the art of conversation

Important conversations I

I have been working on a Brexit project, which is equally fascinating and frustrating. It is a subject which divides people in this country like no other subject I have encountered.

One of the many strands in this complex topic is the Remainer sentiment, 'name one good thing which can come of Brexit?'

I have found one. This advert from JWT for HSBC UK:

 What makes this so good, IMHO, is its very British tone to accompany its global message. To the strains of Elgar's Nimrod (for Brexiteers) the ad, fronted by the excellent Richard Ayoade (for Remainers), is saying that you can be a British and a global citizen.

It is funny (Python-esque humour), self-deprecating, very visual and full of lovely touches.

My only slight quibble is that it is very 'southern middle class'. How will it play to non-middle class audiences in, for example, Sunderland?

I aim to find out ...

Heineken and the value of good conversations

I associate Heineken adverts with those polished baubles of lifestyle fakery from the Champions League ad breaks. 

Now comes a very different and rather good advert called ‘Worlds Apart’. Two strangers with opposing views meet and complete a task together, before their views are revealed and they must decide whether to leave or stay and have a conversation.

It’s a drastic change in style and IMO a brave attempt to play in the tricky ‘moral high ground’, the space between what matters to people and what matters to brands. This is not easy – just ask Pepsi.

Will Burns in Forbes magazine notes that the ad is being based on the idea that people want to be ‘heard’, or listened to, which fits with beer’s cultural values. Simon Mainwaring calls it a good example of combining purpose with profit, in keeping with Heineken’s 2016 mission to “brew a better world”.

Of course there is the inevitable backlash, such as this excoriating piece by The DiDi Delgado, who seems to have forgotten it is only an advert, yet calls us all stupid.

And we must be wary of the idea that ‘brands with purpose’ abound and are successful because of their sense of purpose – a false idea, as shown by Richard Shotton. 

But I rate it because the basic idea rings true: people want and need to be heard and listened to, but rarely experience this. As a result, we disconnect from each other, increasingly living within a ‘bubble’, often without realising it. We hide behind our beliefs or assumptions, reinforced by our media weapons of choice.

We are also ‘boxed in’ by conventional social interactions. Consider the average board meeting, focus group discussion, family Christmas dinner, political debate. Consider how much posturing goes on, how we defend/protect ourselves, judge others, how we dissemble, disguise, disengage, how we ‘play the game’.

Now that the populist forces of Brexit and Trump are on the march, are we becoming even less tolerant, less respecting of authority, less trusting of others, because we are angry and afraid? 

A good conversation is hard to achieve but all the more important to pursue. It is not easy to listen to others and to give up or put aside one’s own point of view, for a while at least. But such conversations are possible – I would say necessary - and can help to re-connect people.

Unhurried Conversations were started by Johnnie Moore and Antony Quinn as an attempt at this kind of genuine, open and honest conversation. They allow people to be themselves, not to act a role. It is less about taking more time than taking more care, allowing people to be more in tune with each other and what they're doing, to think differently and connect with people in a refreshing way.

They have now been run in the UK, Australia, Spain and the USA. I now co-host the London ones (details here – free and open to everyone) and I am applying the principles now to research.

So hats off to Heineken and here’s to more good conversations.

Unhurried Research

I have started co-hosting Unhurried Conversations in London with Johnnie Moore. They are advertised on meetup.com and are open to the public. London Unhurried Conversations can be found here. 

Johnnie has run many of these in Cambridge. Unhurried groups have started in Mallorca and Santa Cruz and a group in Sydney is planned.

Johnnie first blogged about Unhurried in 2014. It emerged from a series of conversations with his friend Antony Quinn. They share an interest in improv theatre and realised that the best improv had an unhurried quality. Players could relate to each other and build the scene together without panic.

The format is very simple. A number of people (so far, 6 – 10) meet for 90 mins to talk and listen. If this sounds like a ‘focus group discussion’, the reality is very different. We use a ‘talking piece’ format, meaning that only someone holding the talking piece can talk. It can be on any subject, for any length of time.

The result is that the conversation has a very different pace and structure to the normal, noisy ‘cut and thrust’ of a conversation or group discussion. It is not so much that it is slower, but more reflective and considered, more deliberated and also more spontaneous. It’s as if the ‘noise’ is turned off and you can hear people’s genuine feelings and thoughts. As Johnnie says:

“in an unhurried conversation, there is time to think differently and connect with people in a refreshing way … people find it easy to join in and not feel crowded out. And listening can be as satisfying as talking.”

Johnnie started exploring how unhurried can guide creativity, collaboration and leadership in his work as a facilitator. He describes the elements of unhurried as an approach here. It is really a mindset of being open to connections and possibilities at any given moment and getting comfortable with both the anxiety and excitement that this brings.

The approach fascinates me and reminds me of our own ‘wild conversations’ experiment. The conventional approach in research is that one group of people (‘clients’) have questions and issues that matter to them, which are put to another group of people (‘consumers’) by someone like me.

But what if we turned that on its head? What if we started with what interested and mattered to people and moved from there to the client’s agenda?

Is this start of Unhurried Research? Research in which:

• people feel willing to show up as themselves, connect and spark off each other
• everyone feels involved, empowered and has an equal role
• a space is created for curiosity and reflection to deepen understanding
• we operate at the edges of our comfort zones, surrendering control but secure enough to experiment

Reading the Signs: four forms of communication failure

You’d think that communication does not get much simpler than a sign. But many signs fail to communicate clearly.

This was dramatically illustrated at the recent Oscars ceremony, where the wrong card was read out for Best Film, but the design and typography of the card may well have contributed to the error, as pointed out by Benjamin Bannister. 

Through extensive observational research, we have identified four kinds of communication failure. These same mistakes can affect any piece of communication, but show up most clearly in signs.

1. Ambiguity

This warning is surely intended as a reference to specific dogs. But it could be taken as general advice about all dogs, at least by any passing pedant.

