech, but I didn’t really get the connection to market research, promise to think harder :-)

The second one was Jeremy Gutsche, founder of Trendhunter.com, again a very engaging presentation. You could see that he is a “man for the stage”.

He was all about two different trends in recent times:

1. The supremacy of culture

2. The tragic return of gut instinct (which we don’t like that much ;-) )

He pointed out that market research used to be driven by product. But that isn’t hitting the nail anymore. It’s about experience. Most of the companies sell products, but consumers buy experiences (see Harley Davidson).

So, to his point of view, we are hunting for the cool stuff, because cool stuff is unique, cutting edge, viral, the next big thing… So you’ll have to create a culture!

Great case study about littering. See the answer from the research and the execution from ad agency and goolge for “Don’t mess with Texas”. Here is the link.  
Most important notes for me: Create a connection to the research! Or connect the research to an experience!

 Then I went to some cool sessions. YouTube, Disney, BING, Intel…

Good stuff: 

Sundar Doraj-Raj from Google showed how to measure the impact of advertising. They have instream ads, overlays, banner / rich media and promoted videos (yes, they belong to google)

And YouTube is incredibly growing. 3 billion views a day, 48 hours of videos uploaded every day… Why is this important? It is, because they earn money with this. 2 billion monetized views every week.

So they did some experimental designs and found out that instream ads (those that are running prior to the video you choose) are most disturbing the users. Not surprising at all, because they stop you from doing what you want. This is getting slightly better when the instream ad is skippable, but this kind of advertising remains one of the most critical issues in terms of usage and visiting YouTube.  But be sure they will react on this.

I also heard some inspiring words about culture in a creative organization from Yoni Karpfen, Consumer Research Club Penguin (Disney). It was very impressive to see how children aged 6 to 12 deal with daily politics in a playful way (like 9/11, breast cancer day or Japan tragedy).

But this kind of product need perpetual creative development and the question is how to do this and what to develop next? Yoni led us through their research process which delivers a highly creative experience. They listen to the players, live and breathe the experience. And they have a huge community support team which is connected to the users anytime.

They are trying to make research free or cheap instead of expensive, fast instead of slow, friendly instead of controversial, trustworthy instead of questionable, tailored to the audience instead of complicated and cool & fun instead of boring. And of course they have to in order to fuel the creative network and their core business…

How? Inspiration meets information, creative has to be compatible to operational. Empathy is the key, and that itself refers to culture. 

Microsoft / Bing is measuring social network conversation and WoM to understand how Gen Y is talking about their brand to get more emotional connection insights of Generation Y. They better do, because 10.1% of Gen Y visits MSN.com on a monthly basis. So MSN and Bing's target for 2011 has been Gen Y for all their media spend & targeting. It is a little bit confusing, because Lise Nicole Brende told us that the Bing research team mainly consists of Gen X researchers. So how can Gen X researchers deep dive into the habits and rituals of Gen Y (but this is another story…).

They moved their attention towards so called Connected Socialiszers (Facebook centric) which produce 47% of all BING searches. In former time they focused on Information Seekers (responsible for 20% of BING searches).

We heard a lot about Gen Y then, taken from the Cassandra Report, and how BING tries to adopt these findings. They constantly try to get in touch with this optimistic, control demanding, group oriented and sometimes overwhelmed and stressed Gen Y. One of the key assets BING has is Gen Y trend seeker panel, providing feedback to them, a very interesting and valuable source.

Last but not least I attended the session by Intel about Experience Driven Innovation. It was again very interesting and presented on a high level.  Tony Salvador was pointing out that Intel is looking for long term evolution trends to use for corporate development. He said that experience that is based on data is future. It delivers new ways of business, new way of making money, new ways of interacting. And he left us with 5 take aways:

- Exchange drives markets

- Many markets are comprised of people

- People have values and they seek value

- Organized complexity is right there

- Cultural values in Flux drive Expertise

I have to say good-bye for now. See you later! Don’t forget to follow me on twitter @olympiamilano :-)

Btw, for more check out the gorgeous twitter hashtag #TMRE

About the author: Christian Dössel is blogging about market research in German language here and here. After having worked for TNS, TBWA\ and other strategy and market research agencies he now holds the position of Senior Research Director at MM-Eye in Hamburg / Germany with special responsibilities for MM-Eye's new media and online research approaches.

Announcing: The Audience Measurement Event

How people consume media is changing as rapidly as technology enables them. The challenge is making sense of it all…

The Audience Measurement Event brings the real world to life. Created to be 100% practical, every session focuses on the business value of understanding your audience's total consumption habits. It's the place for brand researchers, marketers and media powerhouses to explore, share and debate measurement in the new frontier – mobile, social, digital and the new traditional. Featuring a comprehensive agenda of real-world case studies complimented with visionary perspectives, you'll uncover the latest practices for navigating the complex media landscape, optimizing your cross-media mix and adapting your content to reach the "connected" generation.  The Audience Measurement Even is taking place May 21-23, 2012 in Chicago.  For more information and to sign up for event updates, visit the webpage.

TMRE Day 2: The Best Profession in the World

Day 2 of The Market Research Event begged us all to step up our games a bit and it's fair to say that everyone, from speakers to attendees, gave over a larger piece of their brains to the general discourse.

