ESOMAR Congress Day 1 Vol. 2

The afternoon opened with a topic that has generated a fair amount of controversy of late – online sampling in our evolving world.

Chaired by Reg Baker, the three panelists Kees de Jong of SSI, Jeff Hunter of General Mills and James Castro-Edwards  discussed how to best leverage online technology and how this area is changing a fundamental part of research – how to go about getting respondents.

There seemed to be all around agreement that Industry doing its part through issuance of Guidelines by ESOMAR, CASRO, and other organisations, but the question of how should we define “panel data quality” was still to be answered.

Jeff gave his perceptions of this as a client stating that he has no real true answer, but that as a client he cares a great deal about data quality. He did not that he was finding it difficult to know what good quality is.  The idea of replicable and similar results that link to marketing and consumer behaviour are in the end what they seek. The three key areas of focus should be consistency, predictiveness  and comparability.

This was underscored by Kees de Jong as important for survey providers as well…but not the audience agreed, with Ray Poynter stating that “ESOMAR should ban anyone claiming to be representative! You can model it and come up with great results… but let’s not kid ourselves.”

The audience expressed that they saw it as the job of associations to help keep the industry aware of the law – particular with social media there is no law up to date…many legislators will only listen to trade orgs…

CASRO’s Diane Bower then pointed out that it is indeed the job of trade orgs to keep members informed and knowledgeable – as these topics are moving targets. However, she underscored that it is incumbent for researchers to their own due diligence.

So the underlying question to be asked seemed to be “Is the research you’re doing fit for purpose and can you sell that idea to your client?” The answer seemed to be to give clients assurance your panel sampling was done well and replicable to show that.

Click below to read more …

[expand title=”Afternoon Parallel 1 – Emerging Approaches – Elias Veris“]

The online and the offline world are merging, Marnix Van Ginsbergen told us. Smartphones are among us and it’s about time we start thinking about how they can be used in marketing and market research.

Advertisers have realised that too, and so Marnix did a very interesting experiment, where he created a virtual store, and had people walk around in it. At certain points, people would get advertising that is related to the product in front of them. Based on the behaviors of people in the experiment, and a survey after the experiment, a model was crafted that proves that location-based ads are perceived as less intrusive and have a larger positive effect on attitude than non-location-based ads.

While this certainly is extremely interesting, a very good question was raised by the audience; Did you say less intrusive, or not intrusive at all. Are people happy to get ads, or just less unhappy? Turns out that being location-based is not the holy grail of advertising, and that people are just less unhappy.

That doesn’t come as a surprise for me.

As we see in our own research at InSites Consulting, people are definitely interested in information tied to a location. Information that helps people to do stuff better; choosing better meals, having background on the history of a monument they’re at… In this mode where they are actively asking for information via smartphones themselves, brands can communicate with them and start a conversation. With them, not at them. Bottom-up, not top-down.

While Marnix didn’t really go into how smartphones and location-based services should be used for research, I would say that the bottom-up way should be the starting point. A lot of non-response to surveys can be attributed to cluttered inboxes; the last thing we want is cluttered smartphone screens on top of that. Smartphones can be an absolutely brilliant way of doing research, but let’s be careful with it…

A hot topic, and so lots of speakers are trying to enlightening their fellow researchers about it. In a very beautifully designed presentation, the people from TNS gave us a perfect introduction to the topic. Just to remind you: it’s about using game mechanics to get people engaged into an experience. That can be a research community or a survey, or any other type of research. Techniques like copywriting questions (in a fun way obviously), giving feedback after questions, and using reward systems are some “easily applicable” game mechanics. The speakers emphasize however, that gamification is not some kind of bribing system; you don’t want to go to a situation where people’s behavior goes away when the bribe goes away. A very important point indeed; in my opinion, gamification techniques work best if they have a real reward behind it, and especially if it’s one that is linked with inherent motivations of respondents. Respondents are respondents because they like giving feedback to brands in many cases. As we’ve experimented with in some research community projects, rewarding people with a movie from a brand manager that thanks the respondent personally, is a great motivator. Having them give feedback, and then giving them access to new product ideas from their favorite brand (that you wanted to show them anyway), is another great motivator.  Numerous other examples of gamification tapping into existing human motivations can be listed, but for market research it mainly means the following:

Let’s think about human motivations before we bombard people with another survey…

As the second gamification speaker stressed: “Even if the only benefit of gamification is making respondents happier, then it’s worth the effort.” In their study, they compared 4 different survey types, from text only over visually improved to fully gamified. The more enhanced, the better respondent satisfaction got. Most other results in terms of response quality for instance, were either inconsistent or difficult to interpret. For me, a cry for further validation of gamification in surveys on the one hand, but also a very encouraging result from a respondent point of view.
Let’s keep in mind that gamification techniques are a means to an end, helping market researchers to engage respondents better in their projects.