Then there is this adverbially-challenged sign, seen in the toilet of a dance studio:

The small print does not say, ‘leaving en pointe is appreciated but not obligatory’.

Of course, we understand what is meant in the context of where the sign is located. But these examples suggest that nobody checked that the words meant what the author thought they meant.

2. Obscurity

Sometimes the context gives no clue as to the meaning. Such as this handmade street sign.

More worryingly, these signs (below) on UK motorways are baffling. On the assumption that they are meant to mean something to the public, rather than being a private language, what is going on?

How many people know what these signs mean, without Googling them?

We are surrounded by jargon and words or symbols which we are assumed to have understood.

Have you heard radio journalists refer to ‘the package at the top of the programme …’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 3. Mis-direction

Good communication is supposed to be clear and single-minded. There is also a desire to serve a purpose. But signs trying to be helpful or comprehensive can mis-direct our attention.

 

4. Overloading

A very common failure is where things get in the way of the intended communication. It may simply be trying to convey too many things ...

 

… or it may be the temptation to over-elaborate, eg explain an acronym for the benefit (presumably) of the intended target, in this case, those with psychosis.

My favourite example of unintentional overloading, as posted by @Nickparker, is this wonderfully seething sign in Westminster:

 

What comes across more than the information are the layers of attitude. As @AdContrarian Bob Hoffman recently pointed out, we can be too focused on the 'message' without realising what we are 'signalling'.

Are the inverted commas meant to make it sound friendlier, rather than snarky? Has the author ever seen a bike, let alone ‘tied’ one to railings? The use of ‘your’ as a plural is another give-away, pointing to the real issue behind most of the communication failures illustrated here.

I have a theory about why signs like these fail. Some say that this is a very intellectual issue, but I'm not so sure. Sorry.

I think it is more straightforward: it is about perspective. It is harder than you may think to adopt the perspective of others, but vitally important when trying to communicate with them.

It requires some imagination and empathy. You have to first identify and then put aside your own perspective. Many people are unable or unwilling to do either of these things.

But this is exactly what the qualitative research process is designed for and what a skilled practitioner can provide: reading the signs as seen and received, to help the sender to communicate better.

Brand loyalty, introspection and shave gel

I always buy Gillette razor blades, which makes me ‘brand loyal’. But what does that mean? And why does it make me feel uneasy? The answer struck me recently in our local Savers - you never know when insight will strike.

The traditional notion of brand loyalty says that it is driven by positive feelings and some kind of emotional commitment or bond to a brand, as may apply to a person. This Metaphorical Model is advocated in Saatchi & Saatchi’s Lovemarks, based on a 2004 book by Kevin Roberts and updated in 2015 in the paper, Loyalty Beyond Reason. Brand loyalty is driven by ‘brand love’. A crucial link seems to be, because people can be brands, so brands are like people. (Well, it does say 'beyond reason').

The 2015 update attempts to provide evidence to support this theory, with copious scientific-sounding references, eg: "Dr. Paul Zak, an economist and neurobiologist ... has identified the instances when people love brands more than people, triggered by a ‘story button’ in the brain". The Lovemarks blog is now closed to new submissions.

The Behavioural Model by contrast says that brand loyalty is not an emotional bond but is based on repeated behaviour and is a matter of salience, availability and convenience. People have only weak links with brands, which are not at all like relationships we have with people. This model is advocated by Byron Sharp in ‘How Brands Grow’.

The battle of these conflicting models of brand loyalty has seen a comprehensive victory for the Behaviourists, I think. The idea of brand love been exposed by many, including Martin Weigel and Mark Earls. This is good because the Metaphorical Model is total twaddle.

Byron Sharp shared a conference platform with Kevin Roberts in 2011 and to make his point about loyalty being based on habit not love, he asked those in the audience to put their hand up if they had returned to the same chair they were sitting in previously – nearly everyone did. “Amazing loyalty, but not presumably due to your strong emotional commitment to that particular plastic white chair”. 

Which parallels my unease about Gillette loyalty. I buy the blades but I don’t feel the love. In fact I feel resentment at having to pay so much for razor blades to an organisation who spends it on cheesy advertising with personalities (‘brands’) which leaves me cold.

So why persist, you may ask? 

For those who don't wet shave, razor blades or heads are designed to fit a particular handle and there has been a kind of ‘razor arms race’ between Gillette and competitors. The twin-bladed Contour led to Sensor, then Mach 3 (three blades), then Fusion (five blades!). Proliferation continued with the likes of ProGlide and Proshield Flexball.

I suspect that men cannot resist buying the highest spec gizmo. The higher tech the features, the better (regardless of need), from power tools to cars to razors. ‘The best a man can get’ is a powerful line - conceptual catnip to a man.

Therefore men (like me) have one or more branded ‘handles’ which fit only one type of blade. Gillette’s dominance is such that their blades retail for up to £2.50 each. It has been estimated that this represents a mark-up of 4,750%.

So I was 'locked into' Gillette razors, but what about gel? I reflected in Savers on how I chose gel, which revealed:  

• I honestly could not remember which gel I bought last time
• I excluded foam, then more expensive gels, then tertiary brands 
• I’m never sure whether or not I have ‘sensitive skin’, so I ruled these in

My strategy was ‘buy the cheapest branded gel’ with an upper limit of £1.50 for 200ml. This is one of these conversations I remind myself never to actually have aloud, along with, 'what is the cheapest litre of petrol?' or 'what's the best way from A to B through London?'.

This left two options, Mach 3 (RHS) and Sensitive (LHS). I bought them both, to prove conclusively that that there was in fact no difference between them. Wrong: there was a difference and it had nothing to do with technology. It was all about the smell.

The Mach 3 product smelled of cheap aftershave. It reminded me of Blue Stratos, the Lynx of its day. It made me think of being a teenager, of big collars, body odour and desperation.

