InSites Blog

On the most recent BAQMaR Conference, Tom De Ruyck launched the ’10 challenges’ that our industry will need to overcome in the coming years. That day, interviews with the speakers of the Conference and some of the attendees were conducted. Niels Schillewaert, Managing Partner at InSites Consulting is one of the interviewees. These videos provide first answers to the questions asked. But BAQMaR wants to go further, including all of you into this discussion about the future of our profession. Take a look at the videos!

And let’s make our industry COOL again!

While writing this blog post, I’m sitting on the train to Belgium. I’m on my way back from Amsterdam, where I attended the kick off of the ‘Givolution’-campaign of Ben & Jerry’s, the legendary ice cream brand.

Although it’s very cloudy and rainy outside, I’m feeling excited. It has been an epic day, and this is how it all started:

Last week I got a call from Kristof De Wulf, one of our Managing Partners, asking me if I could make it to a Ben & Jerry’s event in the Netherlands. Apparently we got invited by the people at Unilever, as an introduction for an upcoming research project we’ll be doing in the coming months. I was about to mention my holiday plans when I heard Kristof say:

Kristof: The event is planned on Monday afternoon and euhm… Mr. Ben & Mr. Jerry will be joining the event in person!
Dado: Like, really BEN & JERRY? The original founders of the brand ??
Kristof: Yes, I know it’s hard to believe!

I immediately postponed my planned holidays. I mean, how much more can you ‘feel’ and ‘experience’ a brand, especially as a market researcher? This had to be the best project kick-off ever!

Ben & Jerry were coming to the Netherlands to set up their campaign called ‘The Givolution’ (www.givolution.nl). The goal: give away 100 free ice creams in the hope that the receivers will give away something else to other people. This way Ben and Jerry hope to establish a true ‘give-away’ chain. And last but not least: they were about to announce that all Ben & Jerry’s flavors will be Fair Trade Certified by the end of 2013.

After two days of nervous excitement I took the train to Amsterdam on Monday morning, without any idea about what was going to happen. I was just going to go with the flow. I arrived in Amsterdam around 11 am. In the morning the press was invited to the Lloyd Hotel, located just near the Central station, where Ben & Jerry would give personal interviews. On my arrival in the hotel, I met one of the brand managers of Ben & Jerry’s, who seemed to be very, I mean very, excited. Let’s face it, meeting the founders of the brand you’re working for is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

I looked around in the crowded room and was about to sit down when I suddenly spotted Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in the corner of the room. No glamorous stars but just two ordinary, easy going guys with a big smile on their faces. They truly embody their brand…

During lunchtime I met one of the attending journalists who interviewed Ben and Jerry earlier on in the morning. I asked her how it went and she replied:
“I was really amazed: two super friendly men with an enormous passion for what they do. While we were talking about typical Dutch food they suddenly started brainstorming together on how they could use typical Dutch ingredients in one of their ice creams…”
Just what I hoped to hear…

Half an hour later, right after lunch, we headed to the centre where Ben and Jerry would hop on a wagon that would take them to the many invited fans, who were impatiently waiting. To my pleasant surprise, I was invited to the wagon as well! Suddenly Ben and Jerry were standing almost just next to me! This was clearly going to be a moment to remember J Off we went, destination: Scoopshop, Leideseplein.

When we arrived minutes later at the Scoopshop, hundreds of fans were standing in line in front of the shop, yelling out loud and applauding for their ‘idols’. It was overwhelming, especially when several photographers & cameras were gathering around the wagon. While leaving the wagon Ben and Jerry immediately started shaking hands with their fans. Again, very low profile and with a big smile for everyone.

Shortly afterwards Ben and Jerry were standing behind the counter of the shop, greeting the shop assistants and asking them to tell more about their experiences. In the mean time people of the team were preparing the necessary for the meet and greet with the fans. Everyone had the opportunity to shake hands with them and a professional photographer made sure it was a moment to cherish. A mythical moment for many fans.

