From a business point of view, the last year has essentially been about the economy and what we were once told was the worst recession since the Great Depression. I’ve long held the belief that the depth of recessions are manifestations of our own fears, i.e. we’re told there’s a big recession, so we slow our spending and boy, wow, we’re suddenly in a recession. I’m not discounting all the significant economic indicators, but I believe false pessimism leads to a deeper hole than one we might originally have been in.  So I was interested and chagrined to see this graph, courtesy of the Societé Générale which shows how economists are largely far more optimistic about recessions than the reality.

As James Montier, the author of the report wrote, “when you look at their record, it’s clear that the three blind mice have more credibility”.  A question I’ll pose now and try to answer later is this…if economists can be this wrong about predicting future behavior, how about brands?

I was reading Scamp's blog the other day and he was referring to this long, but brilliant article by Paul Feldwick.  Anyone who works in communications should read Paul Feldwick- he's written for years on brands and his wisdom is timeless, regardless of how technology changes. I still use his division of "strategic idea, creative idea and executional idea" in creative development research.

Feldwick's article basically debunks any advertising (or research of such), that is based on communicating a rational message, because he doesn't fundamentally believe that rational messages work to convince us of anything. Instead, he argues that emotional associations are what matter and all successful brand building advertising is based on this…intentionally or not.  A lot of his examples are from the UK in the 70s and 80s, so they rang true for me, but he discusses the Wassup campaign from Bud a few years ago as a perfect example that readers of the Dozen should understand.  The original Bud campaign and its many spin offs had no product message, no mention of hops, barley, glacial spring water, brewing method or whatever- but was still hugely successful because it built positive sociability associations with the brand. Scamp (a creative director at BBH in London) calls for briefs to state these desired associations rather than "main message communication".  This obviously has implications for how we research advertising.  

It interested me, because when I think back to all the creative development research I've done, when I ask people to play back the "main thing the ad was telling you about brand Y", I know when the work is succeeding when they describe an association (makes brand Y seem sophisticated, or when I want to stand out, I'll buy brand Y) vs. when they play back a rational thought. These emotional associations can then be linked back to that individual's life in a much richer and more evocative way and arguably this makes communicating at this level more powerful.  

Feldwick's theory holds water in lots of categories - even in automotive, where you'd imagine that rational claims would be crucial to helping people justify their purchase.  Remember these two gems that work entirely at an emotional level.  The only place I can think rational claims can work is after you've just spent money - it helps soften the blow.  But for me, it always all about heart over head, which is why I also drink Guinness and eat Cadbury chocolate.

What do you think of Microsoft Vista?  That was the question posed to a sample of 140 respondents by Microsoft researchers trying to resurrect the image of the beleaguered operating system brand, dubbed a "work in progress" by Steve Ballmer. Everyone knows the trouble that MS have had with Vista and the damage it has done to their brand - most consumers have opted to stay on XP or switch to Mac. Apple, always ready to take a pop at PCs created some wryly amusing ads about how crappy Vista was here and here. 

So Microsoft have created a new campaign showing off their new OS, called Mojave… or is it?  Those tricky nerds weren't really launching Mojave, it was a means of duping respondents into thinking something was new.  It was really just Vista in disguise.  The Mojave Experiment went like this:

Step 1 - Establish a Benchmark - Ask respondents what they thought of Vista - most said "crap" despite never having used it. 

Step 2 - Show them a "new" OS, billed as new and improved - called Mojave.  Have a guide hold their hand through the demo, showing off all the coolest features.

Step 3 - The Big Reveal - hey suckers, that wasn't Mojave, it was really Vista and you were completely wrong about it being crappy - as you've just seen, it's awesome!

I use a PC and actually like it, despite knowing that Macs have a cooler and more creative image. I detest the smug way that Mac users assume a superiority that they are smarter, more creative and their computers never have any problems. However, I have to say that this Mojave Experiment is totally flawed.  Hats off to MS for trying to address the abysmal brand image of Vista, but this wasn't the right way to do it.  Here are the reasons:

1. Of course in a controlled environment, with a totally great new laptop with big processing power and a guide who knows the system backwards, Vista is going to look awesome.  Wait until you're on your own and your slightly older PC crashes a million times whenever it tries to install updates, then see if you like it so much.

2. In 30 minutes or however short the experiment was, you can make something look fabulous.  It's the Pepsi Challenge - on one sip, Pepsi beats Coke all the time.  How about after a whole can?

3. Respondents were primed - they were told they'd be looking at something new - and therefore immediately open to it being better.  When they were shown Mojave/Vista in such a great light (run by an expert on a great computer), it's inevitable that they'd give it higher marks than their perceived impression of Vista.

So from a brand perspective I can see that they're trying to get good PR.  From a research perspective it was badly executed and that's ultimately what I walk away thinking of Vista.  Again.

We can reasonably assume that all adults living today, even those that work in marketing, were once teenagers.  But it is amazing to see how soon we forget how it felt to adolesce; that above all, most teenagers want to be treated and spoken to as what they are – young adults – and not coddled, patronized or dismissed by society as we so often do.