The Sensitive one smelled like soap, a vaguely carbolic, Imperial Leather type of smell. It reminded me of barbers shops and old armchairs and confidence.

Shaving is a private, intimate activity which has not really changed over the years.

We are told that Generation Z consumers are more savvy and more brand-wary than previous generations.

So let’s hope that P&G, who bought Gillette for $57bn in 2005, don’t forget the power of fragrance and its role in signalling a more 'authentic', unvarnished, confident masculinity. 

Let’s hope that P&G are not about to discontinue Gillette Sensitive shave gel.

And let’s not forget, despite what some New Behaviourists say, the value of honest introspection (ie questioning) in revealing truths about why we buy what we buy.

Brexit, stage right

Photo by Boaz Guttman

We interrupt this blog with breaking news. The UK voted by 52:48% to Leave and break away from the European Union (EU). More break-aways, in the EU and within the UK, are not unlikely. 

Politics is in turmoil, with resignations, new appointments (including a new Prime Minister) and great uncertainty: what will it mean for the economy, for Europe, for British society? One thing is clear, the result was not expected. Everyone, including the markets and betting firms, predicted a Remain vote.

To declare an interest, I strongly felt that Leave was the wrong call, as was the EU Referendum in the first place and campaigned for Remain in the week leading up to the vote. The Art of Conversation is about research and communication, not politics. But it looks as if Brexit is a result of a massive failure in communication.

Campaign magazine said as much, in that the Remain team left out strong work and did not get the message or the tone right. I fear that it goes much deeper than this. This was a massive communication failure in at least these five ways:

1. Miles apart from the start

Communicating effectively requires some common ground, shared understanding. But the Brexit vote has "exposed a huge rift between the metropolitan elite and the rest" to quote James Bartholomew in the Spectator. So many people felt cut off from and/or put down by ‘the establishment’. The Leave/Remain vote drove a further wedge into the rift which was already there, but which those in power ignored, under-estimated or just did not see.

2. Never assume

There was something that felt rather complacent about how the Remain campaign conducted itself. ‘We know best’. It was as if they assumed they would win, as if staying in the EU was so obviously the better option that this merely had to be spelled out (no matter how patronisingly). As Grant McCracken pointed out, polling mistakenly assumed (once again) that asking someone their voting intention has no context. But it does, people respond to an imagined ‘position’ not to a question. Similarly, the numbers chucked at us during the campaign were either pointless or counter-productive: “millions of Britons were sick and tired of experts presuming they know better.”

3. Tonally wrong-footed

Tom Ewing at Brainjuicer pointed out that the emotional message of the Leave campaign was stronger, more heartfelt and tapped into a powerful archetype (re-birth) and turned feelings of frustration into something positive and dynamic – “Take (back) control”, “We want our country back”. The Remain campaign “Stronger In” was more conceptual, based on a judgement, a calculation ('more jobs, lower prices, a stronger future') not a gut emotion and the campaign did not capture a sense of pride or Britishness.

4. People not messages

In ‘Could He Actually Win’, Dave Eggers describes the Trump American presidential campaign, seen from a rally in Sacramento. Trump has said some outrageous things in his campaign; similarly, some messages in the EU Referendum were clearly untrue, most infamously the £350m ‘cost’ of the EU. But as Eggers points out, it is not about the message. We are in ‘post-factual’ times, to use that chilling phrase. What matters is the sentiment and the person conveying the sentiment:

“(Trump’s) appeal is in the forbidden delight in hearing highly inappropriate things spoken into a microphone … His supporters are not really listening to anything he says … Nothing in Trump’s platform matters. There is no policy that matters. There is no promise that matters. There is only the man, the name, the brand, the personality … a loud, captivating distraction ... His appeal is … fuelled not by substance but by his willingness to say crazy shit”

Trump in America, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage in the UK; larger than life characters (‘brands’) whom people wanted to be unconventional and disobedient. The Remain campaign put up people with far less charisma, including establishment figures and anonymous economists who made the economic case using lots of numbers. The source and the message itself left people cold and the message was characterised by Leavers as ‘scaremongering’, winning the emotional high ground (or low ground?).

5. Cultural identity

As Mary Beard pointed out on the radio this morning, Britain divides into those who culturally feel more ‘European’ as part of their identity (broadly, in Scotland and in London, plus some other pockets) and those who do not. It should have been no surprise that so many people see ‘being European’ or being ‘part of Europe’ as a contrast to not a complement to ‘being English’. Consider how English history focuses on fighting the French, the World Wars. Apparently, Leavers tended towards nostalgia/the past, Remainers oriented more towards modernity and the future. So the cultural ‘background communication’ for years has been anti-European and very much anti-EU (‘meddling bureaucrats’ etc). No doubt we shall now learn whether Britain’s isolation is quite as splendid as we used to imagine it to be.

And so the repercussions and fallout rumble on. There is debate about whether Brexit necessarily means leaving the EU in all forms. What does Brexit actually mean and entail? (Yes, you would think they'd have considered this, before the referendum was called for Tory party political reasons). Could there even be a second referendum? A government spokesman responds with 'Brexit means Brexit' which falls a bit short of meaning anything whatsoever. But, to use another airy truism, 'we are where we are'. Which would be worse, actually leaving the EU, eventually, or not leaving the EU? Damned if we do, damned if we don't. Splendid indeed.

So what are the lessons, what can we learn?  

We need to learn how to engage with people not like us, who hold different views. Social media encourages us to engage only with those inside our own, like-minded sphere, a kind of 'digital gated community'. Those who care about such things maybe need to get out more.

Politicians need to consider how they represent their constituents. The media need to consider the impact of their work on the public and in whose interests they operate.

People on both sides, whether denouncing 'thickos' who voted Leave, or sneering at the 'liberal elite' who voted Remain, need to get over themselves. Those of us in market research need to understand more and measure differently.