While listening to one of the many interviews that Ben and Jerry gave after the meet & greet, I heard a guy, who was standing just behind me, say to his friend: “Ben & Jerry’s is not a brand, it’s an experience”. After this day I can only agree with that man…

Just before Ben and Jerry left the shop, I took a shot and asked someone to take a picture of me and my new heroes. The cherry on the cake

Both from a personal as from a market research point of view this was truly an amazing day. Being able to meet the original founders of what has become a legendary inspiring brand (or should I say experience) is unforgettable.

In the last interview Ben and Jerry were asked to give their advice to beginning entrepreneurs:
1. Start small
2. Be very passionate about what you do
3. Earn money while doing things ‘right’
“We measure success by how much money we made + how we contributed to the community”

Viva la Givolution! Viva Ben & Jerry’s !

Read the whole story behind Ben & Jerry’s via:

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_&_Jerry%27s
http://www.inc.com/30years/articles/ben-and-jerry.html

The Swedish Market Research Society invited Annelies Verhaeghe at their Swedish Market Research Day on 11 March. Annelies will present her ESOMAR presentation on ‘Getting answers without asking questions’, the evaluation of a TV program based on social media.

For more information about the Swedish Market Research Day, click here or contact Annelies.

Last week I attended the IIR congress ‘Front End of Innovation’ in Amsterdam. As a market researcher with a passion for innovation, and as an employee of a company which fosters innovation in everything we do in order to take research forward, I really looked forward to this event. I was there to be inspired, to hear things I did not know yet and to meet interesting people who shared interest in a common topic: passion for innovation.

I must admit that I returned from this conference with a puzzled mind and mixed feelings. Here are my key take-aways from the congress:

1. Innovation is a serious matter: Probably it was a wrong assumption, but I expected to meet a diverse audience, young at heart and bubbling with energy. Upon my arrival on Monday night, I was surprised about the profile of the attendees: mainly seriously looking men dressed in equally serious suits and ties. Obviously, dresscode should not be a key gauge for ones attitude towards innovation, but I clearly got off on the wrong foot. As a side note, it was interesting to see how dress code was used as a driver for networking: during the breaks, groups of suits and ties and groups with informally dressed people could be observed.

2. Technology comes first: First to speak was Adrian van Hooydonk, Director design from the BMW group. Adrian gave us an exclusive preview of BMW’s new concept car which was developed behind the concept ‘future sustainability and the joy of mobility’. Great car, great design, great technology, all of which was enthusiastically applauded by the audience. Clearly a good kick-off for the congress, men in suits like cars! This was a good example of how future vision can lead to interesting innovations. However, is this the end point? I was pleasantly surprised about one question that was raised by the audience. Concept cars definitely serve a purpose and some elements that were integrated in the concept car will be transferred in the cars we will drive in the future.

Still, this concept car does not break with the rules as it is still a car (4 wheels, a steering wheel, it needs a road, …). What about taking innovation in the car industry one step further by completely rethinking the concept of mobility? Will the concept of a road, 2 lanes, a box on 4 wheels be sustainable in the long run? And what about the joy of mobility? Is mobility really fun in our current world? Interesting food for thought which I reconsidered while driving back from Amsterdam to Ghent on Wednesday… it took me almost 5 hours to drive 220km. Joy of mobility?

3. From pyramids to pancakes: The congress started strongly on Tuesday morning. Josephine Green, Senior Director Trends and Strategy at Philips Design, talked about how to engage with the future differently. During her presentation, Josephine talked about how modern society has changed and how these changes will inevitably impact (i) the way we connect with consumers, (ii) build professional organizations and (iii) go about the innovation process.

