InSites Blog

Mid-August Kees De Jong (CEO – Survey Sampling International) launched Research Voice, an advisory board composed of senior executives from Bernett, Cambiar, GfK NOP, M/A/R/C, Nielsen, SSI and of course InSites Consulting. De Jong’s idea for a unique industry-wide initiative that supports, rather than berates, people who give their time and opinions in marketing research.

The aim of this initiative is to develop an own research-on-research project with the goal of enhancing the respondent experience.

Advisory board member Niels Schillewaert, Managing Partner at InSites Consulting, appeals to people from all areas of marketing research to join the initiative. Everyone can learn from each other, he stresses.

“All stakeholders are affected if people no longer participate in research – agencies, subcontractors, and eventually end users. I cannot imagine marketers flying blind without any – or wrong – market insights. Research should become sexy and cool again, not intrusive, frustrating and boring.”

For more information, contact niels.schillewaert@insites.eu

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the UBA event organized to celebrate the 60th anniversary of UBA.

Jacques Séquéla was the first and in my opinion best keynote speaker during the event: he kicked off his presentation with a lot of humor, optimism and creativity. During one hour Jacques inspired us with a speech that was both entertaining and inspiring. He talked about the history of the advertising profession: what initially could have been (wrongly) perceived as being a speech of how good advertising was in the early days, backed up with some nice illustrations of early days first cinema campaign of Charles Avar and later work of Jacques developed for Citroën, soon turned into a critical meta-analysis of changes in society and the changing roles brands and related advertising have to play.

According to Jacques advertising during the early days was about repetition of simple messages -“Je lave plus blanc”- in a society of accumulation (until the ’60). With the arrival of cinema, products became ‘stars’ in a society that evolved towards a society of consumption (until ’80): advertising during that time was about seduction. Actual themes related to dreams, risks and humor. An example of advertisement for Citroen was shown where the product as such was actually not shown, but the soul of the products strongly communicated… something rarely dared nowadays….

In the decade of the ’90s brand values increase in importance and need to be social responsible, fair and environmental friendly. Example of the famous Apple computer and The Independent are nice illustrations around the new value themes.

Jacques ended his presentation with an interesting observation that the values have evolved from masculine (competition, strength, ambition…) towards the more feminine values of caring, creating and engaging. Key challenge for us as marketers is the fact of 360/365: we now have to deal with a consumer or’ conso-zappeur’ that has access to multiple media channels on a permanent basis. The length of publicity campaigns will become shorter and shorter and the message still needs to be transferred. Advertising will become more and more shared and even co-created in a world that has evolved from a vertical system of sending or bombarding message to the consumer towards a model where the advertisement is the molecule for a circular movement that triggers and encourages conversations amongst consumers.

Earl Wilkinson described the evolution and need for newspapers to reinvent themselves. He used a nice metaphor of forest, trees and leaves with the idea that we are entering the age of micro media: instead of talking about releases, audiences and target groups, we have to start reflecting in terms of highly customized and contextualized messages to community members.

According to Earl the value perception of new media is still lower compared to traditional newspapers: if traditional print would obtain a value index of 100, e-paper would rate only 47, mobile web 35 and website 19. However, the role that different media can play has been nicely illustrated by the example that you probably would not pay a penny for reading in the newspaper that a house in China was burnt down by accident, whereas you would pay a lot to learn by SMS that your own house is own fire right now! He concluded his presentation by stating that newspapers are certainly not dead, but that the challenge is about finding the right content for the right platform: for instance newspapers could provide you with thematic in-depth articles on topics of interest, whereas for instance the role and added value of mobile phone content is in simple, factual but location based content. An example could be, the nearest tube station or teller machine.

Lindsey Clay from Thinkbox, the UK organization studying the effectiveness of TV, presented many findings of UK research with the aim of convincing the audience about “the renaissance of TV”. Although I have not yet taken the time to visit www.thinkbox.tv very extensively, I could not help thinking while listening to her presentation that some of the results have been looked at with a certain love for the good old ‘telli’. It’s true that with statistics you can prove about anything… Anyway, Lindsay had 5 bold facts or statements about television in the UK landscape for the reader to judge:

• UK is watching more TV – UK people watch 1 hour more than 10 years ago. According to Lindsey, the switch from analogue towards digital television could be part of the explanation here. TV gets a media share of 54%.
• Television is still the most effective medium: from my research experience TV attribution is typically overrated by respondents and gets attributed even when there was no TV in the media budget.
• Television is still the most dominant medium amongst youth with 47% of media share! Very surprising and counter intuitive from my experience with new media…
• Technology is good news for television: we can no longer watch television from home but on all types of devices increasing the exposure. PVR’s that enable people to deferred viewing and skip advertising blocks would actually increase ads exposure by 2% according to UK research.
• TV and online is the magic formula: referring to website enables call for action and triggers impulse buying.