A few groundbreaking campaigns in recent years have dared to communicate with young adults as they are: intelligent, thoughtful, fully aware participants in society.  Most notable of these is probably the Truth anti-smoking campaign by Crispin Porter + Bogusky. 

Following close in its heels, however, is this anti-binge drinking campaign (a realistic goal advocating moderation not abstinence in alcohol consumption - click on the picture to see one of the spots) launched in England introduced by Amelia Torode in her blog.  Similar to the truth campaign, these TV spots de-glamorize the over-indulgence of alcohol by displaying, in naked clarity, how very unaspirational drunkenness really is. 

Bravo, well done. 

Three spots featured:

The Girl's Night Out

The Boy's Night Out

Fashion Show 

We Feel Fine[dot]org was created a couple of years ago and it’s tremendous fun to navigate around.  If you’re not familiar with the site, it trawls all the blogs in the world for the expression “I feel” or “I am feeling” and then grabs the words that immediately follow. The site allows you to cross reference feelings by age, gender, weather, country and year - so for example you could see how 30-39 year old men in the UK were feeling in 2006 (9.4x more “positive” than normal, but also 1.3x more “weird”). It’s a brilliant social project.  Creator Jonathan Harris can be seen here at TED talking about it.

I had high hopes for the site for it to answer some of the most pressing questions of the current day:  are we happier and more optimistic now than 2 years ago?  Are people in Boulder feeling freakier than those in Chicago?  The way the site gathers information made some of these comparisons difficult to make, but what struck me was less the differences between cultures, and more the commonalities between people around the world.  The most often cited feeling (whether in the USA, Iraq, France or Australia…or a dozen other places I searched) was “better” - even in today’s gloomy times.

The other top global feelings?  “Guilty”, “Bad”, “Right”, “Good”.  Sure, there’s nuances between places and ages and genders but fundamentally what this told me was how similar we all are and how fundamental human truths run between us all.

So if you work in the world of brands, I challenge you not to get entirely sucked in by this little site, created by the smart Noah Briar and taking the blogosphere by storm. It's popping up everywhere. Thanks to PSFK for the original link, but I've found reference to it here, here and here. It's even been picked up by the Wall St. Journal. Based on the simple truth that brands exist as constructs in our heads, whatever you associate with a brand, is essentially that brand. The site pulls up a logo and you just enter a word or phrase that comes immediately to mind. It then generates a big tag cloud of associations with that brand. Register on the site and have a play. Hard not to get drawn in, especially to the bit that lets you guess the brand based on the tag cloud.  

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist working at MIT.  He studies how people make decisions and has recently published a book about how irrational we all are.  Dan's book suggests that we are not randomly irrational, but rather our irrationality has patterns and themes that make it entirely predictable.  So for instance, why do home buyers often place their first offer much lower than the sale price on a house?  (The answer is that existing ownership of something creates an intrinsic "value gap" between seller and buyer).  Another brilliant example is how easily and irrationally we are influenced on price & value by the context of how something is sold, rather than a supply/demand/quality equation that we have in our head.  Expensive wine should be good, right? Or a ripped t-shirt sold in a fashionable LA boutique is "reasonably priced" at $100, because the jeans on display next to it are $450.  Anybody who works in the consulting business should read the chapter about pricing different offers - you'll never price a proposal the same way again.

It made me question a lot of my recent purchase decisions, from investing in an uncertain market, to buying property, to purchasing a coffee at my local Starbucks. In an effort to becoming more less predictably irrational, I'm going to try to immunize myself through awareness of these irrational behaviors. I'm going to attempt a week of no irrational behavior. Let's see how that goes.

It's a few years old, but I recently read Masaru Emoto's book "The Hidden Messages in Water" - quite an astonishing read.  In it, Dr.Emoto experimented with how water crystals were formed when they were "stimulated" by different words or music.  He found that when beautiful music was played (e.g. some Chopin , or "Yesterday" by the  Beatles) as water was crystalizing, the actual crystals formed were complex and gorgeous.  When heavy metal was played, the resulting crystals were a mess.  Another experiment involved typing words on paper and wrapping them around a bottle of water.  When the water was cooled to freezing point, Emoto took the crystals and examined them.  Crystals formed from the stimulus of words like "wisdom", "let's do it", "I'm sorry" or "I love you" were perfectly formed and lovely.  When the water was shown phrases like "you fool!" and "you make me sick", no crystals were formed or they were unrecognizable.  Amazing stuff, especially if you think that we're made up of more than 60% water.

But as I flicked through the different experiments conducted, I found myself wanting to see one which stimulated the crystals with different brand names.  Would crystals stimulated by "Whole Foods" or "Kashi" be beautiful and lovely and ones stimulated by "Exxon" or "Marlboro" be all deformed and gnarly?  We're frequently being challenged by clients to come up with new research methods….how about "Brand Crystalization Research"?  

Feeling optimistic about the future of the research industry?

Well… you should be… according to the latest Research Industry Trends Report issued by Rockhopper Research (with the help of Egg Strategy and other key industry players).