That our brains were better tapped in is prescient - the day was all about two key themes: (1) insights as breakthroughs and; (2) the depths of the mind and how we as researchers can better connect with the deepest of human emotions and connections.

Drs. Sheena Iyengar and Mimi Ito were both phenomenal keynotes yesterday. Iyengar pressed us to look at the depth achievable in simplicity - how simplicity is really the key to connecting with consumers; particularly in aisle.

Ito extended that thinking to a discrete cohort - teens; one that keeps me and my TRU colleagues busy 24/7. The comparative insights of Japanese vs. US youth were outstanding; bringing color and a respected voice to an argument we've been making for a couple of years: teens are the flashpoint for innovation and new tech/media adoption.

As we rolled into sessions, it's helpful to consider some of the more prominent terms in the word cloud above: thinking, insights, research, choice, people and society.

Leaders like Blizzard and the American Cancer Society showed us how to work together better by better harnessing our internal data assets to drive meaningful, communicable insights and building stronger, more flexible terms into client-vendor relationships.

J&J, Intel and others took us into the mind; asking us to balance concepts like the lizard-dog brain with our traditional research views and outlooks. Those two presentations, along with guidance from Kraft, were a fantastic lead into AK Pralad's presentation on NeuroFocus and the way EEG readings can help us truly tap into the mind's mysteries.

To sum up the value of yesterday's discussions would be impossible, but I was struck by a quote from one of the most popular sessions yesterday that had folks clamoring for an encore:

"Market research is the BEST profession in the world" - Stan Sthanunathan of Coke

Hear, hear!

Live from TMRE 2011: Learnings from Coca Cola, Henkel, Mars Pet Care and 3M

Yes of course, putting famous brands in the headline always is a good idea... But today I learned how to choose... ;-)

The second day of this year's The Market Research Event is nearly over and I have to say it was very inspiring as well as educational to a certain extent.

Everything started with the keynote sessions and a session I had really looked forward to: "The Art of Choosing" by the impressive Sheena Iyengar.

"Be choosy about choosing" was the summary of it all. But before coming to this final recommendation she was takling about one of the most relevant problem in everyday life consumption of any goods. How do people choose and how could choosing be simplified. If you are more familiar with  "the narrowing down problem" by Fidelity research or the "3 by 3 rule" by McKinsey, you know what Sheena was talking about. 

In her own words she was talking about the "jam problem". She showed some of her experiments and one was about jam. Draeger's Grocery Store for instance has a huge variety of options to choose between all kinds of products, besides others 348 different kinds of jams. The question is, is it useful to have that large variety of options? To test this in the experiment she tested two stands, one with 6 jams and one with 24 jams. At the booth wit 24 jams 60% stopped, at the both with 6 jams 40% stopped. But only 3% bought something at the 24 jam stand and 30% bought something at the 6 jam stand.  So it was more than 6 times more likely to buy jam if 6 jams were offered than 24 jams. The number of choices is attracting but the choice itself is much more difficult. 

In another experiment people were asked to choose chocolate, one group out of 6 pieces and another out of 30. At the end they could rather have money or chocolate for incentive. Chocolate choosen from the 30 piece deck was perceived as less delicious and people tend to take the money more often than the product.

This leads to three different negative consequences for brands and products:

1. Commitment - The number of choices weakens the commitment toward the choice anyway, even if it is important to consumers

2 Decision quality - The more choices they have, the lower the perceived quality of the decision

3 Satisfaction - The more choices they have, the less satisfied they are with their choice they made

But why is this?

We have cognitive limitations, the modern world is designed for experts who knows how to skip suboptimal options.

Options are more and more indistinguishable. Differences are to small but variety is often seen as a competitve advantage, no matter how small the differences are. 

And there is more pressure to choose anyway. Because we aspire to be unique (but not extraordinary). And our choices express our personality. We think: "If I choose this what does this say about who I am and what I want and how does the choice reflect on what I want and who I am..."

So it is all about offering a better choosing experience!

And there are three techniques to deliver this:

1. cut - retailer ALDI ist probably the best example to express what sheena means with "cut"

2. categorize - look at Best Sellers and they categorization of wine to get an idea what's behind this

3. condition - start easy with complex choices and slightly increase complexity within the process of choice

The next one was a good experience. I was sitting at the bloggers' desk and was glad to have a seat. 

The room was crowded, first time at TMRE in the session I attended. Diane Hessan and Stan Sthanunatahn were there to talk about Market Researchers in the 21st century. Amazing, they only showed one chart, and this was the title ;-)

So it was more an interview than a track session, but very interesting to hear a big company's perspective on the future needs of our industry. Want to read some quotes? Here you are:

"Market research is the best profession in the world, because it is at the heart of every important decision"

"But the best profession is also boring, because parts of the jobs are boring. Processes are designed to be boring"

"Challenge is inspiring people. Be a change agent."

"Surveys may not always be the truth, and why would you tell the truth to a complete stranger?"

"What makes Coke so successful? Not just the tv commercials, but the "strong community connections" 

"brand health can't be developed in a month, why measure it on a monthly base?"