For my part, there are organisations such as Involve which campaigns for active citizenship and greater public engagement and have called for facilitators to rally round. (What is the collective noun for facilitators?). I'm in. People such as Agents of Change have been discussing how people in organisations can generate more inclusive and constructive conversations. I'm there.

Things can get better. But only if we work hard and work more collectively.

Photography-as-research, part 3

The practice of photography is closer to the qualitative research inquiry than I had first realised. Maybe this is why they work so well together.

In the paper we referenced the fact that more images have been taken in the last 12 months than the whole of history up until that   
point. I have also been asked whether there is a difference between ‘a photograph’ and a snapshot ie any image.

So I wanted to address both of these issues, before drawing our conclusions from our ‘photography-as-research’ experiment.

Anyone can interview someone, press ‘record’, transcribe the interview. So can anyone do qualitative research? Yes. But can anyone be a (good) qualitative researcher?

Similarly, anyone can point a camera (or smartphone) and take a picture. So are we are all photographers now?

Doing a qualitative research project is not the same as collecting and reproducing data. Yes, there is skill involved in collecting data - more than is perhaps always understood. But the real value of qual arguably comes from how the data is collected and processed, how it is interpreted, framed, prioritised, contextualised and communicated.

In the same way, what is involved in photography is more than simply taking images. It’s the way you do it and what you do with it that matters. There are differences between a photograph and any old image (a snap), although a snap could be a great photograph!

I see the differences* as:

• you make a photograph, you take a snap 
• structure and proportions matter in a photograph, but not in a snap
• a photograph has interest to anyone, a snap mainly to those involved
• a photograph is about what is left out, a snap is about what is put in
• a photograph can take time to make and can endure, snaps are fast and fleeting
• a photograph has meaning, intention, a point of view, emotion, a narrative; a snap is just data

I think that these qualities are shown in many of these iPhone 6 adverts, seen on billboards everywhere. What marks them out, in an image-saturated environment, I think, is their emotion and their narrative power.

This is what links photography to qualitative research. What a great photograph adds to research is its ability to resonate, to convey things simply and powerfully, to focus our attention and to free our minds.

In his essay ‘Forgotten Women Photographers of the Twentieth Century’, the novelist William Boyd says:

“photography is the most patently democratic of all the art forms … we are (all) capable of producing … a really fine photograph – maybe even a great one ... the camera allows us to create an image that will move, intrigue, startle, disturb and satisfy – that will resonate in some way … billions upon billions of moments seized doesn’t seem like ‘stopping time’ any more. The integrity and the quality of the unique image is what makes photography different, what makes it work.”

‘Integrity and quality’ could mean the thought that goes into it, the planning, the care, the editing, selecting, framing, the (dark art of) post-production. I’d argue that photography, like qualitative research, is a way of trying to interpret or make sense of a subject, rather than simply representing it. There is more to it than meets the eye. To coin a phrase.

Photography uses visual data and qualitative research primarily uses verbal data, but both depend on careful selecting and 'processing'. Which is why it is surprising that we do not make more of the power of images in our qualitative research projects.

To do so, in our opinion, would make our projects altogether richer and more complete. We are all capable of making good photographs (a bit of time, patience, technique needed) but it adds a great deal, when combined with our existing, linguistic skills.

The summary and conclusions of our experiment are coming up.

* with thanks to researcher and photographer Tom Peck for some of these comparisons

An experiment in photography-as-research, part 2

What did we learn by using our 'Seeing Interview' method, in our experimental research for Akzo Nobel? The method was to take photographs over two visits to participants' homes, show these photos to participants during our conversations and analyse them. We had intended to ask them to take photos too and would do this in future, but time counted against this in our study.

A curious thing happened. By having our attention less exclusively focused on what participants said, we learned more about them. We were not in 'interrogation mode'. We were 'distracted' by looking around their home and this seemed to encourage them to say more.

It is hardly revolutionary. Some documentary-makers talk with people while they are doing something. Ruby Wax used to interview people while walking along.

Product designers IDEO encourage us to 'listen with our eyes' to discover what people really care about.

Secondly it revealed things through the objects we photographed. Neil MacGregor wrote 'A history of the world in 100 objects' for a BBC Radio4 series. The objects told intertwining stories 'of endless connections'. On a much smaller scale the objects we photographed enriched our understanding of participants' stories and values. 

For example, Karen's necklace encapsulates her style and aesthetic: subtle sophistication, intricacy and confidence. It perfectly reflected the way she talked about light, colour, materials and textures.

Thirdly, using photography enabled us to reflect not only what we saw in front of us, but also how we felt about what we saw, helping us to express and visualise ideas about our participants. For example, this photo evoked the particular feeling Karen called fizzy – a specific vibrancy, dynamism or excitement which mattered to her.

 

We also learned a great deal about the subject of colour, not only in terms of how a particular group of people viewed and chose colour for their home, but also in more general terms.

For example, we all know that colour is highly subjective, everyone sees colours differently. But did you know that up to about 10% of all men have a form of colour vision deficiency, but only about 0.5% of women? We'd say that colour is identity, it’s a technology of the self. It both reflects our world and allows us to project aspects of ourselves and make them manifest. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Colour is ‘dimensional’, meaning there is colour within colour. We subliminally reference other colours in how we see a particular part of the colour spectrum. 

And you cannot separate colour from texture. Different textures reflect light differently which dictates how colour is experienced. And textures suggest feelings, they make vision tactile, and suggest visual pleasure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which may be all very well and rather technical, but as we were asked, the subject of colour/home decorating obviously lends itself to a visual approach, could other research topics also be illuminated using the Seeing Interview approach? 

Our answer is yes, due to what the approach offers and also what makes a photograph different to an image/snapshot. All will be revealed in the last instalment.  

Now I See What You Mean: an experiment in photography-as-research, part 1

THE VISUAL AGE

We live in a Visual Age, the age of Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, smartphone selfies. 