To give my short wrap-up of today: for me it’s all about communication. We are not communicating right to our clients, and we are not communicating right to our respondents. Maybe synthesizing conclusions in one key vision works for clients, and maybe games work for respondents, or maybe even the other way around, key issue is that our industry needs to learn to communicate. That will finally establish us as a damn sexy industry. And after all, isn’t that what it’s all about? [/expand]

[expand title=”Afternoon Parallel 2 – Impactful Society – Erika Harriford-McLaren“]

The importance of MR to society is key to keeping our communities healthy, educated and productive.  A real gem of the Congress this year is the focus on ROI on a social level and the first two presentations in this sphere did not disappoint.

UNICEF – which has always been great at showing how they use MR to create value – didn’t disappoint here either… Today, teamed up with Iconoculture, they discussed something that is important to all non-profits – fundraising and how to do it better by putting trends to good use.

80% of income for UNICEF comes from the public – so it is vital for them, as well as for many organisations, to stay in touch with the public. In the end it’s nice to get funding from the Bill Gates and Soros Foundations of the world, but don’t forget it is your “casual donors” that keep you alive.

Get your staff on board and educate them on the key areas that will impact their job but also make the work they do mean something. This is what the value of MR can bring. Make people realise that the data/materials we put in front of them can help them make a difference and as long as this is done in a clear and simple way with an easy to follow process, you will get buy in and value will be seen.

The impact of emerging markets on family structures and how this can change business practice was explored by Unilever and Kids and Youth in the UK.  The findings were interesting to say the least and leave plenty of room for companies to re-evaluate the importance of products and services for bettering the lives of families in various regions.

Top line findings indicated that the emerging economies are indeed affecting families by creating a new way of life for middle class families who are more prone to stray from their parents way of raising children and defining their marital relationship differently.

Kids and Youth examined numerous countries including Turkey Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and BRIC nations and found very common problems across the regions and cultures, including little space for play for children, little space within the home and with little time to spare.  They also found an increased emphasis on education and that these markets seek more value for money…All in all. They found that it has led to a global increase in stress…

Some interesting stats as well:

The gap between developed and emerging countries tend to be quite big…

In the Netherlands 25% of parents feel they don’t have enough time to play with their kids, while in  Germans, Americans and the British are 40% or higher. Conversely Russia was at 57% and 61% in China.

When as if they were too stressed to enjoy playing with their kids, the only 12% of Dutch agreed with this, while 22% of Americans did, and 29% of those from UK.

However, the numbers for China and Russia were once again much different (40% in China and 42 in Russia). The changes to families and family structures in the emerging markets will definitely be worth watching and will inevitably change the way product development and social services are used in these areas. [/expand]

[expand title=”Afternoon Parallel 2 – Impactful Research – Betty Adamou“]

Many brands harness the power of imagination in order to make their products or services seem more desirable than ever. Nick Gadsby of Lawes Gadsby Semiotics believes that the imagination is crucial to human happiness and is a huge and vast untapped source which can be further used for marketing strategy.

He began with showing us one such brand who uses the imagination of the consumer to ‘fill in the blanks’. The Lotto, who’s old logo was ‘It could be YOU’ has now been replaced with ‘What would YOU do?. This, as Nick put it, is a much more valid slogan than the previous one which now seems ridiculously unfeasible due to the very low probability of winning big. Therefore, capturing the imagination of the lotto ticket buyer was a much more believable and effecting marketing campaign.

Gadsby spoke to us about varying degrees of imagination and gave us brands which harness the uses of that particular ’type’ of imagination.

1)      What if’s/counterfactuals

2)      Imagined Memories

3)      Fantasy/pure escapism

4)      Patching Reality

‘What if/counterfactual’ kind of branding and marketing is shown in Gadsby’s presentation as before and after pictures of cosmetic surgery where the ‘after’ image shows the model much happier, smiling and with wide eyes as well as bigger, other assets. This kind of visual comparison aids the viewer in imagining ‘what if’ in an easier fashion.