"Synthesize your findings into an informed dream of the future"

"Take the familiar and make it unfamiliar. Convey facts in a different way to inspire"

  

Nothing to add at this point :-) 

Then I attended a session from the Marketing & Brand Insight track and one from the Activating Insights track. 

Ann Bearth was talking about 3M and the efforts they made by reactivating the brand. Quite interesting to see what barriers to overcome internally and how to roll out a real huge internal and external survey. One of the most interesting findings to my point of view was the fact that younger employees of 3M are more engaged in the brand, for customers the opposite is true.

And that brand activation can be ensured by sharing the stories of the companies and their brands, internally and externally.

Henkel also found a great internal experience to bring insights to life. They decided to have an internal live event in order to let the consumer speak and to show the employees their work in order to use their power and ideas to develop new ways of increasing usage of the prodcts the compay sells. All in all it was an intense experience for them.

But Heiko Schäfer also pointed out waht you have to keep in mind when doing this kind of internal event. Some very valuable pieces of advise:

- Identify important business topics

- Set and track the event against clear objectives and KPIs

- Plan ahead and don't underestimate the time and effort required

- New skills are required

- Make it big

- Engage your audience

- Make it fun

But don't stop at the end of a one-shot. Make it a process and show your skills.

Be out in front and lead. 

This indeed was an encouraged speech about the current and future role of market research in companies and for agencies.

Personally I have to say TMRE doesn't mean "too much really enough"


About the author: Christian Dössel is blogging about market research in German language here and here. After having worked for TNS, TBWA\ and other strategy and market research agencies he now holds the position of Senior Research Director at MM-Eye in Hamburg / Germany with special responsibilities for MM-Eye's new media and online research approaches.

Live from TMRE 2011: It's All About the Brain

What a day at TMRE! Like yesterday, there seemed to be at least one blatant theme: the brain.

It started this morning with Dr. Sheena Iyengar, author of The Art of Choosing, describing the complexity of consumer decision-making. For example, in some cases, we may only prefer seven choices to choose from (like shopping for jam), but in other situations (such as getting your nails painted), you might prefer to have 40-50 color options. In any case, it is our role to understand how consumers are making decisions and how we can increase the probability of them either a) choosing to purchase anything at all or b) increase our product. This level of understanding is critical for understand how consumers are choosing us.

Jennifer Nelson of Johnson & Johnson (in the Activating Insights track) also discussed the role of the brain in decision-making in her discussion of "Integrating Marketing Transformation with Marketing Research Innovation." She discussed, like Ipsos yesterday, the difference in instinctual and deliberative mindsets. Her focus, however, was slightly different. She focused on how we can communicate the differences in consumer mindset to other business units (who may believe that consumers are rational decision-makers). A problem, she explains, is that humans are not wired to notice slow, subtle, change; and this applies to a business where we are trying to educate business units the complexities of decision-making and consumerism. Her suggestions?

1. Bring the thinking to a broader context (bring people in that will challenge different thinking)
2. Apply to business issues (get the buy in to apply emotion mining to one of your current business issues).

Dr. Leeza Slessareva of Visa (in the New Tools & Breakthrough Methodology track) discussed one my favorite topics (as it relates to advertising), priming in her presentation of "Quantitative Methods for Understanding Subconsciousness." Priming, she explains, is the influence on our thoughts, feelings and behavior with the environment. For example, during the week, a grocery store might play slower music (the primer) that subconsciously influences shoppers to take their time through the store, and be more relaxed. The music during the weekend, however, might be much faster to subconsciously influence people to shop must faster to help move the lines faster and avoid crowding. Priming is a can be used in advertising (for example, media placement), to transfer the feelings and perceptions of a show or magazine to "rub off" onto the product or brand experience. The subconscious is activating with priming and measured across groups to understand the effect of priming.

Of course, the presentation by Dr. A.K. Pradeep, CEO of NeuroFocus, Inc., was also laser focused to helping us understand our brains (and those of our shoppers) and for getting at true shopper experiences (on a side note: I am absolutely expecting this video to go viral - "Listen to your Brain" - Just sayin'). At a 10,000 foot level, these are the shopper experience dimensions that we need to be focused on for understanding our shoppers' experiences:

Shopper Experience Dimensions:

• Self-worth
• Simplicity
• Education
• Entertainment
• Interaction
• Information
• Community

The Main Takeaway

The brain is an inevitable force that's responsible for all decision making; yet it is still a mystery - a big black box. Neuroscience is reaching many areas of our field, and there is a great need for accessing human emotions, feelings, and thoughts that guide traditional research metrics that have been based in the absolute outcome of all thinking: behavior. To keep up with, or ahead of, your competitors, understanding what's behind behavior is incredibly important, and that was evident in many of today's sessions at The Market Research Event.

Garrett McGuire (@GJMcGuire) is a Consumer Insights Analyst for a major retailer. His areas of focus are advertising research, brand equity, and providing consumer insights for many marketing initiatives. Prior to his current position, he was a graduate student at Michigan State University where he began his blog, "The Journal of a mAD Man," that explains the theories and methods of advertising.

