Blog

Alerts on UK Xmas Ads: Orange is the Colour

Aldi’s offering was the season opener in this year’s Christmas ad parade. Quite surprising, in that it stars a root vegetable, viewers found Kevin the Carrot to be a happy, innocent and cute little chap; his triumph at the end of his exciting adventure leads to good levels of happiness and an effective resolution.

Alerts on UK Xmas Ads: Applause for Mrs. Claus

After many commentators bemoaned the melancholic tone of 2015’s adverts and sensed that the emotional heartstrings were being over-plucked, 2016 has already shown it’s still an emotional playing field, albeit with a very different tone. As emotional engagement correlates best with long-term business success, this is not too much of a surprise to see, nor is the excellent story-telling that we’ve witnessed in some of the more lengthy and big-budget ads released so far.

The 3Fs: Good For Your Brand, Good For Your Budget

Spend any length of time in market research and you become aware of the notorious Cost-Speed-Quality Triangle. Notorious because the idea is you can only have two out of the three. Good and cheap research takes time. Fast and good research ain’t cheap. Fast and cheap research means cutting corners on quality.

Binet And Field Return With ‘Media In The Digital Age’

At the IPA Effectiveness Week Genesis Conference, Les Binet and Peter Field unveiled the first findings from their third volume unpacking the IPA datamine for ad effectiveness nuggets.

Debunking the Pre-Testing Vs. Creativity Myth

Fighting Back Against Idea Fatigue

We’ve all heard the figures about the staggering numbers of new products launched every year. But what people don’t often say is that these innovations are rather unevenly distributed. Some categories see only a few major launches. Others see a huge turnover of new ideas. And behind every one that makes it to market there are a throng of concepts that didn’t get that far.

Ad Testing: More Vital Than Ever?

Online video has been one of the great success stories of digital advertising – consumers are said to prefer it as a way to consume content, and brands have invested in it massively. Its momentum is such that the news this morning that Facebook metrics have been overestimating the amount of time people spend watching videos on the platform won’t change the upward trajectory of online video or its centrality to modern marketing.

5 Questions To Make Your Digital Content Better

On September 26, 2006, the modern era of marketing began. Facebook – already enjoying viral growth among academic institutions – opened its accounts up to the public for the first time.

“You Had Me At Hello”: Introducing Fluent Innovation

What makes an innovation succeed? Successful innovations are 20% the new and surprising, 80% the familiar and pleasing. You have to have that core good idea, but so much of what makes the difference between success and failure lies in framing it for acceptance.

Fame, Feeling And Fluency – The Only Brand Metrics You Will Ever Need

There has been a growing awareness in the marketing community that traditional Brand Tracking doesn’t really help much to guide and predict brand growth, and there is desire to see it reinvented from the bottom-up. Why not start with Behavioural Sciences as a guide, because the great thing about science is that it simplifies and clarifies things? And if there’s one area of consumer research that needs cleaning up, it’s brand tracking.

Fame, Feeling And Fluency: A VW Case Study

Volkswagen, as you just may have heard, is in a spot of trouble at the moment. The kind of trouble that wipes a quarter or more off a company’s share price and removes CEOs. Whether the legal fallout from their emissions-test-fixing scandal, and the fines the company face, will cripple or even destroy VW is an open question. But there’s another question to answer too – what are consumers making of all this? How likely are they to forgive VW, or didn’t they care much in the first place?

Branding Reality Bites: The Strange Tale Of OK Soda

2015 brings us a little-heralded marketing anniversary – it’s been 20 years since Coca-Cola pulled OK Soda from the market. If you’ve not heard of OK, or you’ve forgotten it, that’s more than forgivable. The drink – meant to appeal to the ironic, cynical, Nirvana-loving teens of Generation X – was launched in 1993 but never made it to general release. OK Soda survives now as an occasional case study and minor cult – like the Ford Edsel, it haunts the graveyard of global brands that never were.

These Aren’t The Insights You’re Looking For

Previously we published an obituary for the Traditional Concept, which struck a nerve and became our most-read post for months. Research concepts, we argued, are simply too reasonable – they are appeals to deliberative System 2 thinking in a world where decisions are actually made by our fast, emotionally-guided System 1.

Obituary: The Traditional Concept, c.1960 – 2014

The traditional Concept, which passed away earlier this year after a brief illness, will be fondly remembered by the many researchers who spent time with it. It was a reassuring presence in the research industry, its three part structure – Insight-Benefit-Reason To Believe – resonating as a solid, common sense way of developing and testing new products.

So, How Many Basic Emotions Are There Again?

We’ve had this article (or variants of it) brought to our attention a lot in the last couple of weeks. It’s about some new research by academic Rachael Jack which calls into question Paul Ekman’s idea that there are only “six basic emotions”. According to Jack’s work, there are actually four.

Surprising Fluency

In yesterday’s blog post I talked about a new study of scientific papers, which shows that hit papers – the ones with highest impact – score highly on both “conventionality” and “novelty”. In other words, the very new thrives best when it’s planted in extremely familiar soil.

Familiarity Breeds Content

What makes a hit? Understanding why things become popular is one of the foundational questions of marketing, but a surprisingly difficult one. It’s easy – too easy – to come up with reasons for success which are satisfying from a narrative and a commonsense perspective, but which are ultimately completely untestable.

Taming The Panda

Brand Trackers are the Giant Pandas of research. They are slow-moving and not particularly clever. They exist on an extremely limited diet of hard to digest data. They are naturally solitary, rarely joining up with other data sets. And getting them to procuce offspring, in the form of useful insights, is an exceptionally arduous and frustrating process. In short, they seem like something of an evolutionary disaster and it’s remarkable they have survived given the pressures of the modern world.

How To Eat A Sandwich (The Daniel Kahneman Way)*

This is a post about how to get a better experience from your lunchtime sandwich. Here is a sandwich. This particular sandwich is a chicken, bacon and avocado baguette, but don’t worry! This powerful psychological trick works with any kind of sandwich.