In the 20th century, innovation used to be a funnel process that was conducted with a linear mindset: it started with the fuzzy front end where consumer insights and ideas were generated, then it moved to the middle of the funnel where winning ideas were shaped further and ended up by launching the ideas that survived their trip through the innovation funnel. Throughout this process, consumers were mainly passive creatures, who were supplied with new technology and who simply bought the products that met their needs. This approach has been successful for a long time, no doubt about it. Josephine made clear that, in order for this funnel approach to work, organizations require a pyramid structure, with clear hierarchy and sub-divided responsibilities. Leadership within this structure requires planning, budgeting, measuring, evaluating, structuring, controlling. In other words: command and control. This should sound familiar to all of us who have been professionally active in the 20th century.

Things are changing, however. Consumers are increasingly non-passive and did come out of their boxes during the past few years. Innovation has become a circular process – it is happening all the time. Not only we as innovation professionals are involved, but consumers have also taken their role of innovators seriously. In fact, consumers have moved from the back end to the front end of innovation. We have stepped into the century of social innovation, which will demand a very different way of thinking on how we must innovate. We have moved away from the pyramid structure to a flat innovation platform – a pancake – where manufacturers of consumer goods products and consumers are at equal level. As a result, we must reconsider the structured funnel approach of innovation and move towards a circular process that allows strong engagement with the consumer at all times. This is the only way to develop solutions (services and products) WITH consumers instead of FOR consumers. And importantly, also the well established leadership role will have to change. Leadership in the pancake world requires questioning, dreaming, imagining, experimenting, learning, enabling. In other words, we will have to learn to let go and listen to the consumer more intensely.

4. Market research is dead. LONG LIVE MARKET RESEARCH! Apart from the many other interesting speakers – I learned about how sustainability can be a key driver for innovation, how team work and a never-give-up attitude has led to the development of the MP3 technology, that disruptive innovation comes from focusing on the extremes (i.e. people who love your brand and people who hate your brand) rather than looking at the averages, … – there was one provocative statement made on the last congress day that was really eye-opening and divided the audience in 2 groups: “Market research at the early stages of innovation is, at best, useless. At worst, it will be counterproductive”. In other words, you have to develop a vision based on technological capabilities, graft your innovation process on that vision en develop new products against it. No consumers are involved at all.

It should not come as a surprise that I, as a market researcher, strongly disagreed with this statement. In fact, it is directly opposed to the vision of Josephine that was shared earlier on. What about first listening to consumers, understand them inside out, and then develop an innovation vision by using that knowledge. Isn’t this the best approach for developing consumer relevant innovations?

I think I prefer pancakes over pyramids.

Yesterday I attended the second edition of the Webvertising Forum, an event for all those who are interested in digital marketing. So as you would expect, the audience was mostly made up of advertisers and digital agencies.

First to present, was Patrick Marcke from IAB Belgium, who said a few words about the internet population and how online advertising budgets are evolving. Most graphs and insights used, were taken from the MC DC study, an extensive internet study which InSites Consulting conducted in partnership with IAB Europe. (http://mcdc.insites.eu) So, from my point of view, that was a very good start to the day

The forum went on to give a good overview of which digital marketing methods are out there and offered the possibility to do some networking over a cup of coffee and a copious lunch buffet. Miech Rolly from The Parking Lot presented the case study of Pearle, focusing on the fun aspect and the efficient way of using Twitter & Facebook for recruitment of actors/models and the promotion of the campaign. You can still check out the campaign on http://www.thesteamyroom.be and you’ll know exactly what I mean by ‘the fun aspect’.

Guy Makmel, Managing Director at Easyconcepts presented a technology, which acts on user intent to dynamically construct the content of an ad. This way, the ads that are shown to you on a certain site, are determined by certain semantic or behavioral factors. Applications for this technology are mostly on e-commerce sites, travel sites, etc. And the main advantage of it, is that conversion and thus ROI are very easy to measure.

David Warszawski from TradeTracker gave his view on performance based advertising with affiliate marketing and Bruno Van de Moortel from Medialogue spoke about crowdsourcing, giving some nice examples of how you can outsource content creation ànd even ad creation to your own audience.