TMRE 2011: Coca-Cola VP talks about Truth, Insights and Community

It is obvious that Stan Sthanunathan, Vice President, Marketing Strategy & Insights at The Coca Cola Company, loves his job.

He opened with "The marketing research profession is the best profession in the world....for one simple reason. Insight is the most critical thing." 

Well, he certainly knows his audience because most of us here at The Market Research Event agree with him...at least I do:)

Diane Hessan, President & Ceo of Communispace facilitated the discussion, and she told me prior to the session start that it would be worth blogging about...and it was!

This is what I enjoyed most about his presentation:

1. Visionary thinking ..."The responsibility of companies is to help create the future.....but you have to learn how to stop looking in the rearview mirror?" 
 2. Perspective on hiring. "Hire people that are not the same as you had before." He said that many of his "strange hires" have turned out to be "great hires." He also cautioned companies not to "outsource your thinking." 
3. Clear communication of the brand. "What makes coca cola what it is today? It's the community we have established..that we touch people on a daily basis." "It's a drink that promotes happiness." Check out what Coca-Cola is now doing with a program they call 5 BY 20.


April Bell

Calling all “Change makers” …..

Last year the industry was wowed by the first ever Technology Driven Market Research Event.

In the spirit of our industry flagship, The Market Research Event (TMRE), we proudly present the new and expanded: The Market Research TECHNOLOGY Event, a holistic synthesis of intelligence, insights and implications. This is an event with practical lessons, productive debate and inspirational messages for moving forward and driving innovation in your organization.

Once upon a time businesses dreamt of a 360 degree customer perspective, now, it is a reality.
From fragmentation to integration, data convergence is disrupting established industries and business models. Primary research methodologies are no longer sufficient. A 360 degree perspective is needed to fully grasp all of the data and tools that are being used, creatively and effectively, to better understand consumer behavior.

Technology is a tool but it does not replace the art and science of market research as a discipline
We are arguably in the midst of the most major sea change the industry has ever seen. Historically market research has been the main driver of data collection – but now, with the explosion of data available and the convergence of so much data - researchers are expected to perform data integration, aggregation and prediction alongside their data collection. That’s not enough. They are expected to turn data into stories that people want to hear – that ultimately drives innovation in their company. This undoubtedly requires a whole new set of skillsets, talents, and leadership.

Big data can be an obstacle and it can also be a goldmine
Understanding different behavior patterns throughout different touch points and across customer cycles allows us to know our customers better than ever before. This translates into smarter decisions and more productive outcomes. Market research is part of a bigger world – the world of consumer and marketplace intelligence.

From market research to business intelligence, the tools available are growing exponentially, the knowledge available is astounding, the game is changing, and therefore, so are we…

New for 2012:

• Dr. A.K. Pradeep is back! Running a full day workshop on Research Innovation and Neuroimmersion. 
• Gaming is the new social. Find out how Jane McGonigal, Author, Reality is Broken, is using games to collect significant amounts of consumer data.
• Technology is no longer a tool; it’s an intrinsic consumer behavior. Join Behavioral Economist, Dan Ariely as he taps into the forces behind the different decision-making processes.
• Trend tracking is the motivation you need as a business to unlock hidden potential of emerging markets. Explore your social currency with Michael Tchong, Analyst, Michaeltchong.com.

Join us in this new technological wonderland!  Visit the webpage to sign up for updates on the program.

TMRE Day 1: Learning from our Explorer peers

Day one of The Market Research Event is in the books and, while the start was a little less caffeinated than we'd collectively hoped, my sense is that we all really built up a head of steam as the day evolved.

Seven track sessions today capped by former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy's interview kept my keys clacking on Twitter and my brain whirring while I endeavored to keep up with the insights, best practices, thoughts and guidance of some of our brightest research and marketing peers. To help organize all that I was exposed to today, I word-clouded my tweets and some themes start to emerge.

One, duh, we're at TMRE. But, what about the other stuff?!

Well, Yum! Brands, Pepsico, AT&T and CBS Interactive really made an impression on me. And, it's no surprise: they brought some of the most exciting insights to bear today extracted from the front edge of market research.

Further exploration of the cloud substantiates this: mobile, India, local, aspiring... The insights around aspirational lower income consumers in India delivered by Pepsico were some of the most powerful I had a chance to learn from. Need states are driven by so many elements and, for those of us in market research, our charge is to balance need states with the challenges of executing sound research in developing markets - languages, local nuances, and access.

On the front edge of "developed" markets' developing research landscape, AT&T and CBS Interactive shared how they've leveraged mobile research to drive innovation and product development with a powerful mix of qual and quant.

We all have to love sessions like these where our explorers are coming back from their expeditions to share with us the paths forward. I'm excited to hear from more trailblazers tomorrow!

Live from TMRE 2011: NGMR 2011 Disruptive Innovators Jostle Research!

Net Promoter Score Displaced? Cookie-Free Ad Effectiveness Kudos! And Big Data Play Makes Waves...

By Marc Dresner, IIR

Disruptive innovation was on display today at TMRE as two research companies, one information services provider and one visionary individual accepted awards for pushing the research envelope in progressive new directions.