‘Imagined Memories’ pointed us to the popular Hipstermatic App. An App which I use myself. The App allows budding paparazzi’s to take photographs in a dreamy, romantic feel which borrows the aesthetics of 60’s and 70’s style photography.  Because of its popularity, other, similar apps have come about such as 8mm, Instagram and Pixlromatic.

‘’Fantasy/pure escapism” shows us a Flake advertisement from days of yore, (you remember the ones, with the woman in the bubble bath, red lipstick and short black hair eating her chocolate sumptuously…). This is a perfect example where the consumer can be visually inspired to think about how a product or brand can drastically change who they are or their lifestyle.

“Patching Reality” showed us examples from objects in the home to the Benefit make-up brand. Brands and items that seem to make-up voids in our lives. Gadsby tells us of an example where a man noted that he felt a certain brand of colourful coffee mugs in his house summarized how he wanted his home to be and how he wanted to be perceived. The mugs were colourful, minimalist and post-modern. His house however, was filled with bland furniture and beige walls. The same premise can be applied to Benefit make-up where the marketing is so good that some consumers are willing to overlook that the products aren’t that great because the packaging is just so nice (just from what I’ve seen on eBay comments).

Nick also spoke about the possibility of increasingly asking respondents to imagine to help give further insights into brands, products or services. For example: Imagine if you won the lottery, what would YOU do? From here, data has been gathered to harness the most popular ideal life of the rich and so they used a perfect beach in the backdrop to one of their advertisements.

But we use our imaginations for so much more don’t we? As Nick points out, we take stereotypes we’ve heard of and imagine what entire nations are like, despite that we will never meet even a fraction of those people to justify the imagined state that “all Greeks sit around drinking coffee and smashing plates’ or Italians make love and eat pasta all day.

Gadsby’s presentation hit an important note: that allowing respondents to be creative and be involved in the creative process is important because it is with their imaginations that our Clients can understand what it is people want (or think they really want at least).

TNS, as one of the global ‘giants’ of research has to be seen to be ‘in touch with the times’.

Gamification, (although I personally don’t like always wording it in this way) as many of you will know is a special area of interest to me. Therefore, I was intrigued to hear what such a big player in Market Research had to say about it. As some delegates mentioned, it was a great introduction to Gamification if you didn’t know what it was already. My worry however is that if you didn’t know what it was already then the information they put forward, although sound, was just a touch confusing for the listener.

A few times both speakers mentioned ‘bright colours’ as a tool they used to Gamify their research. Unfortunately Gamification is not about bright colours and I would have liked to have heard if they imbued Gamification mechanics in their research projects without the use of bright colours and how this fared with the respondents. Kyle also mentioned Happy Hours as a form of Gamification, which yes does encourage and change certain types of behaviour, but is it Gamification? Jesse Schell sites Weight Watchers as Gamification. This makes more sense to me and rings true to the ‘true’ elements of Gamification being that you can:

a)       ‘unlock levels’ (losing a stone a week or reaching a weekly target weight)

b)       Earn points to do so (foods have points assigned to them)

c)       Monitor your progress (on the scales)

d)       Aid other sin their progress (collaboration)

e)       Are rewarded for efforts (you lose weight and gain the praise from your peers)

f)        There is no reward for not achieving the goals.

g)       Rules and/or limitations

I’m not sure how Happy Hours in the local pub do this exactly but I could understand that they were using it as an example that simply putting a limit on something, or making something ‘exclusive for a limited time only’ can lead to increased engagement. But this we knew already, but it’s still not Gamification.

They did hit a few points right on the head though:

• That Gamification is not the giving out of random points and badges in a tacky and pointless way
• Psychology and neuroscience are incorporated within gamification
• Game-like elements can increase engagement
• Keep it simple, even though what is underneath might be quite complex.
• Harness the imagination
• Creating ‘sticky ideas’ that people can’t help but want to use.
• Gamification can benefit our industry if we step outside our comfort zones
• Gamification can work if done properly, otherwise it is a fad.

The next talk by Market Strategies was a great follow on from the TNS talk as it went into much more depth and they did (and I was very grateful that they did) provide a taxonomy of the different levels of making a survey interesting which, in my opinion, was a better way of teaching the audience what Gamification is or is not.

Reg Baker and Theodore from Market Strategies spoke about this in a very clear and concise manner in the context of research. These are the different levels of what we can do to surveys. We can have them be:

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