InSites Blog

The Park Plaza, London was the setting for the 2010 MRS conference; “a festival of ideas, innovation, and inspiration”. There can be no doubt that all three of these were achieved through the clever mix of speakers from within and without the Research industry.

The first guest to take the chair was Academy Award nominee Armando Ianucci. Research magazine’s editor Marc Brenner successfully demonstrated his qual interview techniques, managing to persuade the “hardman of politicial satire” to admit that he did ask people what they thought of his work before finalising it; even if it was just family and friends. Armando, had you broadened the sample, you never know, you might have won that Oscar for the nevertheless excellent “In the loop”. Thus the scene was set for frequent, and frankly not unexpected, digressions to the upcoming UK election, including numerous references to the industry’s infamous blunder in 1992.

Social media and communities, of course, remained a central thread for the proceedings, with an array of job titles thrust forward, aimed at demonstrating an agency’s ability to tap into this exponentially growing data stream. Social Media Knowledge Leader was a personal favourite. Doron Meyassad (Promise Communities) presented a paper discussing the opportunity for communities to allow large companies to rejuvenate their innovation pipeline through iterative co-creation. This was inspiring for any researcher who shares the view that long-term agency-client partnerships are the future of research. A witty client-side presentation by Darren Cornish (Axa) followed, concerning his change of focus from a technically minded Operations Director to becoming a social media advocate. His vision helped develop an internal community that successfully raised employee satisfaction and improved products resulting in greater sales revenue. Case studies such as these provide clear justification for the swift move of social media research up the value chain. In these times of media revolution we have the opportunity to ensure market research is used beyond the marketing department; we must take it. On this very theme, InSites’ Annelies Verhaeghe presented a rousing limerick extolling the virtues of genuinely listening to customers using observational research.

Alongside such visions of the future of research and how we can harness the digital consumer, there were numerous opportunities for researchers of all levels to hone their craft by listening to the experiences of industry experts, as well as those with more diverse backgrounds. Valuably, not all skills discussions were related to the process of research. Aptly named ‘Hothouses’, held in a steaming, packed seminar room included a talk by Executive Coach Paul Vittles outlining the necessity to step back from one’s work and focus on wider issues such as colleague satisfaction.

One of the most insightful lessons reminded us researchers that we should practice more of what we preach – ironically provided by a journalist (Brian Cathcart), in collaboration with Neil Swann (SwanUpping). Five tenets of effective journalism were introduced, followed by their potential application to the market research environment. Despite ignoring 80% of them in this blog, I summarize the rules below and hope we can all learn from them in the future.

1. Get to the point: the punchline comes first and the background – why the man bit the dog – is woven in beneath
2. Humanise the message: think about people before policies – use case studies/typologies that allow the audience to relate
3. Hierarchy of information must be clear: Presentations must be client focused, not producer focused – each chart should do a small number of things very well, in a clear and logical order
4. Make every word count: The best words are plain words, short words – and few of them
5. Ration the numbers: where possible change numbers into pictures; 28% becomes just over one quarter

Getting up early is not my favorite start of the day, but for the WARC Conference on Advertising Performance I was happy to make an exception and that’s how I ended up in my car at 5.45 AM, heading to Lille Europe to take the Eurostar to London. Exactly 15 hours later, I was back where I started – home. But I brought some insights, inspiration and great stories back with me. If you keep an eye on InSites’ activities, you will sooner or later find out where the inspiration took us, but right now I already want to share some insights and some great stories.

Insights

• Emotions are the best predictor of advertising performance. The only problem is that there does not seem to be a consensus yet on how to measure emotions.
• Great advertising (and great marketing for that matter) requires a model of how humans work rather than a model of how advertising works. Fortunately, at InSites Consulting, we use both.
• Advertising always works. A report from Deutsche Bank revealed that any company that spends money on advertising & promotion, shows a better financial result compared to companies who don’t.
• Consistency in advertising works.
• If a viral movie has not gone euh… viral within 8 weeks, it will probably never do.

Stories

• During the first World War, British prime minister Kitchener was the first to use the power of advertising. The posters he used to recruit for the army might seem pretty straightforward now, but they had a tremendous impact. Kitchener expected to recruit 300.000 young men in 6 months. However, with the poster campaign he managed to recruit 750.000 young men in 3 weeks. Why? First of all, there was little or no other advertising at that time. But more importantly, there was a common need to defend the country – the message was relevant to the nation!
• In Korea, Turkey and Serbia, there is a countdown system that shows car drivers when the traffic lights will turn green. Because of this simple call for patience, the number of accidents due to ignoring red lights has decreased substantially. The Koreans were really thorough in testing this: they also experimented with a green signal to have drivers stop instead of a red light. Not very successful.
• Paul Graham had a great metaphor to convince his clients to use social media. Imagine you have a party coming up and you really want people to think you are a funny guy. So months in advance you start making this great billboard, with shiny colors, laughing faces and a clear message: “I am funny”. Now on the night of the party, you go stand in the middle of the room, holding up your billboard for an hour and then leaving home, excited to see the results of your post-test the day after. Wouldn’t you have a better chance to reach your objective if you work the room, go have a chat with people, tell some jokes and have a good time? Great story, but I am wondering if some advertisers might think: “I will put up a big screen in the room and play a hilarious commercial. That will do the trick.”
• Just adding “Drink Coca-Cola” instead of “Coca-Cola” on the Coke fridges all over the world, resulted in a sales increase of 20%. Apparently, it sometimes is that obvious.
• In the ‘90ies, Felix cat food was a rather new brand challenging market leader Whiskas. In one year, Felix only had one campaign that they kept running, consistently showing the same cartoon with the Felix cat (who is probably called Felix), while Whiskas launched 10 different campaigns, one for each innovation they launched. The ad spending of Felix was only half of the ad spending of Whiskas. Nevertheless, in that year, Felix became the new market leader and left Whiskas with a lot of things to think about. Consistency in advertising being one of them.