The 2nd Annual Disruptive Innovation Awards presented by online professional community Next Gen Market Research (NGMR) were—as anticipated—reorganized into three new categories:

Thought Leadership:
- Ipsos Loyalty (Wallet Allocation Rule)

Research Concept Deployment:
- InsightExpress (Ignite Network)

Non-Traditional Provider:
- RapLeaf

The only holdover category from last year was awarded to a perennial change agent and friend:

Individual: Dr. Bill MacElroy, Chairman, Socratic Technologies


A quick scan of nomination submissions revealed compelling reasons to count each of the winners comfortably within the disruptive realm.

My review…


WHO & WHY: RapLeaf
Arguably the most conspicuous innovator in the bunch—RapLeaf—came from without the research industry as traditionally defined and has made waves in ad targeting, CRM and analytics circles.

RapLeaf’s database includes over a half-billion unique email addresses and corresponding data from various social and ecommerce sites, enabling the company to provide real-time information to B-to-B clients.

The company notably ran into issues with Facebook last year after a Wall Street Journal series profiled various social research and online data aggregators.

RapLeaf has reportedly since resolved the matter and has pushed ahead with an information deliverable that NGMR Founder and Chairman Tom H. C. Anderson says demonstrates what is possible when you are first to leverage this type of data.

“By thinking outside the box, RapLeaf has distinguished itself from traditional consumer data aggregators and has built the richest database of social behavior on the Web,” said Anderson. “They’ve learned a few lessons along the way, but they’re the first to access this breadth of data and I expect they’ll continue to refine and evolve their products.”

While RapLeaf had difficulties due in no small part to an emotionally charged privacy climate, they’re not the first and they won’t be the last. One key takeaway, I think, is that to compete in a space like Big Data analytics where innovation abounds, research providers are going to have to take a few calculated risks. Think two steps forward, one step back.

For bucking the status quo in pursuit of a superior information capability, RapLeaf was awarded Most Innovative Research Product from a Non-Traditional Provider.


WHO & WHY: InsightExpress (Ignite Network)
Launched in January 2011, InsightExpress’ Ignite Network has ingeniously cleared hurdles that have heretofore frustrated online ad effectiveness research efforts.

While I’m still not entirely sure what’s going on under the hood, the main thing you need to bear in mind is that according to InsightExpress the Ignite Network is an opt-in platform that does not rely on cookies to track respondents.

Why is this important? Cookies can be deleted, which significantly handicaps attempts to get an accurate picture of browsing behavior. And it’s nearly impossible to assess post-exposure ad impact over time with cookies.

Via strategic aggregation arrangements with leading sample providers, Ignite Network can also deliver a scalable, persistent respondent pool, thereby eliminating dependence on recruitment by pop-up and banners. (The former is restricted on Facebook, YouTube, portal homepages, ad networks, etc., and the latter yields abysmal response rates.)

“The potential of this breakthrough isn’t confined to online ad effectiveness,” Anderson noted. “The ability to capture online behavior without cookies in an opt-in way has important implications for a variety of other research.”

For surmounting cookie limitations and facilitating ad measurement on some of the Web’s most important properties, InsightExpress got the nod for Most Innovative Deployment of a Research Concept.

Additional props to InsightExpress SVP & CRO Marc Ryan for lighting the fuse behind Ignite Network!


WHO & WHY: Ipsos Loyalty (Wallet Allocation Rule)
Net Promoter Score critics rejoice! Ipsos Loyalty appears to have discovered a new formula for predicting share of wallet with an unprecedented degree of accuracy: The Wallet Allocation Rule.

In a groundbreaking, two-year longitudinal study among more than 17,000 consumers spanning more than a dozen industries and nine countries, Ipsos Loyalty uncovered a strong correlation (0.9 out of a perfect 1.0) between share of wallet and the rank that consumers assign to a brand relative to other brands in a competitive set.

Furthermore, while other approaches seek to “fit” data to share of wallet via regression techniques or back-solving functions, according to Ipsos Loyalty the Wallet Allocation Rule performs as well or better than very complex data-fitting methods across industries with no data fitting required.

Is this the Holy Grail that marketers have historically sought using NPS, customer sat and other loyalty metrics?

Perhaps. It certainly has generated interest in the right places (notably the October 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review).

“Net Promoter Score and traditional loyalty metrics haven’t correlated to what matters most to marketers at the end of the day: share of wallet,” said Anderson. “The Wallet Allocation Rule may completely change the rules.”

For potentially displacing an industry standard with a simpler alternative with bottom-line impact, Ipsos Loyalty won the award for Innovation Thought Leader.

Congratulations to the team:
- Timothy Keiningham, PhD, Global Chief Strategy Officer, Ipsos Loyalty
- Lerzan Aksoy, PhD, Associate Professor of Marketing, Fordham University
- Alexander Buoye, PhD, Vice President of Analytics, Ipsos Loyalty
- Bruce Cooil, PhD, Professor of Management, Vanderbilt University


WHO & WHY: Dr. Bill MacElroy, Chairman, Socratic Technologies
Last but not least, there is in my opinion no individual in research today more deserving of the label “disruptive innovator” than the incomparable Dr. Bill MacElroy.