More images have been taken in the last 12 months than in the whole of history to date. 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook on average every day (243,055 new photos every minute).

Images are now arguably the dominant cultural medium. 

But research is still very much in the Linguistic Age; we are rather word-bound. When we do use visuals it is often in a rather lazy way, grabbing stills from Google to support what we say. I would bet that, in the average research project, most of our time and attention is devoted to words and very little to images.

A RESEARCH EXPERIMENT

What if we turned this around? What if a research project paid as much attention to pictures as to words? What if we took a photographic approach to research?

For the ESOMAR Congress in Dublin I worked with Dr Nick Coates and Akzo Nobel (of Dulux fame) on an experimental project to explore the potential business value of photography-as-research.

Colour is particularly important to Akzo Nobel, for obvious reasons. We focused on one customer segment who are confident in creative matters, but are often overlooked on the basis that 'they don't need help' from the likes of AN.

We had two main questions:

– What does colour mean to them: how do they use it, how does it affect them?

– Does having a photographer’s approach and mindset help in research?

INNOVATIVE METHOD: THE 'SEEING INTERVIEW'

We designed a new, hybrid approach we called the Seeing Interview, a combination of ethnography (observing, in situ) and an interview (spoken conversation). We were looking and listening, following what we saw and what we heard. We rejected the discussion guide in favour of a fluid, person-led, fragmentary approach. We created the narrative around the images. 

'Cubist' approach: embracing subjectivity and creative interpretation

There is an established connection between research and photojournalism. So we wanted to embrace this but also to explore other photographic styles to create multiple perspectives and to understand our subject-matter from every angle – a kind of 'Cubist' approach. We embraced subjectivity, by trying to engage our own style and subjectivity as photographers, as well as that of our participants.

Meet our participants

Cathy: single mum, lives with her irrepressible 10-year old son. 

Heidi: business consultant by day. Candle obsessive at night. 

Sarah: event organiser on maternity leave, pop art and Elle Deco fan.

Karen: jewellery importer, all flowing dresses and 1960s values.

What did we find out?

More in part 2. 

How to have a better conversation

Celeste Headlee is a radio host who gave a really good TED talk about how to have a better conversation, summarised recently by Claire Labrum for the ICG. 

Celeste's recipe for better conversations focused on honesty, brevity, clarity and (especially) on the art of listening.

Some of Celeste's top tips for interviewing people;

• Listen hard and resist the urge to talk. "Most of us don’t listen with the intent to understand, we listen with the intent to reply". (S Covey)  
• 'Stay out of the weeds' - people don’t care about the details, they care about you and what you have in common
• Try not to repeat yourself 
• Don't multi task, be mentally focused, be 'present' in the moment, without distraction
• Don't pontificate, listen for what you can learn from the other person. 
• Don't equate your experience with theirs 
• Try not to repeat yourself
• Be brief 

Good lessons for life, not just for research.

Listening to, listening from and listening back

I have been listening back to people I have interviewed, mainly women, talking about meals, families and cooking.

What I noticed was a kind of “Law of Thirds” rule. About a third of the content was good, insightful, useful, a third was OK and the rest was less good.

This made me consider how I had been listening while doing the fieldwork on this project. I like to think that I know how to listen to people, paying close attention, allowing pauses and silences etc.

I am familiar with the idea of ‘active listening’. (Although I learned, thanks to Johnnie Moore, that Carl Rogers came to reject the idea as gimmicky or technique-y).

Then I remembered someone using the notion of ‘listening from’. The idea is that ‘listening from’ is what you are REALLY listening to, what your latent perspective is, your hidden filters.

As Maria Popova puts it in ‘Lessons in Listening by John Cage’: we only hear what we listen to.

What were my filters, where was I listening from, in those interviews I deemed ‘less useful’? I think they included: ‘I’ve heard this before’, ‘is that really true?’ and ‘and …?’

There are several different listening styles. Qualitative researchers have to listen in different ways simultaneously: listening empathetically to the person and listening from the perspective of the research objectives. There is a view that we lean either towards a ‘person orientation’ or towards a ‘task orientation’.

I came to the conclusion that my task-oriented listening was getting in the way, in those cases where I felt I was not learning enough. Impatience stopped me hearing, perhaps.

But I also wondered, today being International Women’s Day, whether my ‘person oriented’ listening has recurring, gender-based biases. Did I hear women in a particular way? I thought about some of those closest to me. 'What now?' insinuated itself. 

The lesson I came away with was to pay attention to how I really listen, where I listen from.

And also to appreciate the value of listening back.

pic by Devlin Ralph

Conversations as universal social acts

Here at The Art of Conversation we believe that spoken conversation is an important and revealing human activity. We would say that, wouldn't we? This, despite the current trend in research and marketing to decry or play down spoken conversation in favour of digital exchanges and behaviour aggregates.

Well it seems that science is on our side. As reported in The Atlantic, researchers have discovered a universal pattern in the length of the pauses between spoken utterances of people, across culture and language. And the typical pause is very short: we all wait on average about 200 milliseconds before taking our turn speaking. Oddly, the average is 470 in Denmark, but only 7 in Japan. Hells bells!

Conversation analysts have known about the rapid-fire nature of spoken conversations for some time. But now Stephen Levinson from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has measured them by recording videos of people casually talking in informal settings.

What Levinson describes as a “basic metabolism of human social life” is the universal tendency to minimize the silence between turns, without overlaps. The short duration of these silences is amazing, in that it takes 600 milliseconds just to retrieve a single word from memory. So we must be planning our responses in the middle of a partner’s turn. We continuously predict what the rest of an utterance will be, while preparing our rejoinder. 

But can this be right, 200 milliseconds? The cynic in me wondered whether the conversations which were filmed were atypically rapid-fire in the first place. 'Look, psychology researchers with video cameras, let's talk really fast without gaps and see if they notice.' 

