InSites Blog

Every report confirms the trend: Marketers are shifting advertising budget away from traditional media and into online media.

But not all channels are equal. So what’s a quick and easy way to work out which outlets can serve up your target audiences and where should you be placing your advertising?

To answer that question for Belgian marketers, we launched a free online tool called eScape at the end of 2009. eScape shows the socio-demographic profile of visitors to participating sites, data about site satisfaction, and consumer habits and intentions in sectors that often use online advertising such as FMCG, automotive, finance, mobile and travel.

Since launching, we’ve added extra features and new outlets have joined. Hi-Media, Corelio Connect, Pebblemedia, Paratel, De Persgroep, Roularta Media and Trustmedia were the first participants. They’ve been joined by the blogging network Skynet and Microsoft MSN.

eScape’s features include complex analyses in real time, benchmarking against other sites within an industry sector and a handy portfolio planner. Exporting the data is easy, and you can set the language during data collection to more than a dozen local options.

Publishers, ad networks and agencies are all getting better data thanks to eScape. Why not sign up yourself and find out how this free tool can improve your targeting?

On Wednesday 26 and Thursday 27 May SKIM and Sawtooth Software hosted two days of training sessions on Discrete Choice Modeling (DCM) in Germany (Köln). My colleague Mike (from R&D) and I were fully immersed in the ins and outs of Choice-based conjoint (CBC), Adaptive CBC and MaxDiff.

The first session I attended was by David Lyon, who is an authority on survey-based pricing research. In his very interesting session he showed us all methods that can be used in pricing research, and with a critical view discussed for each one of them, detailing both the pros and the cons.

The second session was about Maximum Difference Scaling (MaxDiff), a methodology widely used here at InSites Consulting. Aaron Hill from Sawtooth Software clearly outlined for which research problems MaxDiff can be used. At the end of his session he showed two new exciting add-ons to MaxDiff: TURF and the MaxDiff simulator.

In the last session on Wednesday David Lyon talked about weighting the data: principles, perils and pitfalls. In a lot of market research studies data are weighted, but the main lesson of the session was that weighting is not without implications as it can create more variance in your sample and make your sample less accurate. A very interesting and eye-opening session!

On Thursday both sessions were on Choice Based Conjoint (CBC). In the morning Richard Neggers from SKIM showed three extended case studies. As the session was very interactive it gave a very good opportunity to enhance my CBC knowledge. In the afternoon Sawtooth guru Bryan Orme and David Lyon talked about advanced CBC examples. It was amazing to see how complex CBC designs can be. Bryan showed us some power tricks which will definitely be useful in our next CBC projects.

Mike joined me in the training sessions about choice-based conjoint. It was truly an interesting and informative experience. Below you can find Mike’s thoughts on his sessions.

The sessions I will focus on were both run by Bryan Orme, a true “guru” of CBC methodology. He has been working on CBC modeling for more than 15 years, and is very well known in the world of conjoint analysis. The first presentation focused on a new type of CBC methodology: Adaptive CBC (ACBC for short). This is a new type of CBC application that can adapt to the choices consumers make at the beginning of an exercise. It looks to be a very interesting technique, and one that can be more interesting for respondents, as well as being less reliant on the assumption that consumers rationally consider every aspect of a given product when deciding whether to purchase it.

Another very interesting session I saw was also run by Bryan Orme. This session focused on the background of conjoint analysis and hierarchical Bayes modeling. In this session, we learned a number of tips and tricks to take CBC analyses to the next level of complexity. Topics included the use of covariates, probing, testing and interpreting interactions, and the use of constraints when estimating CBC models.

All in all, it was a very informative event and all of the information I learned will come in handy when working on upcoming CBC analyses!

Hakim Zemni is Research Director at InSites Consulting.

What’s the new ‘buzz word’ in your domain? What does it mean and what do we do with it?

I believe that the beginning of the 21^st century will be remembered as the ‘in-between era’: a lot of socio-cultural, economical and even international and political domains show revolutionary new opportunities, technologies, possibilities, applications and viewpoints but most of them have not quite reached maturity yet.
These mini evolutions collectively set the scene of an imminent marketing paradigm revolution: the current explosion in online social media use is only at the start of an international landslide with major impact on traditional media usage, the idea of a corporate ‘ecolomical’ wave (i.e. economy and ecology as allies instead of enemies) has proven its seductiveness but still has a long way to go for it to reach the masses, the growing need of consumer interaction and co-creation with brands is clearly there, but brands have not yet fully deployed their marketing weapons to facilitate this, discounters are selling premium brands whilst premium brands are dumping their prices, the financial crisis is over or is it not?, etc… . This makes people somewhat uncertain and in a continuous survival modus: they are very resilient in their choices underway.