Since he hasn’t been put out to pasture, I won’t turn this into a Lifetime Achievement Award by recounting MacElroy’s innumerable and pioneering accomplishments and contributions to the research industry over the years. That’s all well and good, but what’s he done lately?

MacElroy shared a few current pastimes:
• Respondent Engagement: Use of technologies (animations, interactive video, etc.) and methods (brand affinity, topic salience, different forms of digital incentives, etc.) to increase online survey cooperation and improve data quality.

• Interface Transitions: Experimenting with usability and question content control in non-traditional-PC environments (tablets, smart phones, etc.) to determine best practices for using touch-based systems and alternative methods to physical keyboards for data entry (voice recognition, virtual keyboards, Swype, etc.).

• Data Dissemination: Developing more interactive systems and tools for research end users for scenario analysis, tracking analysis, real-time modeling and reducing time to decision. (This involves extensive database work and creation of smarter, more interactive tools for accessing and filtering the tons of data being generated both from traditional research and transactions.)

While these were reportedly among the key considerations that earned him the distinction of Individual Disruptive Innovator, I have a hunch the really disruptive stuff Dr. MacElroy is working on isn’t necessarily being shared. We’ll just have to wait and see…


Congratulations to the 2011 NGMR Disruptive Innovation Award winners!
 

Editor’s note: For more on this year’s NGMR Disruptive Innovation Awards, be sure to visit NGMR’s blog.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marc Dresner is an IIR USA communication lead with a background in trade journalism and marketing. He is the former executive editor of Research Business Report, a confidential newsletter for the market research and consumer insights industry. He may be reached at mdresner@iirusa.com. Follow him @mdrezz. Meet him at TMRE 2011 in Orlando this November!

Live From TMRE 2011: PepsiCo and Sentient Win 12th Annual EXPLOR!

The 12TH Annual EXPLOR Awards Honor PepsiCo and Sentient Decision Science for Outstanding Market Research Innovation

Finalists Hewlett-Packard/Qualvu and Microsoft/Blueocean Showcase Exemplary Achievements in Applying Technology to Market Research


uSamp, one of the world's fastest growing technology and online sampling companies, and sponsor of the EXPLOR Award, today named PepsiCo and its market research partner, Sentient Decision Science, winners of the prestigious 2011 EXPLOR Award. Now in its 12th year, the EXPLOR Awards celebrate exemplary achievements in market research by recognizing the most innovative applications of technology in the field today.

Sentient Decision Science and PepsiCo presented their case study during The Market Research Event (TMRE), being held Nov. 7 - 9 in Orlando. TMRE brings together hundreds of the leading market researchers across the globe to exchange cutting-edge knowledge and learn what's new, next and critical in market research.

"The EXPLOR Award is a significant recognition of our work measuring emotions quantitatively and using the decision sciences to gain real insight into the underlying motivations of shopper choice," said Will Leach, director, strategic insights, PepsiCo. "Our winning of this prestigious award is proof-positive we are moving in the right direction."

"Significant elements of our work with PepsiCo illustrate the future of market research, and we are honored to achieve industry recognition with the EXPLOR Award," said Aaron Reid, Ph.D., chief behavioral scientist, Sentient Decision Science. "From our perspective, the future of marketing can be found today in the behavioral science literature, which allows us to understand the why’s of human behavior that have yet to be applied to business questions on a large scale."

This year's world-class judging panel — from noteworthy organizations like General Mills, GfK, NBC Universal and Wharton — selected the top three candidates from among submissions focused on research-enabling technologies that ultimately enhance the research process, data collection, or dissemination of information. The goal is to highlight companies that are making a positive impact on market research and the profession overall. Case studies must highlight a client-specific research initiative and are accepted from brands, academics and research suppliers.


Download the finalists' case studies:
PepsiCo/Sentient, Hewlett-Packard/Qualvu, Microsoft/Blueocean

"We extend our congratulations to PepsiCo and Sentient for being named winners of the 2011 EXPLOR awards, which celebrate excellence, creativity and innovation in market research," said Chuck Miller, CRO of uSamp. "Pepsico/Sentient, together with finalists Hewlett-Packard/Qualvu and Microsoft/Blueocean, have demonstrated exceptional enterprise and market research leadership through their case studies, providing inspiration to all of us."

About EXPLOR Awards
The EXPLOR Awards is an annual case study competition, honoring technology innovation in marketing research. Innovation leaders from global corporations, research agencies and academia are invited to submit high impact cases where technology and innovation have advanced the research and insight process. For more details on the finalists' case studies, please download: PepsiCo/Sentient, Hewlett-Packard/Qualvu, Microsoft/Blueocean.

TMRE 2011: Day One in Pictures

TMRE 2011 kicked off yesterday in Orlando.   Here's the day in pictures!

Live from TMRE 2011: Great first day at TMRE

After an 11 hour long lasting but still comfortable flight on Sunday from Hamburg, Germany I arrived safely and in good conditions in Orlando, Florida. As I learned today – more about this later – Sunday is NFL day, so I went to a nice sports bar and watched some American Football. Very nice experience…

Today I was curious and excited to see The Market Research Event started at The Peabody in Orlando.

So I went quite early to get my registration done and to join the first session from the Ad & Media Research track: “How US Consumers’ Ethic Identity Influences Media & Purchase Habits”.