And to end with, a great quote from Sir Chris Powell, who has decades of experience in advertising: “Make it good in the first place, rather than measuring your failures.” It won’t surprise that we have some good solutions to help you with that

Tom De Ruyck (Senior R&D Manager) was one of the speakers at the Mobile Research Conference in London at the beginning of this week.  Tom presented the results of the InSites Ultimate Twitter Study, To tweet or not to tweet, that’s the question!

As a wrap-up of the conference Manfred Mareck of ESOMAR interviewed Tom, discussing the currents trends in mobile research. Check out the podcast online.

Want to find out more about the Mobile Research Conference, check Twitter #mrc2010 or contact Tom De Ruyck.

On March 9, 2010 Tom De Ruyck & Niels Schillewaert will be presenting the Ultimate Twitter Study at the Mobile Research Conference 2010 in London, UK.

InSites Consulting conducted the largest study ever on why and how people are using Twitter. To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question! and what the ‘Twittersphere’ can bring to market research.

Interested in joining the conference, register now online!

Yesterday evening MRS celebrated the best in the research industry at the Research Awards 2009 in London. InSites Consulting was nominated for 2 awards

• IJMR Collaborative Research Award for Join the research: participant-led open-ended questions by Annelies Verhaeghe, Niels Schillewaert & Tom De Ruyck
• Best Conference Presentation for the Pecha Kucha session of Niels Schillewaert.

Niels Schillewaert, Managing Partner at InSites Consulting was the lucky one to bring home the Best Conference Presentation Award 2009 for his Pecha Kuch session at the Research 2009 Conference.

What the judges said:

A riveting, bravura performance. Seamlessly supported by 20 brilliant slides, Niels took only 6 minutes 40 seconds to communicate his cogently argued view of ‘creative destruction’ as an inevitable, but exciting, future for Market Research. His presentation neatly encapsulated all the main themes of the 2009 Conference, including (quite masterly) storytelling.

Today Econsultancy announced its winners of the 2009 Innovation Awards. InSites Consulting is one of the lucky few to receive one of these awards, more specifically Innovation in Online Marketing Research or Customer Insight.

Our winning entry: Social media nethnography Click here for your free download.

We developed a new research paradigm called social media netnography that makes use of user-generated content on social media to answer a certain research question. The approach challenges the traditional research process in all phases. It helps marketers and researchers to enclose new quality information which is not easily available via traditional research. At the same time the methodology respects the research ecosystem because it does not demand the cooperation of research participants.

What the jury said: “This is how a great deal of research will be conducted in the future and a step change in the way that companies can get insight. Great use of user-generated content to answer questions in a way which makes invasive questions unnecessary.”

Want to find out more? Contact our ForwaR&D Lab team.

I attended the IJMR Research Methods Forum ‘Stop asking questions, start listening’. The venue was promising: ‘The Royal Society’. I felt honored to see Isaac Newton’s original manuscript and be at the very place where Darwin introduced his theory of evolution. But quite frankly if I transfer it to observational research as I observed it at the research forum, Darwin’s theory might not hold for observational research!

I somewhat expected to see more state of the art observational and ethnographical studies and methods. Not necessarily much about social media, but how about illustrations of how we can empower participants to provide us with insights we could not get 10-20 years ago. What happens if you give people a camera, if you ask them to record a movie of their behaviors and tag the content or ask a different crowd to interpret the observational reports of other participants or even ethnographers? As Darwin might say, things have evolved. Yet the forum placed a great deal of importance on relatively traditional, old-school techniques. My expectations were not completely met in terms of real contemporary observational research.

Still, as always there was some interesting food for thought. Here are the main take-aways:

Phyllis Macfarlane rightfully pointed out that nowadays more data are available than ever before and that clients review their spending like never before due to the economic downturn. These two ingredients could be a lethal combination for us market researchers.

‘Yes’, there is still a sexy job for the statisticians among us – in the end who is going to analyze all these data – and ‘No’ it is not because there is a lot of data on social media that it is accurate!

Phyllis illustrated a web mining experiment which led her to conclude that:

• opinion leaders are the ones who post more regularly on the web, but they are not necessarily more critical or negative …
• a lot of the sentiment that is expressed online was neutral, so the question remains: what we can do with it?
• the coding needs a lot of human input and it is time consuming and expensive

I would have loved to hear more about it, but Phyllis was right when she said we need more triangulation in the research that we do!

