By David Pritchard @drpritch
Day 2 of the ESOMAR Congress in Dublin picked up the intensity and intelligence perfectly from where Day 1 left off. The day started out with a session from cinema “giants” (in RP Translate’s words) Pearl & Dean and Join the Dots, helping to unpick some of the truths about how movie-goers’ emotional states continue to provide the ideal platform for advertising.
The post-break session on shopper research opened with Stephen Needel of Advanced Simulations promising to debunk some long-held theories about shopper research, as he has done with other topics in the past (such as Big Data). Stephen’s presentation, engaging as ever, drew upon theories from Mackenzie to Taylor Swift to help uncover the truth about consumers’ in the shopper journey and purchase funnel. By understanding different types of journey, the research industry can better position itself to influence consumers. However, we know that the journey is open to such a large degree of interpretation, and supporting (Big) data is so sparse, that building prescriptive and descriptive path-to-purchase models is incredibly tricky work. Simplifying the model to measure behaviours and attitudes, focusing on behaviour as an end-point, will help us to “sell more stuff”!
The afternoon Client Talk Show began with Russell King of Orange introducing an approach to benchmarking their Brand Tracking study with 17 comparable global brands. Being the biggest budget-hogger in most clients’ research portfolios, Brand Tracking tends to attract a great deal of attention from procurement teams to define what represents “value for money”. Russell’s overarching findings suggested that “Brand Tracking isn’t rocket science”; however, as with so many other aspects of research, the devil was in the detail. Giving a business the best chance of a successful outcome relies on 5 factors: Clear objectives/expectations, a supportive organisational structure, the right use of technology, local flexibility and clear action-planning.
The ensuing discussion among senior brand research stakeholders revealed some very interesting influences on the decision-making process for vendor selections. Some selection below:
“Selecting the right supplier required a long period of stakeholder management”, Barclay’s.
“The new supplier was very supportive in helping us through our exit strategy with our incumbent provider”, Barclay’s.
“We decided not to change supplier because our supplier was in the middle of launching their new brand equity model, giving us the opportunity to shape it to better meet our needs”, Orange
“Executives need to evolve to meet the needs of the business, rather than being tied to the old strategy”, The Coca-Cola Company
“We don’t compensate our executives through brand tracking, more from customer experience”, Microsoft
“Purchase funnel metrics are so slow to move, so obsessing about them in ‘real time’ is a waste of our time”, Microsoft
“Data confidence and quality is more important to us than getting data quickly”, Barclay’s
What followed this informative discussion was something which engaged and entertained the audience in equal measures. Led by Cyriel Kortleven, the audience was invited to collaboratively brainstorm some ideas for making the industry more accessible, attractive and fun. By breaking out into small groups of complete strangers, attendees were invited to take the lead of the recent successful #ilooklikeanengineer campaign, and to apply thinking from a number of leading brands to understand how they might approach the problem. The result, not only a fantastic opportunity to meet and chat with our peers, in what would have otherwise been a silent, dark room, but the foundations of #IamaproudMarketResearcher. Watch this space!
Rounding off the day, after an excellent “Early Revelations” presentation by 15-year old Jordan Casey (Casey Games), the assembled audience was treated to hugely innovative sessions on Big Data segmentation and increasing Digital Media ROI through use of survey data.
Nature Research and GE Capital shared the stage for the presentation on Big Data segmentation, focusing on the scale of the GE consumer business in Australia. Post-financial crisis GE observed a number of key consumer behaviours which had significant potential impacts for their business, and thus took it upon themselves to create a behavioural segmentation to better inform their strategy. Through embracing change within their organisation and integrating fully with their research partner, GE were able to overlay researched attitudes with real behaviours to better serve their customers at a difficult time.
InterContinental Hotels Group and TNS presented their paper on how they identified the right audiences to drive Digital Media targeting towards. Through matching brand attitudes to passive (purchase and browsing) behaviours, TNS were able to build a clear view of the most valuable prospective audiences for IHG’s Holiday Inn brand. Drawing upon the strength of its WPP Group partners, TNS was able to support the creation of a digital campaign targeted at these audiences, resulting in significant uplifts across IHG’s major KPIs.
After such a positive and uplifting day, it’s difficult to see how the final day can possibly trump this. I look forward to its efforts!
David Pritchard is one of three RWC bloggers, reporting straight from Congress 2015 onsite.
David Pritchard is Client Development Director Network Research.
