InSites Blog

Every marketer has a few old fashioned marketing books somewhere in a box or a cupboard. We’re offering you a chance to recycle them and get a FREE copy of Steven Van Belleghem’s latest book The Conversation Manager in return.

Here’s how in three easy steps:

1. Bring your old marketing books to the Stichting Marketing Conference on 4 or 5 December 2009 in ICC Ghent
2. Throw your old books in one of the big ‘InSites Consulting’ rubbish bins (look out for the recycling logo)
3. We’ll give you a voucher you can exchange for Steven’s book when it’s published in February

Hope to see you at our booth at the Stichting Marketing Conference. The conversation revolution’s here!

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

Implicit measurement is something we’re hearing a lot about.

What does it mean? There are many different definitions. A basic one is that, with implicit measurement, researchers seek to infer the contents of mental life through experimental procedures. This type of measurement is thought to be beyond the respondent’s awareness and beyond his or her subjective control.

A lot of claims have been made about implicit measurement, but research does not support all of them. At InSites Consulting, we are exploring and implementing some thoroughly researched and theoretically sound implicit measurement techniques.

What can we do with it? We think that, properly done, it can add an interesting dimension to branding studies, concept tests, and many other domains. More to come shortly!

What are you most proud of?

Lately, I have been lucky enough to implement a couple of long-term and ambitious R&D projects, for example our work on implicit measurement. Another interesting project involves tracking the outcomes of online discussion groups, from the perspective of participants, moderators, and clients. The scale and ambition of these projects is really quite amazing to me, and I feel very proud that I work for a company that can see the need for such research, and take it on enthusiastically.

What has surprised you lately?

So this isn’t necessarily related to market research or InSites Consulting, but I was surprised to hear that Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian prime minister, was chosen to be the first president of the European Union. Apparently many Belgians were also surprised…

What did your morning look like today?

This morning, I worked on developing syntax (a small computer program) to run the analyses for some implicit measurement tests that we are doing. It was a little bit complicated, but went just fine in the end. I also did some analyses for a project on youth marketing that we are running with MTV Networks. There’s a lot to do at InSites Consulting, but the work is always rewarding!

Let’s end with a ‘quote of the day’!

Assessing the unconscious in terms of processing subliminal stimuli is analogous to evaluating the intelligence of a fish based on its behavior out of water.

This is a quotation from the psychologist John Bargh, a tremendously brilliant researcher who has done a great deal of work on unconscious or “implicit” thought and behavior. His point is an interesting one, which is that, in addition to having a very developed conscious mind; humans have a complex system of unconscious processing which can guide intricate behavior in the absence of direct conscious input. Previous research on this unconscious mind has been conducted in such a way (e.g. presenting stimuli for a very short duration) that has led to an erroneous picture of the unconscious mind as being simple and inflexible, when in fact the opposite is true.

The full program of the ESOMAR Global Healthcare Conference is final and InSites Consulting is chosen to present not less than two cases.

On Monday 1 March 2010, Annelies Verhaeghe (ESOMAR Young researcher of 2009) will present ‘And they lived happily ever after…‘. Her award-winning paper on analysing user generated content on social media to increase the elderly’s quality of life.

The same day Niels Schillewaert will co-present with Hans Schmeits and Rudi Van Campenhout of UCB Pharma. Health 2.0, social media as the central nervous system for learning about epilepsy.

Find out more about the conference here.

The ESOMAR Qualitative conference is always a quite thrilling experience. This year’s edition welcomed 130 researchers from all over the world in a hot Marrakech (28-30 degrees Celsius in November… a dream for Middle-Europeans like me) and they had one thing in common: they ARE great listeners.

Next to that, they seem more creative than the average quant researchers. It was actually the first conference where I saw a peer researcher working for Nielsen Australia dancing multiple times on stage during her presentation, remembering that she wanted to be a Bollywood movie star in her child years. It was also the first time ever I have met the CEO of a UK based research agency looking like a rock star: long hair cut, cool shirt and glittering earring. So ESOMAR Qualitative is about to become the new” X-Factor”, “I bet you can dance” or “Idols” for the research society. Which is good really, because it is our strategic intent too, to make market research sexier after all.

I was presenting our Even Better than the Real Thing paper on authenticity and Generation Y together with the Consumer Insight Manager of Levi’s Europe, Dirk Van Kemseke. And we proudly came back from Marrakech with a nomination for the ESOMAR Excellence Award. Click here for a conference review.

Social media is the Tsunami that will allow the socialization of banks, is what I consider the key message of the SOMESSO conference on ‘Leveraging Corporate Social Media in the Finance Sector’ in Zürich, 3rd of November.