Roy Langmaid gave a traditional but inspiring view on listening for the future in terms of co-creation. We need to work at “relational depth” with participants and therefore need the following core conditions:

• empathy
• an unconditional positive regard for the folks we are working with
• be dependably real or authentic

Due to the myth of the open mind researchers are often hampered in what they should actually observe. Too often we listen to the opinions “about” the participant, not “to” the real opinions as such. We also want ‘the toplines’ right away so we can get to closure and confirmation quickly. But co-creation is not about short term problem solving, it is about “creating possibility”. No one seems to hear the creation in co-creation, actually. The magic of co-creation is not about getting a lot of people together, but about changing the normal and interrupting the existing culture. If we can achieve that, then we have possibility.

“When we want to get real observations we need to observe actual consumers, when they do the things they do at their normal time and place”, said Philly Desai. We should not extract them from their natural and normal context. According to Philly Desai there are 5 areas where ethnography is of interest:

I. Retail navigation
II. Product development
III. Life styles and culture
IV. Urban ethnography
V. Habitual action

Michelle Harrison illustrated that we can use deliberate listening when we have to deal with issues:

• which are characterized by complexity & uncertainty
• that tackle justice or ethics
• which relate to difficult tradeoffs which have to be made
• where true deliberation is needed and a decision has not been made yet

It was hard to find the figurative gorilla and black swan in what Paul Edwards presented. A couple great and appropriate quotes: “Thinking is more interesting than knowing but less interesting than looking” (Goethe); “In the long history of mankind those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed” (Darwin); “Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream” (Muggeridge).
And the future will tell, Paul, if Twitter will last … .

According to Ed Keller’s word of mouth research 76% of it happens offline, 2/3 is positive and it is does have impact! When advertising influences word of mouth than there is 20% more chance that it includes a strong recommendation to buy.

I am still trying to figure out what opinion polls have with observation …

Adam Philips shed some good light on the ethical challenges for observational research. The bottom line is we need to treat people with respect, avoid dubious technology and not use technologies that also serve a marketing purpose. Things have changed! It would not be that easy to take and publish a photo of peeing kids nowadays as it was the case in the mass observation social research in the UK back in 1937. Several people would consider it as inappropriate to picture kids this way …

I am just wondering how far we take this? Are we also not allowed to look at people’s public Facebook page and make some kind of interpretation of it?

All in all, I got some inspiration but my feedback to MRS / IJMR would be simple. As animals and humans are evolving quickly, market research needs to adapt to remain meaningful and prevail. By focusing on that evolution and using it towards our own as well as our clients’ advantage, we can all come out ahead.

Christophe Vergult is Managing Partner and Director Customer Experience at InSites Consulting.

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

‘Referral value’, as many customers share their experiences with a company with others. And that matters. Positive recommendations generate new customers (referrals) and bring value to the company. Many companies still have a single focus on the traditional, individual ‘value chain’ of customer experience, or how they can decrease churn and cross-sell and up-sell among existing clients. Nevertheless for many companies the true value of investing in compelling customer experiences lies in the potential referral value.

As such, marketers need to understand how client conversations contribute to the value of their company. What is the current referral value of the customer base? Which customer touch points matter? What drives positive conversations for each touch point?

What are you most proud of?

Ask me the same question in a year, and I hope I can say we have successfully established our office in the UK. First steps have already been taken, but within a year we want to have moved forward substantially: having built a solid team of experienced and enthusiastic people based in London, being recognized in the UK market for our innovative research beliefs and techniques, and being trusted by major brands as their market research partner on an international level.

What has caught you lately?

Recently we set up a ‘360° video ethnography’ test together with a retailer. With this joint R&D study we aimed to develop a consumer driven alternative for traditional mystery shopping. Consumers were asked to record their store visit with a ‘spy cam’, and tag and comment different scenes afterwards. A large group of consumers were exposed to a selection of those scenes and invited to tag and comment them as well. The data have been analyzed both via text analytics and traditional observational analysis techniques. The results proved to be very insightful and lead to a very actionable level of recommendations.

What did your morning look like today?

To start with I had 1 extra hour of sleep due to the shift to winter hour I primarily introduced new members of the customer experience team at InSites to our beliefs and research offering in this domain. In between regular trips to our London office and client visits in Belgium and the Netherlands it was a relief to be present in our Ghent office for a quite relaxing morning with internal meetings.

Let’s end with a ‘quote of the day’!

I can never remember quotes with more than 2 words… ‘No fear!’, lately often heard in the InSites’ office when we are talking about our plans

A few months ago Niels Schillewaert, Managing Partner InSites Consulting received the nomination ‘Best Conference Presentation‘ for his Pecha Kucha session at Research 2009. We are delighted to inform you that our paper Join the research: participant-led-open-ended questions has now been selected by the IJMR (International Journal of Market Research) Executive Editorial Board as one of this year’s finalists for the IJMR Collaborative Research Award. Congratulations to the entire team involved in the development of this project!

The winners will be announced on Monday 14 December 2009 at the MRS Research Awards in London.