Peter Hinssen had the challenge of presenting to the audience just after the lunch break. In my opinion he managed to deliver both an entertaining and interesting presentation about the influence of digital media on our way of working and living. Peter started his presentation with Moore’s law stating that IT capacity doubles every 18 months to describe the enormous pace of digitalization in our society: whereas the 25 past years the technology has only got into the hands of the customers, during the next 25 years digital media will be really introduced and adopted in our everyday life and become the new real. This will of course drastically influence our way of working and living.

Companies will need to adapt their business models toward this new digital reality: future consumers will have zero tolerance towards digital failure, whereas in the early days of internet it was normal for a website to breakdown from time to time. For generation Y, good is enough and does not necessarily need be perfect. Last but not least, organizations and marketers will need to learn to lose control: in times of sharing and co-creation the company can create platforms of enhancement but no longer control everything related to its brand experience.

Paul Isakson described new marketing with an interesting number of examples and adjectives. According to Paul the future of marketing is collaborative, generous, experimental, helpful, imaginative, immediate, supportive, playful, customizable, informative, redeeming, adaptable, participatory and adventurous. He showed a number of interesting examples from T-mobile, location based services, Domino pizza’s and Roku’s reward/HP.

Stephan Loerke of the World Federation of Advertising confronted the audience with the changing new economic realities where Western markets will decrease in importance and new players are likely to come from emerging markets of China, India, and Brazil. Patchi is an Indian chocolate that could potentially rival with Belgian and Swiss chocolate, new great wines could come from China and no longer from France. The only recipe against these upcoming new forces, are stronger brands built with good advertising. Stephan underlined the virtues of advertising by showing the correlation between advertising investment and wealth GDP growth, increased competition and awareness leading to an improved price/quality offering for consumers, fueling a diverse media landscape and sponsoring cultural and sports events. The interested reader can find more detailed information on www.valueforadvertising.org

As sponsor of Make-A-Wish Belgium (a charity organization giving children with life-threatening medical conditions the chance to fulfill their dreams) some InSites employees were invited to join a special concert by Clouseau. The concert was organized last Sunday in benefit of Make-A-Wish.

InSites Consulting has been sponsoring Make-A-Wish for several years. This year we already donated 16.000EUR. Want to find out more about our charity donations? Click here

And yes, we were a little bit impressed by Koen & Kris.

Media Marketing published their 25th birthday edition of MM, giving their readers a special treat. In this September edition they introduce the top 25 of young people that are believed to be promising minds in the Media & Advertising business. Dennis Claus, Senior Research Consultant at InSites Consulting is one of them. Interested in reading the article? Click here

Want to know what your customers need before they know themselves? Are you looking to understand the latest techniques in marketing research that will put you ahead of the game?

Sign up for our ‘Taking Consumers Insights forward‘ – Smartees on Thursday 22 October (2pm – 6pm) and hear how marketers are using new research techniques to gain new consumer insights.

Find out more about the full program!

Tom De Ruyck is Senior ForwaR&D Lab Consultant at InSites Consulting

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

Online Research Communities are definitely the hottest topic in market research today. No self-respecting conference is complete without at least a session devoted to research communities. Blending the authentic voice of the consumer with great ROI, online communities are providing a new way for brands and organizations to get in touch with their customers.

Online research communities come in many forms, from closed to open, from short-term to ongoing, from branded to themed,… In most cases research methods are fused to gain rich consumer insights: polls and surveys, forum and chat discussions, besides a broad range of techniques to observe consumers’ online and offline behavior.

We are investing a lot of time and effort in this area. In close collaboration with Stephan Ludwig, the PhD student we sponsor at the University of Maastricht, my colleague Dado and I are constantly optimizing our community research approach in order to provide our clients with fresh insights and to get the maximum out of their research budgets.

