Excellence - celebrating 60 years
Review
By Roderick White and James Aitchison
ESOMAR’s Congress in Berlin was a showcase for research creativity. Here are some of the highlights.
There were five great keynotes, among which, perhaps, film-maker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck stood out. Then there were the papers. The programme was split into a number of strands and some 40 papers assembled by a committee headed by BrainJuicer’s John Kearon, who said the key criteria guiding the choice of papers was similar to the way we judge the most valuable precious stones – diamonds – by their brilliance, clarity, colour and weight.
There were a lot of well-told stories, especially case histories, but few obviously ground-breaking new methods. There were, of course, exceptions. Who would expect GfK (of all the large research agencies) to train its graduate intake by turning them loose on Second Life? Who could fail to compare Iraqi researchers with the SAS as they literally risked life and limb to get the survey out?
Then the final morning let us loose onto the wider shores of new technology, and the recognition that things really are changing out there. But let’s first take a look at some of the papers.
India and China
Charajeet Sengupta of Evalueserve gave us an insightful view of Chinese and Indian consumers – a sort of compare and contrast exercise that both picked out the similarities and differences between two countries on very similar growth trajectories but, in particular, showed how India presents a far more complex challenge to marketers.
In both countries, it is clear that, for the western marketer, it is no good hoping to build a brand on purely western values. There is a need to achieve a careful balance between traditional values and newer, imported concepts. Further, neither market is homogenous, especially India, and there is a need for marketers to be very clear about the precise nature of the segment (or, more often, ‘tribe’) they are targeting. This can lead, as Chirajeet showed, to brands needing to advertise in very different ways to distinct sub-groups.
Qual-quant fusion
John Pawle and Simon Patterson’s insightful case study of Unilever’s French Rexona brand described how an integrated mix of qualitative and quantitative research turned around an ailing brand – and even led to a complete global relaunch.
In a nutshell, Rexona was in decline in the French market, and the stakeholders and key players involved in the brand couldn’t agree what was wrong.
So, using CRAM International’s RESC model – which investigates Rational, Emotional, Social and Cultural dimensions via a range of qual and quant techniques – the problem was identified. Rexona’s brand image and communications were out of kilter with the aspirations and values of the modern French woman.
The research results were presented to all key stakeholders, including the client and its advertising agency, and formed the basis of a three-pronged relaunch that reworked the brand’s communications, packaging and formulation. And, although the initial research had been concerned with the French market, the insights from the project were such that Rexona – or Sure for Women in other markets – has been relaunched globally.
Millward Brown tracking following the January 2007 relaunch has already reported increases in key brand attributes of between 29% and 55%.
Developing new talent
David Smith and Mario van Hamersveld gave an amusing but insightful double act about bringing in and training up new recruits to the market research industry. David outlined the seven skills that should make up the skillset of the modern market research practitioner:
- Information integrator
- Knowledge contextualiser
- Insight detective (my personal favourite)
- Business impact assessor
- Corporate storyteller
- Business choice framer
- Marketing implementer
Measuring emotion
Orlando Wood (BrainJuicer) and Tijs Timmerman (Philips) talked about how to use faces in measuring emotion – namely asking consumers to choose from seven different faces that best reflected their feelings towards an advertisement. These faces were drawn from the work of psychologist Paul Ekman, who has identified seven emotions expressed on faces that are universal to all people and cultures:
- Happiness
- Fear
- Disgust
- Surprise
- Contempt
- Sadness
- Anger
Emotions, said Orlando, drive all decisions, particularly purchasing decisions. Research using the faces method has been applied to creative that features in IPA-winning advertising case studies in the UK. It showed that these successful advertising campaigns had a higher tendency to focus on emotion and, in particular, generate happiness in consumers, than the non-winning ones against which they were compared.
Web 2.0
Marc Drüner of tromsdorff & drüner, gave us a well-informed view of the new dimensions of the web, based largely on a study of online communities with the Technical University of Berlin. A flurry of statistics showed how a lot of our prejudices about web 2.0 are ill-founded. He isolated five factors – collection of information, feedback, customization, ratings by users, and exchange – as characteristics of successful sites.
A key aspect of the ‘new’ web is the way in which it accelerates the diffusion of ideas – and this leads inevitably to the conclusion that marketers simply have to monitor what is being said about their brands online, in everything from blogs to tags. Marc concluded with four key learnings:
- Everything is possible – though not necessarily for your brand, so you need to understand how it fits into web 2.0, and act accordingly.
- Listen to your customers online: you can’t afford not to.
- Interact in any way you can with your customers.
- Understand the functionalities of web 2.0, and exploit them.
Good vibrations
Netvibes has been nominated as one of the ten technology firms most likely to change the world, and Tariq Krim, founder and CEO of Netvibes has been honoured by MIT as one of the top young entrepreneurs. Netvibes is a service that enables users to personalize their web start-up page by using ‘widgets’ to select the specific material, from whatever source, they might wish to have regularly at their finger tips.
This is a strategy for managing increasingly overloaded time (in the face of ‘overchoice’), and the consequent rationing of our attention. Netvibes provides what Tariq called ‘a dashboard for my digital life’. This enables us to filter out a host of irrelevant content, and to create our own mash-ups (for example), and share them with our friends – or at least the 90 million who are already using Netvibes. This turns the web from publishing to personalization, reflecting that everyone’s different. Freedom beckons. Will we be able to manage within it?
Award winners
ESOMAR Excellence Award for Standards of Performance - The John Downham Award: recognising contributions to the research industry showing outstanding achievement, stimulating excellence at an international level. With a prize of €10,000, this award went to David (DVL) Smith, Director, DVL Smith Group.
ESOMAR Excellence Award for the Best Paper presented at an ESOMAR event 2006/2007: demonstrating a concrete contribution to decision making. With a prize of € 4,000, the award went to ”Death of depth? Understanding the obvious beyond the obvious” by Ayobamidele Gnädig and Oliver Schieleit, H,T,P Concept.
The Best Paper Overall (The Fernanda Monti Award) for the best paper in any field presented at this year’s Congress. Worth € 2,500, this prize went to ”If 'We' not 'I'…Then what? From Anglo-Saxon to global world views of human behaviour” by Mark Earls, Herd Consulting.
The Best Case History Award for the Congress paper that best demonstrates a research application that proved to be beneficial to clients. Worth € 1,500, this award went to ”Training the next generation: It’s market research, but not as we know it” by Mike Cooke and Phyllis MacFarlane, GfK NOP.
The Best Methodological Paper Award for the Congress paper that carries the most technical and innovative interest, valued at € 1,500, this award went to ”Using faces: Measuring emotional engagement for early stage creative” by Orlando Wood, BrainJuicer Labs.
Roderick White, Editor of Admap magazine and James Aitchison Editor of WARC.com reported on the Congress proceedings daily in their blog at warc.com.