A very interesting presentation came from Isabelle Driege from the digital agency Emakina. Without using research figures as such, she still threw some interesting digits around, speaking about 2.0, the 360° approach, but most importantly the 365 day conversation that marketers need to have with consumers. She explained that it is not so much about your brand site, as your brand presence. A brand needs to create a positive experience for consumers on all touchpoints, be they pre-sale or post-sale. Only by using a good mix of digital channels to market your products or services, can you achieve that. The main take-away for the marketer in this presentation: “it’s all in the mix”.

Kris Hoet from Duval Guillaume also spoke about touchpoints, focusing a bit more on creative ways to create new kinds of touchpoints, which take full advantage of our current 2.0 situation. Last presentation of the day was a duo presentation by Philippe Belpaire and Michel Tubbax from Roularta Media Group. It made me think of a short poem from “Poems on the underground”, that starts with the phrase “Not much cricket in Hamlet, I overheard a man say.” and ending with “To be honest, I like it that way, the absence of cricket is fine. But should you prefer work that includes it, please note that now, there’s some cricket in mine.” And well yesterday, I noted, that there was some “offline” in the presentation of Philippe and Michel… With this audience, it doesn’t seem very straight forward to mention your offline work and mostly focus on content. But it has to be said, they made a very convincing case. The new partnerships that they have with brands are inspiring. They allow the brand to contribute to the content and get visibility in return, but in a very subtle and natural way.

For me personally, the presentation on Online Educational Marketing by Geert Coppens from Instruxion was the most interesting. It’s a method that responds to the need of the consumers, rather than of the advertiser, by creating an online learning experience for the consumer before he or she is redirected to the page of the advertiser. Basically, the idea is that e.g. the bluetooth feature on a mobile phone becomes more appealing, if you give an animated explanation about what it is and what it can do for you, before prompting people to go ahead an buy it. Check out more examples on http://www.animatedexplanations.com/. What strikes me, is that this is a way of advertising that really responds to the insight that we need to start communicating differently with our consumers, ànd that web 2.0 offers limitless possibilities to do exactly that. It may not be the best way to pitch it, but I would say finally, you no longer need ‘sex’ to sell your product

At the end of 2009 InSites Consulting launched the ‘Taking Christmas Forward’ action inviting our clients to upload their company greetings at www.insites.be/takingchristmasforward. Every greeting got a chance to win a city trip to one of the InSites cities (Ghent – Rotterdam – London – Geneva).

How could you win?

The panelmembers of our TalkToChange Community were able to visit the website and rate the greetings. The company greeting with the highest rating won.

And the winner is Bjorn Verbrugghe, Sara Lee Coffee & Tea Belgium.

“We wish you a Sensational Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year full of Sensational moments!”

Last week I visited the MRS conference on children research in London. Apart from interesting chats with the legendary smart cabbies (‘you know what MTV should do to cope with the YouTube competition, mate …’), I was quite enthusiastic about the following three contributions.

Claudio Franco of Dubit and Julie Adair, director online operations of Disney Europe brought a story on trends in online entertainment for kids. On UK TV screens Disney channel is head on competition with cbbc and Nickelodeon for the age group 7-14. In this age group 62% watches videos on the internet, 60% plays games with their favorite TV characters and 40% went to websites after on-air calls for action. Where online gaming is the absolute killer entertainment application for 7-10 year olds (with around 90% actively fond of gaming on the web), the interest for games start to decline slightly when they get 11 in favor of online videos, chatting and social network sites. Especially at the age of 13 SNSs like Facebook and online chatting are the main online activities.