What are you most proud of?

Of our counter-cyclic investment strategy: in the eye of the financial storm InSites Consulting opened offices in Geneva and London because we believe in ‘no guts, no glory’.  We have been dodging the impact of the economical crisis successfully so it is very motivating to work in a company that manages to do that and that likes to take bold international initiatives on the way.

What do you want to warn marketers/market researchers about, now and in the future?

As I believe that ultimately the evolutions of the ‘in-between-era’ will result in the disappearance of old school marketing and the start of new paradigms, methods, practices and techniques to reach, seduce and interact with consumers, it is important to understand consumers and their day-to-day behavior in terms of this new setting: survivor-consumers are playing the waiting game before massively investing in one or the other viewpoints, technology, etc… so it is about us taking decisions for them: getting the basics right today and being faster in this than competitors is the challenge we are facing and the key to future success.

What has surprised you lately?

Something I learned from a recent survey: 91% of Belgian students have access to the internet in the comfort of their own student home/house/room. Why has this surprised me: as I wrote my thesis on the impact of the internet back in 1998, I had to rent an hour of internet in the ‘academical it-center’ at the time to have access to ‘the net’. An hour worth of internet was the equivalent of reading 10 WebPages containing only text at the time. It literally took about 6 minutes to surf from one page to the other. 10 years later almost all students have constant access.

What did your morning look like today?

I am expecting a baby so I went to the gynecologist today with my wife. Everything ok but the baby looks a bit underinterested in its appointment with the world as it was due last week. We’ll see… Patience is a good virtue. After that visit, I had a brand image presentation and brainstorm at a client I’ve been working for 10 summers in a row now. In short and without revealing the content: we are looking for ways to tweak a brand image that has been extremely stable for over 15 years so it is quite a challenge to facilitate ‘change’. But our recommendation was very concrete and down-to-earth to achieve this as efficiently as possible. Consequently, after the presentation,  I immediately wrote a proposal for the same client as one of the European hypotheses needed quantification for the Belgian market J

Let’s end with a ‘quote of the day’!

I just clicked on ‘random quotes’ on www.quotationspage.com and here’s what captured my attention:
“The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal”.
So I apologize

Hakim Zemni
+32 9 269 15 26  hakim.zemni@insites.eu

Prof. Dr. Niels Schillewaert (Managing Partner InSites Consulting, ESOMAR Representative for Belgium and Marketing Professor Vlerick Management School) will present you Brand Camp² (Competitive Analysis of Market Positioning and Preference).

This state of the art and unique process developed by InSites Consulting and Penn State University (USA) makes marketers see the true competitive brand structure linked into consumer preference via techniques of perceptual mapping. It demonstrates how brand managers can make brand positioning simulations which lead to action-oriented brand decisions.

The Brand Camp² procedure answers your strategic questions:

• What is the competitive structure of your market?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of your brand?
• Why do customers choose your brand or that of competitors?
• How can you (re/de)position new or existing brands to achieve increased share of preference?

The Smartees is a half-day workshop from 2pm to 6pm (drinks are offered afterwards) and take place in our offices in Ghent.

Find out more about the full program and sign up for your FREE invitation now.

For more information, you can contact Steven Van Belleghem, Director Branding and Communication Research (Steven.VanBelleghem@insites.eu)

Yesterday, I facilitated a workshop for Tenneco in Barcelona. Every year Tenneco invites their customers to celebrate the customer of the year awards. The event included a number of workshops on strategic topics. I facilitated the workshop on the use of new media in the automotive aftermarket. Managers from Tenneco’s key customers discussed with me how they can successfully engage with their customers, when using the opportunities of the internet today. Participants to the workshop showed that Web 2.0 tools can also be used in a Business-to-business environment, although we have not seen much evidence in the automotive industry. The workshop was “food-for-thought” for many participants, and they take some good new fresh ideas with them. Here’s a picture taken from the meeting room, with a view on the bay in the Barcelona area: a very pleasant location to host a client event!” Erwin Knuyt, Consulting Director, InSites Consulting.