What are you most proud of?

I am particularly proud of how we – over the past 2 years – have integrated the power of social media into both our marketing thinking and our way of conducting market(ing) research studies. The latest by developing a whole portfolio of new methods and techniques ranging from ‘Online Discussion Groups’ and ‘Research Communities’ over ‘User-Created Brainstorms’ and ‘Post-its’ to ‘Social Media Netnography’ and ‘Multimedia Ethnography’. It is just great to be part of our FowaR&D Lab team that is responsible for most of the research behind all of this!

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

The context in which we life has changed drastically over the past 5 years due to the revolution taken place on the web. Today’s consumers are empowered and smarter than ever! They literally have the ability to make or break brands. On the other hand, they are willing to give companies a lot of feedback and they even want to co-create new products and services with them (according to the 2009 edition of InSites’ MC DC). This is an opportunity for smart companies: listen to your consumers, get a dialogue with them, understand the issues they are dealing with and eventually co-create products, advertising and branding campaigns with them!

Secondly, I believe that also research agencies have to change the way they are interacting with people: their research participants. If we keep on doing research like most of us do it today, we will have serious difficulties to find people who are willing to fill out surveys that are too long and contain the same old questions over and over again. We have to connect with our participants, give them enough feedback and respect! Ultimately, we need to make our research an experience they can’t resist.

What has surprised you lately?
Last month, BAQMaR – the Belgian association of researchers were I am steering committee member of – was nominated for an ESOMAR award. It shows that the Belgian research scene is more vibrant than ever and that marketing research can be COOL, both as an industry and a profession!

What did your morning look like today?
I am leaving for a holiday of 3 weeks through the country side of Croatia (J), so I am finishing-up the last bits of some of my projects…

Let’s end with a ‘quote of the day’!
“Beta is a state of mind!”
Looking at the speed of change within our industry this has to be(come) the motto of every market researcher! The biggest changes and challenges are still lying in front of us. The best is yet to come and it is the task of our R&D department to get the most out of it for market research purposes in order to help our clients to connect with their customers in the best possible way.

Contact Tom De Ruyck
E-mail: tom.deruyck@insites.eu / Phone number: (+32) 9 269 14 07
Follow Tom’s updates on Twitter: @tomderuyck

ESOMAR announced six award winners at this year’s General Congress in Montreux, Leading the way ethically, responsibly, creatively. InSites Consulting won 2 of them, the Young Researcher Award and Best Overall Paper. Congratulations to everybody who helped accomplish these projects!

Annelies Verhaeghe, Senior ForwaR&D Lab Consultant won the Young Researcher of the Year award with her paper on aging: ‘And they lived happily ever after…‘. The Young Researcher of the Year Award was launched this year. Researchers under the age of 30 were asked to submit a project on one of three broad social issues: world poverty, aging or the environment. More than 80 entries were received from over 25 different countries.

Annelies used social media nethnography and co-creation to better understand how health conditions can affect the elderly and their care givers. Inspired by her grandmother, she delivered a wealth of insight into health related anxieties, with wide ranging practical and easily implemented recommendations for those who provide family and institutional care. What the jury said: “Verhaeghe has shown innovative thinking throughout, which has led a first-rate piece of work. An excellent example of exploratory research into an increasingly important aspect of humanities.’

Annelies Verhaeghe: “I am of course very happy to win this award for me, the ForwaR&D Lab team and InSites Consulting. Recently I saw an interview with Ferran Adria, Chef of El Bulli, on television where he was reacting on the several awards El Bulli received as best restaurant of the world. He was claiming that the fact that you win an award means that you have a certain influence on the industry. I can only hope that for my paper on aging this can also be true for the market research industry. We have ignored spontaneous consumer feedback for a long time and I hope that my paper illustrates what we can learn from social media. Moreover, it would be satisfying if health care professionals, caregivers or governments can put my recommendations into practice.”

The second award for InSites Consulting was Best Overall Paper, the ‘Fernanda Monti Award’. This award rewards the best paper in any field presented at the ESOMAR Congress. ‘The Longest Day. Cultural differences in CSR‘ by Tom De Ruyck, Niels Schillewaert, Annelies Verhaeghe and Michael Friedman. Corporate (Social) Responsibility is high on the agenda of almost every national and international company, but little is understood about what it does to a brand or how a brand should deal with it. ‘The Longest Day’ delivered the analysis from an in-depth multi-country study with insights into the relationship between corporate social responsibility and branding across multiple industries and supported by multiple clients. What the jury said: “This paper show a real understanding of business issues by providing its actual impact on decision making.”