However, we are not there yet! According to Forbes Global 2000 – 2009, only 5% of the top 100 banks acknowledged having a presence in social media… That all speakers consider this as a missed opportunity goes without saying.

Benedikt Köhler kicked off by stressing that social media is here to stay and will continue to grow explosively in the next few years:  in Germany, 2 out of 3 onliners are on social media, 90% of the youngsters use them, social media grow the strongest in generation 60+ and it is proven a prime time medium. While trust in banks declined drastically, consumers increasingly put their trust in peers – online, by the tool called social media.

To enable participation in this community of peers, the 2.0 corporation should incorporate social media in 5 key dimensions of its organization:  Marketing & Sales, Research & Innovation, Support & Customer relations, Human resources/employer branding and Public Relations.

Examples of banks that implemented social media successfully in their corporate strategy are Mint.com (20.000 followers on Twitter), Missouri Bank (Facebook fanpage) & Wells Fargo (hosts several blogs and an own virtual world where you can learn how to use your money wisely).

Köhler closed with next steps for banks and companies in general:

1. Chart your company’s social media landscape
2. Develop a strategical view of your company’s dialogical future
3. Build strong and sustainable user experiences in social media and give users a chance to live your brand online.

Christophe Langlois argued for a phased introduction of banks into social media: learn, listen, participate, engage, measure and improve. If not ready to participate, it’s time to learn and to start listening NOW! Banks need to increase their official presence on social media and try to be different by putting people first, having the right tone of voice, providing relevant content and make it easy and rewarding for ‘members’ to participate. BUT, for now, “It’s better to be boring, than to do nothing”. Start now…, leverage later, is the credo! Langlois illustrated the principle with different success stories of banks supporting their customers on Twitter.

Networking is not new, it has been happening for decades! The social web only makes it more powerful: more efficient, more transparent and less controlled. According to Johannes Haus, banks need to pro-actively engage with the outside, be authentic, have no fear of criticism and have trust in employees to carry responsibility.

Lee Bryant suggested the incorporation of social media into a ‘social business design’, allowing improved workforce collaboration, customer participation and partnerships & service innovation. Real time social networks as info filter and influencer will constitute the future of corporate and retail banking. For corporate banking this means personalized info services, conversational relationships, expertise and knowledge sharing and avoiding commoditization. Applications for retail banking are brand communities, peer-to-peer help; self-service, user-generated information, better tools and tracker feeds, lower acquisition and transaction costs. Bryant concluded that information asymmetries are falling away and banks will be competing in the open soon. Intimate, social service is the best protection against this evolution of price sensitivity and commoditization.

According to Anne McCrossan, social media provides banks with a platform to leverage intangible assets like brand culture. Whereas banks are today most importantly communicating about products and services, social media will allow expressing corporate mission, culture and  personality in a cost efficient way. Social media will lead banks to a customer centric business model, whereby being both credible and compelling on the social web is key.

Although very inspiring, I regret the conference did not tackle innovative research methods using social media – social media netnography (online observational research), online safari, co-creation in online communities, etc. – to illustrate new business opportunities in the financial sector. Let’s make it my personal mission to put them on next years’ agenda.

To be continued…
For the slide share presentations, see http://somesso.com/

On Monday Joeri Van den Bergh, Director Kids & Youth Research and Managing Partner at InSites Consulting presented at the ESOMAR Qualitative Research Congress. His paper on authenticity just got nominated for Best Paper at this ESOMAR Congress.

Download Even better than the real thing – Understanding generation Y’s definition of ‘authenticity’ for the Levi’s brand.

In April 2009 Tom De Ruyck, Senior ForwaR&D Lab Consultant was one of the speakers at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam (NL). Check out his Pecha Kucha presentation on ‘Together we build the future’.

If you want more information, contact Tom De Ruyck.

Save the date: The Next Web conference 2010 is planned on Tuesday April 27.

On 29 October the game console Wii of Nintendo won the MTV Networks Sticky Award. The Award, for the coolest Dutch brand was rewarded at the MTV Networks event Identity in the MTV Studio in Amsterdam (NL). 1200 youngsters were questioned in the research InSites Consulting conducted in cooperation with MTV Networks, the youngsters were asked which brand they perceived as ‘cool’. Wii of Nintendo was ranked first on every aspect, Coca-Cola honorably second.

Check out the full press release online or contact Joeri Van den Bergh, Director Youth Research for more information.

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.

55% of Belgians does not reach the healthy savings buffer of 6 months’ salary. 38% is able to save maximum 100EUR a month. And 20% doesn’t know whether they will get round to saving.

These are some of the conclusions of the fourth annual edition of ‘De Belg & zijn Geld‘ survey, conducted by InSites Consulting in cooperation with De Tijd.

Check out the full press release or contact Dennis Claus for more information.