But if we accept that the conversations were real and typical of social interactions, it suggests that this is 'deep' behaviour, that spoken conversations are highly evolved acts. Our turn-taking system seems to predate language. Great apes take turns when gesturing to each other and other primates take turns when calling and match a partner’s rhythm if they speed up or slow down, according to researcher Tanya Stivers.

Research is ongoing, however, with the team still investigating how infants learn and adapt their turn-taking conversations. While infants are super-fast, apparently, 8 year-olds are a few hundred milliseconds slower than adults, which is "a puzzle".

Perhaps I can help here, in the interests of science. It's context dependent. 'It's time for bed' - slow or no response. 'Who wants ice cream?' Japanese-level response.

Polling, predictions, people ... and pictures

The Art of Conversation is back after a nice Summer break. 

These last few months turned out to have been quite eventful. In the UK, the Conservatives won an overall  majority to become the sole party in government, after hundreds of polls predicted a hung parliament.

There has been a great deal of soul-searching among pollsters in the UK. The British Polling Council proved themselves to be masters of understatement: "The final opinion polls before the election were clearly not as accurate as we would like."

The enquiry is apparently ongoing but it is likely that the causes of the predictive failure go well beyond methodological tinkering. Surely there is some systemic failure, a fatal flaw in how we go about trying to predict future behaviour by simply asking people what they intend to do.

A great deal has already been written about this, but nothing as clear and well-argued as this article by
John Kearon. John demonstrated how it wasn't so much that people “defied the polls” as that polling "failed to predict the people".

The fatal flaw in polling is that it tries to measure how we'll vote based on our rational processing, our ‘System 2’ brain (Kahneman). But as behavioural science has shown, our decisions are driven by our instinctive ‘System 1’ brain, which deals in our experience and emotional impressions.

In other words, we vote, we choose, we behave, according to how we feel. At the time. A response to a question like how will you vote or will you buy this product is not a prediction but is a position. 

But we all instinctively know this. Which makes the continuation of question-and-answer forms of market research all the more puzzling. And while opinion polls are the best known form of market research, they could not be further from what we do (in qualitative research). 

But there is no room for complacency and qualitative research is very word-bound, over-dependent on interpreting what people say.

So we have undertaken an experiment. It was to carry out a research study using pictures (photographs) instead of slavishly following only what people say. We shall report on this shortly ...

 

Advertising reimagined

I am lucky enough to have seen 'Paddington' recently and also to have flown with Etihad Airways.

So I can say with some confidence that Nicole Kidman is a fine actress and that Etihad provides excellent customer service. 

Nicole fronting Etihad's new luxury package ought to have been a match made in heaven. 

The visuals are sumptuous, there is lots of slow-mo and a haunting, middle-eastern-y musical theme. There is one whole minute to impress us and 'land' the message (sorry). What could possibly go wrong? 

The idea seems to be that Etihad's new package (a cabin on the A380, yours for £12.5k apparently) is not flying reinvented but is Flying Reimagined.

A subtle distinction - and one which the copy does not clarify. In fact, the copy seems to have been designed not to make sense but to make sounds to accompany the visuals. Copywriting Reimagined. 

The problem may be that old, 'retrofit the strategy into the copy' trick. Or perhaps the copy is mis-translated from the original Arabic (into Tuareg, then Farsi) into English. Or maybe it is just very badly written.

Not only does it not mean anything, it's about as elegant as a sack of hammers. For example:

'... bored by reinvention of the superficial kind ... because their goal isn't to improve on what has been done before but to totally reimagine it ...'

I sounds as if someone has been through the script and removed all the punctuation. Grammar, Reimagined.

Here is the transcript on YouTube; odd to say the least, but possibly a slight improvement on the original.

"occasionally people come along when not content simply moving things in they want she's the Tara plans start again take another group game see the future and knock down walls to reach 62 between is possible Japan indecision intake running 10 into the engine by reinvention into submission the mountain stable is in to improve on what has been done before totally the match and ok"

Nicole and Etihad have been quite heavily criticised for the campaign. Not over the copywriting but over Etihad's commercial and labour practices, vs Nicole's role as a Unicef ambassador for women's rights.

Etihad's response? Call for the same copywriter to draft a statement:

“Our crew are entitled to the full scope of benefits in line with UAE laws, but we choose to go further. Etihad provides many benefits that exceed those requirements significantly, such as housing allowances, comprehensive medical insurance, education expenses, company-wide performance bonuses, robust HR practices, career advancement opportunities ..."

@perfect_siobhan would have been proud. Paddington would have seen through it. But perhaps Nicole should have known better.

Ads with footballers: the bad, the good and the ugly

You'd think that the combination of global superstars and big ad budgets would lead to some good adverts.

Qatar Airways, €150m sponsors of the FCB all-stars, show us how not to do it. This lame, half-hearted, cliche-ridden effort does not even convey where they fly, given the distraction of Suarez et al poncing around. It's obviously for a global audience, but they deserve better than this drivel, which adds new meaning to the phrase 'embarrassment of riches'.

Turkey Airlines, on the other hand, have made some pretty decent ads, like this one which has a story, humour and originality. It also manages to convey where they fly to and that their food is good.

But Qatar/FCB still have some way to go before earning the accolade of worst advert with footballers, which must go to this ad from 2011 for Casillero del Diablo, which features some truly diabolical acting and is totally devoid of an idea. Along with the Qatar Airways shambles-fest, it's a reminder that advertising needs an idea rather than famous footballers and big budgets to succeed.  

Sound as a pound

Market researchers Ipsos Mori have an intriguing slogan ...

An apt idea for a research company, but is it true? Can we predict what value means to people, for example? 

I've been researching pound shops, as it happens. Everyone loves a bargain - but what is the psychology of the pound shop shopper? 

Pound shops have been doing rather well recently - predictably enough. Poundland has just bought 99p Stores. (I wonder how much they paid?)

