“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 »

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 »

Pulling the trigger

Have you ever had the experience that something was on the ‘tip of your tongue’ but you couldn’t quite remember?  That’s likely because you know the information exists, but you can’t quite find the right connection to trigger its recall.  That’s why such memories sometimes come back later when triggered by a more relevant (but often random) stimulus. Read more »

Home Economicus or Homo Sapiens?

We have seen that the majority of human behaviour is controlled outside consciousness.  This is in contrast to the classical models of economics which assume a model of man as Homo Economicus who is entirely rational, always knows what (s)he wants and is capable of calculating the precise consequences of any action.  We all know that this is nonsense, and recent economic events have once again highlighted the inadequacy of such models both for economics and further afield. Read more »

On autopilot

Imagine a busy housewife, with impatient kids in tow, walking through the supermarket to find fishcakes and chips (or perhaps noodles and vegetables) for the evening meal.  Her mind is focused on the task in hand and finding the right items, along with trying to listen to descriptions of the school day just gone.  All of us do many things (arguably most things) in our day via an internal autopilot. Whether it’s brushing our teeth, driving to work, or buying our evening meal, much of our behaviour is learnt and unconscious. Read more »

What makes research valuable?

I had a great time running a Tapestry Workshop earlier this week on “Winning the Hearts and Minds of Clients”.  One of the key, and often repeated, messages on the course is the importance of linking research to business value creation.

I have read several defences of market research recently, with articles by Spych, Frankie Johnson in the last few days.  As a passionate market researcher, I love to read other passionate researchers standing up for the industry and the importance of linking everything back to the customer, and I applaud them for it. Read more »

“All right, brain.  I don’t like you ad you don’t like me – so let’s just do this and I’ll get back to killing you with beer.”  - Homer Simpson Read more »

“Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.”  - Cesare Pavese Read more »