People have most trust in each other: friends, acquaintances and colleagues are considered to be the most credible source of information. Local celebrities and politicians have the lowest scores. This trend is the same for Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK.
Half of the people considers the Internet to be the most reliable source of information. Television comes second (23%), and newspapers come a remarkable third (13%). 7 out of 10 surfers reads comments on websites about products and brands on the internet. “In view of the considerable credibility we lend to each other’s opinions, the feedback on websites about products and brands has become a huge influencer of purchase decisions. Even if we don’t know these people personally, we still take into account a lot of these online reviews written by other surfers”, says Steven Van Belleghem, Director Branding & Communication Research at InSites Consulting. Fore more information, read our PressreleaseWOMuk_13_01.

Filip, our Director Innovation Research, likes to end the week with a quote, taking research forward: “We are no longer dealing with respondents and data, but with people and opinions.”

It was an interesting day at the conference today. The chocolate boxes at our booth are popular. So we could talk to a lot of research managers, and gather quite some new market knowledge. It is great to feel that our new methods and research approach are very well appreciated by market researchers from different industries. It is remarkable how many companies have plans to develop an ongoing community of clients. Some of them as a cheaper and faster alternative for the large number of ad hoc research projects they run, but many really see it as a means to continuously connect with the user base through ongoing discussions, and as such increase the buy-in and impact of market research in the company.

Christophe had a meeting with the research manager of an airline company to discuss the results of our Relationship Monitor study. This is pan-European study about the drivers of customer relations in 8 industries, the airline industry being of them. We learned a lot about how consumers see the flight experience. In their perspective this is actually stretched from entering the airport to arriving on their final destination, while many airline companies just focus on the time their clients spend on the aircraft. We’ll further elaborate this insight together with this airline company. Great!

At our neighbour’s booth, Sam & Steven had their handwriting analyzed. It was incredible how accurate that conclusion was. The good news is that Sam and Steven seem to be very complementary in a team and love to work in together, which is true. The other details of our personality, well, we’ll tell you in person J

Tomorrow 9 o’clock local time we will be here again, enjoying interesting talks! Christophe is leaving at noon for a client meeting but Sam and Steven are ready for it!

See you tomorrow!

Steven

This week, InSites Consulting is present at the Insights show (sound a little funny, doesn’t it). Steven, Sam and Christophe are there to learn more about the industry and talk to interesting people in the market research world.

But first: a presentation at IAB Europe and meeting some clients
It was an early morning wakeup call this morning for the three of us: a train at 7u30 implies leaving our houses around 5u30. The Insights show start tomorrow, but today Christophe has a client meeting, Steven & Sam are joining the IAB Europe meeting here in London.

At IAB Europe, Steven is one of the speakers, presenting his ‘warning speech’, a story about the challenges marketers are facing these days. Everybody understands that consumers have changed in the last 3-5 years, but still, there are only a few marketers that know how to deal with this change. In his warning speech, Steven gives his vision on different aspects of this transition. In short, the warning speech describes the know role advertising should play in an organization and ads the role of ‘conversations’ in the daily life of a marketer.

Further, Alain Heureux, president of IAB Europe, gave an interesting speech based on some InSites Consulting research. As InSites Consulting is one of the members of IAB Europe, we were happy to see that a large group of interesting people showed up for this first event.
To finish up our day, we went to Nobu, our favorite Japanese restaurant. If you ever have the opportunity, visit one of these resto’s and try some of their wonderful fish dishes. Our favorite dish is the lobster tempura, hmmm.

Smartees are free half-day workshops that deliver new ideas and practical techniques for better marketing. They’re led by some of the sharpest minds in research today, and participants really do take inspiration from the chance to learn and share ideas in a relaxed atmosphere. The next sessions focus on Innovation and Connected Research. Here’s a taste of what’s going on.

“Taking Innovation Research forward”
Ghent, 20 and 25 November
Mathieu Mottrie from CREAX will talk about meeting customer need through systematic innovation, Filip De Boeck will present the latest methods for connecting with customers in the co-creation innovation proces, and Kristof De Wulf will discuss how to reduce risk in the innovation cycle. Read more about the full program.

“Taking Innovation and Connected Research foward”
Filip and Kristof will bring their innovation topics added with the sessions of Steven Van Belleghem and Tom De Ruyck. They will be exploring Connected Research and how market researchers can use Web 2.0 methods to get close to customers. Learn all about desk research 2.0, Online discussions groups, Bulletin Boards, Online communities and how they were used in cases from different industries. Read more about the full program.

Read more about our Smartees on www.insites.eu/smartees and register online for the next ones.