Want to find out more about our ForwaR&D Lab team? Visit www.insites.eu

Last Thursday, we attended the Combell VIP Event. Combell, our hosting partner celebrated their 10th anniversary. The IT department, i.e. Gunter, Joost, Ken, Frederick, Bram and myself were invited to represent InSites Consulting.

The festivities took place in an exclusive tent in the garden of the new Combell offices in Ghent. We were the first (of a total of some 200 invitees) to arrive at the party at 18h30, since punctuality is an important aspect of the IT employee…

At the start of the event, Gunter was interviewed by none other than Kris Borgraeve. You will soon be able to admire the interview on Combell’s website. The others were invited into the group photo. After having the picture taken, we were treated to some delicious appetisers. During these exclusive starters we could enjoy a performance by Elke Bruyneel, Delavega’s lead singer.

At 21h30 the Combell team was presented, treating the guests with the rest of the walking dinner. All this was spiced up with some music: Elle Yana (a rising Ghent talent) and Partie Party (the Biezebaaze singer’s new band).

From 22h00 on, the cocktail bar was open, where we could get Caipirinha, Amaretto Sour, Whiskey Sour… We are confident that we represented the InSites colors well. The VIP Event was a success, and we would not mind repeating the experience. It was great to know the Combell colleagues a bit better!

If you’re involved in retailing right now you’re probably trying to figure out how to turn a tight marketing budget into sustainable success. A visit to Retailday at the Kinepolis in Brussels on Thursday 24 September could give you the help you need.

The Retailday will feature talks by industry leaders giving you a practical understanding of

• how the market is doing now and what the future holds
• how to increase the efficiency of your marketing while still achieving your sales targets
• how much retailing now happens online
• why service remains essential but can still be kept affordable
• the growing importance of integrated technologies in shops
• and the most important question of all: How do you do all these thing in practice?

Our own Managing Partner Christophe Vergult and Annelies Verhaeghe, Senior Consultant ForwaR&D Lab, will be presenting ‘At your Service‘, the results of a study among Belgian consumers and how they’re experiencing shops and retailing in the downturn.

Check out the full program and sign up online.

Each year around Christmas, Diageo plans a big campaign to promote their Whisky brand Johnnie Walker. For the campaign of 2008-2009 they decided to extend the television campaign with an online activation campaign. In order to better manage the content and set-up of the campaign, they wanted to get a better insight in how their target group was. What are their interests, ambitions and opinions? How can we best target them?

The blind spot

How well do we really know our customers? Our insights are always obtained by deliberately interviewing participants. This brings us to questions like how good do participants know themselves and how well do they want us to know them?

• People are not always aware of their own habits or behavior
• Research participants forget to mention certain relevant aspects
• Humans are also social species and hence influence one another

Online observational research

In order to overcome these shortcomings, researchers have engaged in observational research. For long observational research has been done offline. With the rise of social media however, more and more people live part of their life online. The success of these social networks brings a new opportunity for market researchers. They can now engage in participative observation by becoming friends with research participants on social networks.

The case: becoming friends with Johnnie Walker consumers

In cooperation with Diageo, the InSites ForwaR&D Lab became friends with Johnnie Walker consumers on social networks. The goal was to get a more in-depth understanding of the online life of this target group by observing what they were saying and doing on social media.

Based on an online screener questionnaire, we determined if a certain male belonged to the target groups. Those participants who qualified the criteria were asked to become a friend of us on their social networks. For a week, we followed our new friends online. With the aid of web scraping software, we extracted information from each research participants e.g. profile information, group membership, tags for pictures, conversations with other social network members and so on. The analysis was done with the aid of text analytics.

The input of the online safari was used by Diageo in order to adapt their initial idea for their online campaign. It also served as inspiration to built the website. Despite the fact that they knew already a lot based on qualitative research, the study also changed their beliefs about their target group.

Want to find out more about this study? Contact Annelies Verhaeghe, Senior ForwaR&D Lab Consultant (Annelies.verhaeghe@insites.eu)