Everyone knows that in pound shops - like most shops - you leave with more than you came in for. 'Everything costs a pound' plays to our desire to win at the shopping game. Find genuine value, you win. Pay more than you had to, or buy something you later regret, the house wins.

But when you see what is being sold, like the item below ... is it a pet tombstone, a way of immortalising Thumper ... ?

... turns out it was for 'dearest husband', 'nan' - a plastic mantelpiece mini memorial, to remind you of a deceased loved one. Guaranteed not to break, fade, wear out or get stolen. For a pound. What great value! Who'd have predicted that?

Then there were the gnomes ... all sorts of gnomes, gnomes whose  bums lit your path, drunken mushroom gnomes ...

... gnomes-with-windmill set (two designs to collect) ... 

.. not forgetting the Wine Monkey, a sock for putting over a bottle of wine, 'made from all-American red-heeled socks'.

 

Does this imply that those who run pound shops CAN predict their shoppers? They understand the culture and cater for it ...?

Or are they gambling as much as the shopper? Win some, lose some. Maybe we only remember the predictions we get right.

Esso wide of the Mark

Sometimes we play 'what's my Brief?' Guess the strategy behind the ad. This one was deceptively tricky - a man drives around, re-fuels, drives some more. "This is Mark and Mark is energy." The American version (shown here) is Gordon.

We see Mark/Gordon from high up, in an anonymous American city with very little traffic, where they drive to meetings, seemingly on both the left and the right hand side of the road.

A clue to the strategy is normally found when the VO says, 'that's why ...' In the case of the UK version we're told Mark fills up at Esso because ... he drives to meetings. And gets Tesco Club Card points.

So Exxon's Brief must have been, 'please spend quite a lot of money - and show the logo at the end'.

It's a good illustration of the perils of trying to 'depict the real consumer' when you take a top-floor boardroom view of the world. Why does it fail to live up to its lofty aspirations?

The ad is part of a major Exxon campaign, Energy Lives Here, which translates Exxon's expertise (energy) into tangible, person-on-the-street (or in the car) terms. Which may be fine on paper, seen on a global, corporate scale, but looks very vacuous indeed when seen in product terms, as an individual execution - certainly this one.

Or is it because Dave Knockles has finally got a job, as Exxon's UK Head of Marketing?

The biggest conversation in years is just starting

The time is nearly upon us. Or rather, upon those who live in Scotland. Whichever way the vote goes tomorrow, this is the beginning, not the end of a highly significant political conversation: UK politics changed forever.

As one of the 800,000 Scots living ‘Down South’ I have no vote. But I will be hugely affected by the independence referendum, as will all UK residents and many more besides.

The referendum has naturally been a huge topic of conversation in Scotland for the last two years. But it has only been widely aired Down South in the past few weeks, surely one of the many mistakes made.

Campaigning has brought out the best and the worst in people on both sides. There have been some powerful pieces of communication and some pretty poor ones. None worse than the awful ‘The woman who made up her mind’ advert which was patronizing in the extreme and probably backfired. If I were JK I would want my money back for that one.

This is one small sign, among many, of how out of touch with real people it is possible to be, whether coming from Adland or Westminster. In some ways, the Scottish referendum is about the same kind of political disenfranchisement which is felt by those living in Cornwall, Cumbria Carmarthen or Colchester. Just ask Nigel.

Context is everything. If I lived in Scotland I would have been sorely tempted to vote Yes. I would want self-determination, a fairer, more decent and greener society, a strong health service and no Trident.

I may also have felt ‘Yes-ganged’ by all the blue signs around me. How could anyone resist the positive, patriotic message of hope? It is no surprise that so many Nos are staying silent.

But I would also be really worried whether all these high ideals and benefits could be delivered. Would Scotland be able to afford better education, social and health care? Could we get rid of Trident? Would one political elite not be replaced by another?

From my own perspective, there are two possible outcomes from a Yes vote: things could either be very bad indeed or completely disastrous.

A leading academic* has calculated that the cost of Independence to every man, woman and child in Scotland would be about £480. Most business and economics commentators seem to be predicting a tough time economically for an Independent Scotland.

But any criticism is dismissed by hardcore Nationalists as biased and another example of the Westminster elite trying to deceive the Scots. The Yes vote is partly a visceral protest against the perceived southern ‘enemy’.

If this mentality prevails, especially if there is a Yes vote, the result will be a divisive and divided society, neighbours turned into enemies, rivalries becoming real, on both sides of the border.

This to me would be a victory for base instincts over better judgement. It would be the wrong way to achieve what parts of the Yes and the No alliances want: a fairer, more engaged and more democratic society, a stronger, interdependent ‘regional’ identity. An enlightened Scotland leading the way, not a parochial Scotland backing into a corner.

So, you take the Aye road and I’ll take the No road, both paths would lead to change, only No would lead to manageable change, in my opinion, to the kind of ‘civic nationalism’ some have spoken about.

In the more likely event of a No vote (I’d bet by 5-8% and part of me hopes it is not much more than that) two possible outcomes are: the main political parties attempt to go ignore everything and maintain the status quo. Cue the revolution.

Or, as I think will happen, a No vote is the beginning of a very important conversation leading to political reform, more devolved powers for Scotland and for other parts of the UK and a more grown-up, more engaged electorate.

In Scotland, both factions would need to sit down and resolve their differences. We need some kind of Truth and Reconciliation committee. There has been a lot of deceit and hatred and posturing, a great many ‘crimes against humility’ on both sides.

I don’t think that much of this has been thought through – like so much in this extraordinary episode. But that makes the conversation all the more important.

* Iain McLean, FBA FRSE, Official Fellow in Politics; Professor of Politics, Oxford University. The fact he is my brother does not affect my bias.

