I have just watched Short Cuts again, one of my favourite films directed by the great Robert Altman (The Player, M.A.S.H., etc).  The movie is based on a series of nine short stories by Raymond Carver (plus a poem) with a total of 22 characters taking part in the the scenes.  While Carver’s original stories are all independent, Altman magically creates a movie which feels whole and complete, with many great performances (who can’t fail to love a movie with Lyle Lovett and Tom Waits in the cast as well as a long list of Hollywood ‘A’ list stars).   Above all he achieves the unity by subtly forging a series of links between the different stories and scenes.  The different scenes provide a vivid representation of the randomness and chance of life and also of the sometimes surprising connections that exist between different people. Read more »

“To express yourself as you are is the most important thing.”  - Shunryu Suzuki

Bathhouse presentations

In his latest book on presenting, Garr Reynolds urges presenters to get naked and focus on the natural behaviour which can help establish a personal connection with an audience despite the technology, tools and effects which can sometimes create a barrier between you and others.  This means being direct, honest and clear with your audience, focusing on the core of your message and stripping away unnecessary distractions and irrelevant information, in the same way that we all stood up for our ‘show and tell’ at school without the encumbrance of powerpoint and other distractions. Read more »

“It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available.”  - Thomas Mann

“Always within an arm’s reach of desire.”  - Robert Woodruff (former chairman of Coca-Cola)

Getting connected

In the final chapter of How Brands Grow, Byron Sharp focuses on the key to great marketing: making your brand easy to buy.  There are two aspects to making brands available which are covered extensively throughout the book: mental availability (something discussed at length in this blog previously) and physical availability.  He argues (based on empirical evidence) that product innovation only works when a brand is salient and well distributed, through distinctive and clear branding and breadth and depth of distribution. Read more »

Framing thinking

In Don’t Think of an Elephant, George Lakoff provides a practical guide to the way that our mental frameworks shape the way we see the world, in turn shaping the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we behave and how we interpret good and bad outcomes in life.  These mental frameworks are often ‘invisible’ to us (he calls them the ‘cognitive unconscious’), consisting of structures in our brains which we are not able to access, although we can see their consequences in the way we reason, the decisions we take and our personal values (what we see as ‘common sense’).  We also see them in the language we use, as our words are defined relative to these frameworks, and the stimulus of a word, triggers frames which are activated in the brain. Read more »

Cross-cultural differences

I’ve written previously about the importance of understanding cultural context to interpret human behaviour and there has been extensive research on cross-cultural differences, especially in the workplace.  Edward Hall was one of the pioneers of such work, and was the first to focus on the context sensitivity of different cultures, comparing high-context cultures such as Japan with low-context cultures such as the US and UK.  In high context cultures, he found that there was often little need for much written or oral information as individuals were heavily socialised and sensitive to contex, whereas individuals in low-context culture require much more background detail in order to interpret information.  Visual communications without verbal information can work very effectively in high-context cultures because of such sensitivity. Read more »

Questions, questions

After watching the world go by for a while, you may still have some unanswered questions which means it may be time to start a conversation with your customers.  Although more than 90% of communication is non-verbal, there is a huge amount to be learnt from listening to consumers (and asking the occasional question), especially when this is done in the right way. Read more »

“All models are wrong, some models are useful.”  - George Box

The flaw of averages

Market research reports are generally packed full of average scores and comparisons of means, and not often enough with distributions and extremes.  In the real (business) world this is a mistake as, in the words of Sam Savage’s (f)law of averages, ‘plans based on average assumptions are wrong on average’.  To put this another way, errors occur in the real world when we replace uncertain numbers by single (or simple) averages. Read more »

The transformation of market research

Last week I spent a great two days taking part in the MRSS Asia Research Conference (declaration: I had also been involved in it’s organisation).  On the first day, more than twenty young (and occasionally old) researchers took part in two stimulating workshops exploring research in the facebook age, and the busy executive’s guide to social media.  On the second day of the conference, 10 world class speakers spoke on a range of topics connected to the future of research in Asia.

My key take aways fall into four areas: the importance of emotions, the power of measuring real behaviours, the value of contextualising survey questions and the reality of Asia’s ageing population (surprisingly I’ve come back to affect, behaviour and context again!). Read more »

Learning the research alphabet

There are clear lessons for market research (and marketing which I will explore in separate posts) from the importance of affect, behaviour and context in understanding ourselves and our customers.  I am writing this listening to Bill Evans and Tony Bennett, so it seems appropriate to argue that research needs to become more VOCAL. Read more »

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.  Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”  - Herbert Simon

Do you need more information?

How much can information can the world use?  It can certainly create a great deal of information according to a study by Martin Hilbert at the University of Southern California, but the ability to create and even store more and more information is not the same as the ability to understand, synthesise and communicate the information.  I believe this is one of the most important issues we face today, both as content producers and as content consumers with increasing competition for our limited attention.   Read more »