I picked that one because I was hoping to hear some interesting thought both on methodology and results. And both presenters from Yahoo!, Lauren Weinberg and Edwin Wong did a great job with their presentation.

But what was it about?

They showed us a number of fact based recommendations how to do appropriate multi cultural marketing.

This is important to a number of different companies and brands (and also Yahoo!) because the purchase power of different ethnicities is huge and still rising. They report an overall purchase volume of the four most relevant ethnicities (African America, Asian / Pasific, Hispanic / Latino and Caucasian) of 2.5 billion dollars.

To gain a larger share of this purchase power it is important to understand how ethnicity impacts preferences and how marketing can be as authentic as possible for this targets.

To find appropriate answers to this Yahoo! conducted a huge survey, consisting of expert interviews, online communities, focus groups and quantitative elements. It is always nice to see that a client sees the need to do market research. And it is even nicer if this research isn’t conducted for the sake of doing research. But it must have been a hard fight to set the budget free needed for this scale of survey…

Anyway, I learned a lot about the meaning of ethnicity to the groups, with very special area of identification (e.g. music, food, gender roles, appearance, celebrating holidays, language and even the family name). And it differs depending on the ethnicity you are trying to talk to.

If you look at the Caucasian-focused advertising out there it is not surprising that the ethnicities feel underrepresented. But they feel much more underrepresented in traditional media than in online media (e.g. 72% of the Hispanic feel underrepresented in traditional media and only 39% in online media). 

My explanation would be that it is much more easier to find yourself represented in the diversity of the www than in 30 seconds TV commercials. And again the drivers of preferences are strongly driven by the ethnicity.

In order to overcome this issue authentic marketing has to face a basic paradox: On the one hand ethnicities have a strong wish that the ethnic diversity (which they feel to be a part of and which they see as representative for the US society and the real world) is shown. On the other hand they are seeking for well targeted ads in order to deliver a stronger “for-me-ness” and to be represented in a better way. So authentic marketing has to kill two birds with one stone: mainstream versus uniqueness.

This is not easy. And this is a risk. 

This is why 66% of the Asian ethnicity say that the can’t think of any brand, that perform well (Hispanic 42%, African American 51%). 

It is most important to avoid stereotypes. And these again are ethnicity-specific. Aisans don’t want to see the nerdy asian guy or somebody who is unable to attract women. Huge families and Mariachi with Sombreros is forbidden if you want to sell into the Hispanic ethnicity. And don’t show African Americans in a commercial together with alcohol and tobacco and avoid Hip Hop and dancing. 

The true understanding is the basis for success, execution is nuanced. Saying this, to my point of view a strong need for pre-testing, co-creation or crowd sourcing is identified. This is, because if you are doing it in the right way success can be seen in trust, purchase and last but not least activated word-of-mouth, offline and online. And here is a TV commercial shown by the presenters a best practice. 

Enjoy!

The next session I attended was some sort of childhood memories. It was about a multi platform approach for Sesame Workshop by Diane Polvere and James William-Ness.

I have learned that not only my favorite characters from Sesame Street have improved their style (the equipment of Super-Grobi – his German name – is amazing) and some of them were new to me, but also requirements of research improved. James pointed out that 2005 there were 6 channels where you could get in contact with Sesame content, 2011 they have 21 channels. 

No wonder that they need to know a lot of different things about their audience: unique audience, total audience, device interaction and sources of engagement, just to name a few. TV is still key, but gaming devices, audio, web, mobile, podcasts and other devices are emerging and covering a relevant art of channel preferences in the pre-school target group.

After a huge secondary analysis they decided to conduct a huge quantitative study with 2.000 children aged under 8 years. That gave them the opportunity to drill down contact clusters on iTunes, podcasts, amazon etc. as well as important results for future purchase of newer devices in order to spotlight trends. 

Together with existing data from Nielsen, comScore and so on they were able to build a model and bridging the custom data with these common sources.

It was quite interesting that they found a way to develop a multiplatform model to say that over 50 million are in contact to Sesame content. This is an important number for their revenue model (what I didn’t realize is that Sesame workshop is a non-profit organization) in order to give value to their reach. 

And of course – like in every huge surveys – there are a number of other interesting results. Just to name two of them. TV is still number one and key to deliver a first experience of Sesame content. But Online and Mobile is important to engage and enhance frequency of usage.

And I found myself belonging to the “Digital Dads” which bring a new gatekeeper segment to the responsible people at Sesame workshop. They usually stick to the “sesame moms” (described as mothers, who interact with their children and Sesame content on TV and web). But “Digital Dads” bring Sesame content with Apps on iPads, Smartphones and Podcast to their kids. 

Interesting.

Something not completely different but important in a broader sense was presented by Dr. Timothy de Waal Malefy from BBDOs Cultural Discoveries. It was all about rituals and how brands could benefit from this. He pointed out that rituals are nothing new for humans, but for most of the brands. 

The basis for exploring rituals is to look at people. Because consumers use brands to suit their needs and to share their experiences with others. So there is a huge opportunity to learn from the customers in order to identify rituals and make them work for brands. A brand’s benefits can be (among others) to give guidance for a meaningful live to customers. 

