The future of questions

Everyone likes to make predictions as one year closes and another begins with fresh hopes, although fewer go back to check what they said previously (with some notable exceptions). Rather than make predictions, most of which are guaranteed not to happen, I would like to share a hope for how market research can reinvent itself for the future. In sharing my hope I can also share some of the changes that I believe will happen at some time in the near future (I would never be confident enough to say that it will be in 2012).

My big wish is that market research can start to get beyond its obsession with questions. Read more »

What does 2012 hold?

In an uncertain world, it’s always good to hang on to someone else’s predictions of what lies ahead, and in that spirit here is a summary of some of the key trends outlined by trendwatching.com in their end of year report (link here). Some of these trends seem very similar to previous years perhaps, and some are less relevant for Asia, so I will focus on six that I find most relevant and intriguing plus a tip for which colour to wear to your New Year’s party on Saturday night. Read more »

Market research and product testing

The history of product testing is long and can trace its path back to many diverse fields along a similar timespan to that of market research (back to the 1920s when the science was first introduced to manage product quality). Sensory science developed at a fast rate in the 1950s and 1960s, when different techniques for the ‘descriptive analysis’ of products were developed, starting with the flavor profile method, in the fast developments of the consumer goods industries which followed the end of the second world war. The science was boosted by the publication of Stevens’ landmark textbook on psychophysics in the mid-1970s and has come a long way in the last 50 years.

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Making meaning

We are a peculiar species. For example, many of us continue to risk our long term survival for the pleasure of puffing on a stick of nicotine, while others make it very difficult to walk by wearing uncomfortable high heel footwear. Read more »

“Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors.”  - David Hume

“The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.”  - Stephen Jay Gould Read more »

“Who are you going to believe: me or your own eyes?”  - Groucho Marx

In About Face, Dan Hill makes a clear and compelling argument for the use of emotion in advertising and it’s power to drive changes in behaviour. The book is full of useful examples and anecdotes and some statistics too. In one study by Omnicom, emotional engagement with customers resulted in 20% higher return on investment than mere awareness in advertising.  In another review by Pringle and Field (based on 880 case studies from the UK’s Institute of Practitioners Advertising Effectiveness Awards), ‘soft sell’ ads that inspire strong emotional responses in their audience make more money (almost twice as much as ‘hard sell’ ads with more fact-based and rational arguments). And more emotional ads also reduced price sensitivity, created greater differentiation and were more important in more mature markets. Read more »

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 »

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 »