Based on a study conducted among research providers and buyers, the report cites four reasons why researchers everywhere should be jumping for joy:

In the minds of clients, research equals a strategic necessity = THEY BELIEVE YOU ADD VALUE

Corporations are making more money which usually means bigger research budgets = THEY HAVE MONEY TO SPEND

New brands & services are popping up as a result of mergers/acquisitions = THEY HAVE MORE THINGS THEY NEED MORE INFORMATION ABOUT

Greater global expansion = THEY NEED BIGGER STUDIES THAT DEMAND BIGGER BUDGETS

This indicates a promising future for researchers, right?

Yes… but not without some challenges…and the report calls out three big ones…

Clients continue to want their research FASTER, CHEAPER and BETTER.

In addition, technology is allowing clients to do more of their own research projects in-house. (i.e. surveymonkey.com)

But fear not… the report offers valuable suggestions for overcoming these potential hurdles and in turn, remain a necessity to your clients…

In a nutshell…be more cutting-edge, more responsive to their needs and provide more value at all stages of the research process.

Sounds easy, right?  In theory, yes.  We can all grasp the concept of this and probably think of some ways that we can fulfill these needs.  However, it really goes way beyond this.  Let's all put on our 'bigger' thinking caps for a moment and ask ourselves…

How CREATIVE can we be in that process? 

How UNIQUE can we be in the ways that we address these important criteria? 

How can we really MAKE OUR MARK here?

So tell us…what does this mean for your company…on both sides of the business (research supplier AND client)? 

Suppliers:  What do you do to be more cutting-edge, more responsive, and add more value consistently? 

Clients:  How has a supplier or suppliers been especially stellar at one or more of these things?

Jason Oke at Juniper Park recently presented some thoughts at a MRIA conference under the title "Is Qual Holding Us Back?" You'll have to scroll past his post on "are you making enough money as a planner" first, which admittedly is quite enticing, but it does involve taking a survey, so try not to get distracted and get to the generously shared presentation in his Feb 22nd post.

As a qualitative practitioner in various forms for the last 14 years I can admit to being involved in some soul destroying groups (for me and for the poor respondents), but more recently have found these sessions to be rare to the point of extinction.  For me the key slide in Jason's deck talked about the best research being inspired by culture…i.e. "people enjoy contributing most when it's fun and interesting, when they get to be creative and when it's interactive".  Blindingly obvious, but such an important reminder and therefore very insightful.

We just did some groups where we held discussions in cafe's, gave respondents creative journals ahead of time and served them up drinks from the brand in question, so they'd be more "present" to be able to answer questions about the overall brand experience.  None of these methodological elements are new ideas, but it made a huge difference to the success of this qual.  Do I think qual is holding us back?  Yes, when you do it in crap facilities, have the same intro and warm up questions as always, have the same projectives as always and ask inane questions like "how important is the brand in making this choice?"   But fundamentally who does research like that anymore?  Do they still have jobs?

Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think qual is in crisis, mainly because the smarter practitioners are realizing that it doesn't take a great deal of change to make a pretty huge difference.  Simply by taking people out of a facility and putting them somewhere less formal, you're immediately making them more comfortable.  We don't need a revolution, but we do need to break the conventions.

I just wrapped up some qualitative work in Shanghai among teenagers.  Talk about a double challenge:  teens are wonderfully complex puzzles no matter what culture you’re in… but add the dynamic of a society that does not easily reveal its emotional underbelly and you’ve got your work set up for you!  Just reinforces the pleasure and pain of this work.  I love how every time I participate in qualitative research I see universal truths about our collective “sameness” as human beings.  And then to see how incredibly unique we are as individuals as well is also a privilege to observe.  The challenge is making sense of it all when my own individuality and social framework come into play.  Makes me respect the true anthropologists of the world who work so diligently to remove their own influence and/or bias.

How many times have you talked about educating the consumer?  When the consumer fails to use your product correctly, how do you respond?  With more instructions or with fundamental changes?

I worked once with a client whose cleaning product had a terrible reputation - consumers complained that “it never works” and “it just makes the problem worse”.  But in fact, the entire category was like that, so one brand was as good or bad as the other.  When we conducted ethnographic research, we learned that the prodct wasn’t the problem - consumer usage was!  Consumers used the product incorrectly.  They used too much, they used it the wrong way.  They ignored the instructions and allowed their natural inclinations to scrub kick in, but in fact, the best results came from lightly dabbing.  Scrubbing just made the problem worse, grinding in the dirt.  And when consumers were confronted with failure, they just went back, used more product and scrubbed harder.  It was a recipe for disaster.

The solution, of course, was to redesign the product in a way that overrode their natural behaviors and caused them to use the product effectively.  The answer didn’t come in adding more instructions or shouting at the target to LEARN, DAMMIT…the answer came from the company learning itself.

Next time you are working double-hard to make the consumer learn how to use the product…or learn why they need it in the first place…or learn why it’s better than the competition…ask yourself what your company has to learn from the situation and how you can create solutions that don’t require the consumer to do the hard work of learning. 

It’s our job to solve problems, not theirs.  It’s our job to make life easier.  It’s our job to learn.