These figures are also reflected in the most popular games in the UK. Under 11 cbbc, Cartoon Network, and Disney’s Club Penguin are the most popular game sites, above 11 Facebook and SNS games (like FarmVille, CaféWorld, Stardoll) and Miniclip (casual games) are more popular than virtual worlds like Club Penguin. Disney is active in different gaming types. In casual games they offer up to 250 games in the Disney website catalogue (adding 50 new ones a year) including top titles such as Cars, Up, Bolt and Mickey. They also own ToonTown, The World of Cars, Club Penguin and (bright new, for girls and related to Tinkerbell) Pixie Hollow. Almost 11% of all kids are paying for monthly gaming subscriptions (Club Penguin for instance has a monthly price of €4.95), 13% buys virtual goods (add-ons like furniture, clothes, …). Those who pay, spend up to £5 per month. The biggest spenders in both categories are 11-12 year olds.

An interesting topic that is heavily under researched in kids marketing is dad’s role in the family. Pete Maginn, head of child & youth at Illuminas shared his work on this subject (a combination of in-home qualitative interviews with dads as well as online quantitative) in his cheerful presentation. Most dads have a multi-faceted role in the household. They are an economic platform for family life (the breadwinner), they bring fun and a rough and tumble element in kids’ lives, help to care for kids (e.g. bedtime stories) and at the same time represent the strong, male role model. Dads see themselves as instillers of morals and also as a rational, calming presence (Mr. Peacekeeper). One dad’s citation referring to this role was quite striking: “Don’t get me wrong, I would lay down my life for my children but unlike my wife I might consider if there was another option first…”

The product categories in which dad’s role in purchase decision making is higher than mum’s are still explained by traditional gender roles: financial products, family cars, electronics and mobile phones compared to clothes & shoes, the area where mum’s opinion and choice is dominant. On the other hand today dad’s involvement has increased in certain areas leading to joint decision making in family holidays, entertainment, eating out, nurseries and schools, toys and games and food and groceries.

Carrick James (CJMR) and Marie Laver (formerly insight and strategy manager of Children’s and Licensing BBC) told a story about the evolution of licensed characters. The UK market of licensed toys has been booming in the last 10 years. Today more than £1 of every £3 is spent on licensed toys (compared to less than £1 in every 5£ 10 years ago). License lifecycles vary heavily, with typical “flash in the pan” characters such as Ninja Turtles, Ghostbusters, Teletubbies which were highly successful for single year sales figures compared to slowly growing features such as Thomas and friends or the regularly rebirth of evergreen characters such as Winnie The Pooh and Bob The Builder. Interesting elements of the ones that have survived illustrate what is required to build a longer lasting character.

Both Thomas (the blue train) and Bob the Builder were acquired by HIT in 2004 and underwent a re-birth treatment including new CGI animations, digital formats, direct to video features, and new themes/music. Moreover the brand immersion was expanded to theme parks for Thomas in the UK and the US and 4D movies of Bob the Builder at Legoland. Next to this, HIT initialized branded events such as Bob’s educational programmes in schools and a railway ‘Day Out with Thomas’. The latter is quite important since James & Laver demonstrated that children today access an average number of around 3 touchpoints (TV, DVD, magazines, cinema, toys, clothes, food & drinks, online games, …) when engaging with their favorite characters. Future trends in licensing ended the presentation. Reverse vertical integration: e.g. toy brands such as Transformers now producing movies. Secondly, a decrease in second party licensing especially in food as a result of governmental and parental pressures e.g. McDonald’s moving from using licenses as Happy Meal toys to creating their own Fairies & Dragons characters of which they own total control. And thirdly an increase in third party collaborations between two equally strong brands, e.g. Star Wars and Lego.

Smartees are our free workshops for marketers and researchers. Led by experts, they’re a chance to get up to speed on the latest techniques in marketing research and practical techniques for better marketing.

Want to save our Smartees in your Outlook Agenda? Click on the below dates.

• Thursday 8 April 2010: Connected Smartees (NL – Rotterdam)
• Thursday 27 May 2010: Smartees (NL – Rotterdam)
• Thursday 17 June 2010: Smartees (BE – Ghent)
• Thursday 30 September 2010: Smartees (NL – Rotterdam)
• Thursday 18 November 2010: Smartees (BE – Ghent)