But it is not easy to find the ritual, because there are a lot of requirements that needs to me fulfilled before you can call it a ritual. Generally speaking a ritual is a fixed sequence of behaviors that transform us from one state to another, emotionally or physically or both.

It is a powerful motivating experience and develops strong loyalties (best practice: the ritual of weddings). Rituals operate in a clear framework and are highly sensorial, memorable and pleasurable. 

Timothy compared rituals with habits, while habits are single and functional tasks, do not transform a brand benefit and require low or no conscious effort. 

The distinction between the two concepts is clear, but it stayed theoretical to me unless he said that the ritual is “the journey” and the habit is “the destination”. This again is true for wedding, although some people regard a wedding as a habit or other like this ritual so much that they want to have it again and again :-)

But basically it makes a lot of sense to look at rituals in this way. Timothy showed a lot of research and advertising for “The art of shaving” and he mentioned the ritual of making your own coffee. 

First of all I was thinking about rituals as some sort of elitist’s doing in order to differentiate from others, because rituals show knowledge and express mastery. But and the end and by answering questions from the auditorium Timothy pointed out that even this is mostly the case and rituals is not for every brand, there are some examples for rituals in mass market. Barbie vs. American Girl Doll, Build a bear or even the ritual of Hispanics in the US starting to drink wine are good examples for this.

Next session was about women, apparel and the NFL. Alicia Z. Ranking presented backgrounds, process and results for a re-positioning of NFL Womens’ apparel (and the success of it). 
 

Although I am more into soccer I could understand most of the things that were said. It is important to make good offers for women, because 445 of NFL fans are female and they are nearly 8 hours a week engaged with NFL. Even more important is the fact that they spend $ 315 million on NFL apparel.

I like Alicia’s descriptions of the former approach to make a good offer to women. It is called “shrinking & pinking” and says that they took the men’s apparel, shrinked it and made it pink.

The basis for improving this was a huge online research with some face-to-face components. And they build a segmentation on this survey, which revealed a lot of shopper insights such as affinity to NFL apparel and purchase behavior as well as attitudes and insights for product development.

One of the key findings, which they used for developing the campaign, is that women pay more attention towards fashion related items of NFL apparel and men basically want to show their team affinity. And they also found out, that the female core target consists of active and family-oriented women, aged 20-39 years.

So they decided to create awareness for NFL women’s apparel by leveraging a health and fitness performance that fits with the target’s fashion style and lifestyle. In addition they wanted to feature women as NFL fans, which they achieved by featuring real NFL women (I forgot their names. If this were soccer ladies I would probably remember :-) ). But look at this:

They did a lot more to support this campaign (events, microsite, contests, cause-related etc.). And the business increased by 40% and 75% were aware of redesigned product line. Even the campaign was a huge success, 70% recall overall and 63% recall brand related. 

To my point of view this is a good example for having success when you have your business objectives clear and stick to a limited number of relevant results but keeping these at the spearhead of your marketing activities.

After this I attended the Social Media & Communities track to hear Nick Mysore talking about “Trend Spotting with Social Media to Grow Your Business”.

He introduced his speech by focusing on using social media for strategy (and therefore for business) and so (I thought) he would go one step further than saying that listening to consumer on Facebook etc. is important. 

He had a lot of numbers (very good and convincing ones) to support the fact that social media is here to stay, and that is becoming more and more important for marketing. I really liked the style of presentation, very entertaining and very convincing. But for my personal scope there wasn’t much to learn than good examples to show people that social media is important. 

Anyway, it is important to listen and it is important to learn how to listen from these how do it well (like US Gov. for instance). And it is also important to connect the listening with the strategy. Therefore Nick recommends focusing on themes. As an opposite of “a shotgun approach” he mentioned that of course a selection of themes is of course a risk (to choose the wrong ones). But otherwise complexity is too big and it is impossible to deep dive into themes and to deliver results. To create such patterns depends on the strategy and you must be brave enough (or your internal or external clients) to take the risks of social media. Social media is less reliable. But it is more penetrating and honest response. 

This leads to the daily practice that social media is not replacing anything. But it is simple to track and must be simple to implement into marketing (controlling).

The last track I attended was about Celebrity and Engagement in a DVR world by TiVo. Most of the time I saw impressive spots. And I learned that the spending in TV ads are worthwhile, despite the fact that 54% of all primetime TV is time-shifted. 

This relates to former results 5-10 years ago, where it was revealed that is important to keep the engagement high within the audience in order to keep their attention for TV advertising. This is the same now, even if the forward advertising. Let’s take Mad Men as an example.

This Suave ad was shown and people who forwarded advertising thought the film would continue. 

Or let’s have a look at snickers and Superbowl:

People are repeating this spot, because it supports the feeling of the sports. 

The same for X-factor and Pepsi:

Different name for the same things...

All in all it was a very exiting day. 

Looking forward to tomorrow and more hot market research stuff. 

About the author: Christian Dössel is blogging about market research in German language here and here. After having worked for TNS, TBWA\ and other strategy and market research agencies he now holds the position of Senior Research Director at MM-Eye in Hamburg / Germany with special responsibilities for MM-Eye's new media and online research approaches