Research and behaviour: syndromes and conundrums

Mark Earls gave a fascinating AQR webinar recently, entitled ‘What Kind(a) Thing?’. It prefaces themes in his new book, ‘Copy Copy, Copy’ and is an invocation to us researchers to look at the bigger picture (context and behaviour), to cut to the chase and to be more analytical and less method-obsessed.

I couldn't agree more. But I was rather surprised and flattered to find that I was mentioned. In fact, a whole Syndrome had been named after me.

Grant McCracken

Meerkats

It came after the meerkats and just before Grant McCracken. I was honoured by the association - even if the key point related more to comical mammals than to the renowned cultural commentator.

Mark said:
    “If you think a behaviour is … shaped by what goes on between an individual’s ears, then the traditional tools of market research, in particular asking people about themselves … are entirely appropriate … However, if you find that the behaviour in the market is shaped by … what goes on between people, then the traditional methods are not necessarily the best tools”

At first glance it is hard to disagree with this syllogism. Mark’s thesis is that others’ behaviour greatly affects an individual’s behaviour, far more than that individual realises or may care to admit.

This is (a) true, IMHO and (b) an important correction for ‘traditional’ marketing thinking and research, which has relied far too heavily and exclusively on reported behaviour, often not well gathered.

I’d say that very few people nowadays think that, in any given market, a behaviour is ‘shaped (I take this to mean determined, rather than influenced) by what goes on between an individual’s ears’.

But the trick is in the second part of the construct. If you accept that ‘behaviour in (a) market is shaped by what goes on between people’, does that mean that ‘traditional (research) methods’ are not necessarily the best tools?

If ‘traditional methods’ mean only talking to people and taking what they say at face value, then yes, this is less than optimal. And more a function of short-form research, I'd say (but I am biased).

If on the other hand, if these methods include talking to people (as networked, social creatures) in such a way as to help them be better witnesses to their behaviour, as well as using observation, previous studies, big data, little data and other sources, then I’d say that ‘traditional methods’ are quite reasonable tools.

But this is where the Syndrome comes in. Mark knows that I would say what I have just said. And that talking to people is an act, that group dynamics and what people do before and after a long-form research interaction are part of our data set.

The KMc Syndrome, Mark says, is the idea that an experienced researcher’s research technique is not ultimately what matters, but rather their interpretation, their ‘ability to judge people and our attempts to change them’.

I am of course flattered by this – but not fooled by it. It's nice to think I may have good judgement when it comes to assessing attempts to change behaviour, but this does not come out of thin air. It comes from studying as much available evidence as possible, including having conversations with people and applying past experience - and talking to other people and thinking a lot.

So this is the conundrum. (There may be more than one.) My ability to judge people (and their future behaviour) is informed by my interactions with them, which includes both what I observe going on between them and what I hear may be going on between their ears – ie from the workings of their external and internal networks, both of which I have only partial access to.

Internal and external networks

This is because what goes on between an individual’s ears is itself shaped by what goes on between that individual and other people, and vice versa.

All of which makes Mark’s original question, ‘what kind(a) thing?’ a good one as it invites us to ask, for any given product or market, so what does shape the behaviour we are trying to change?

But rather than rule out a set of methods just because they have been widely and sometimes badly used, we should use any method we can, but use it wisely and well. And copy those who do that.

We are all animals are we not

I do like a nice cycle. These days it's mainly commuting to work and back.

Why do people like to cycle? Partly to appreciate the Great Outdoors, to commune with nature, go where we like, when we like ...

 

 

 

 

 

In other words, 'to know I am not a sheep'.

But then there is the sheer pleasure of cycling along, the speed, the thrill of the chase.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In other words, 'to know what it's like to be a horse'.

Pictures by John van Rhijn, Hareesh P, Charles Morrice and Sum_of_Marc

 

Contiguous conversations: a short story from Orkney

I never expected this: hunched in a small plane bumping through clouds staring at a patch of green emerging slowly through the mist.

I was going to Orkney to research electricity usage and tariffs for Big Sofa.

A dry subject, on the face of it; possibly the only dry thing in Orkney at the time.

It was not such an unusual research project, two group discussions and some in-home visits. Although I was 210 miles from the nearest ‘viewing facility’.

But as I sat in the steamed-up taxi going back to the airfield the next day, I suddenly realised what had been happening.

As discussed last time there is a trend in research to value data about ‘consumers’ over information from people. ‘New Behaviourism’ has it that people are unreliable witnesses to their own behaviour. People dissemble, deceive or otherwise diddle us, without realising it.

This is not a new idea, of course. David Ogilvy is said to have said:

    "The trouble with research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and     they don’t do what they say.”

The last point most exercises New Behaviourists. They say that talking to people in research is old hat. It is better to experiment on them eg using electrodes or flashing images at them or tracking their movements and those of all their friends.

Now, we all know that people do not always do what they say (how could you, anyway?). But what the Orkney trip taught me is that there are certain kinds of conversations which get closer to the behaviour they are designed to explore. I’d call these ‘contiguous conversations’.

This is not meant to be as pompous as it probably sounds. It is simply meant to underline how helpful it is to remove the ‘stuff’ which gets in the way or distances you from the behaviour you are exploring, when talking to people.

I was in people’s homes as they showed me their electricity meter, as they stared at their last bill or tried to remember what tariff they were on.

Not only was I physically close to the subject at hand, there was also a will or an intention on their part to understand and to articulate what they did and how they felt about their electricity usage, arrangements and suppliers.

As it happens, it is quite a complicated set of behaviour (that’s an understatement), subject to many biases, in Behavioural Economics (BE) terms. These include the ‘better the devil you know’ bias, the ‘frankly, I cannot be arsed’ bias and the ‘gobbledegook resistance bias’.

These are well-known behavioural heuristics, re-purposed. Which is one of the fascinating things about BE, how often biases crop up, in different guises.

And more are emerging all the time. I would not be surprised to learn that a Princeton professor had uncovered a new bias, the bias of the unknown bias.

So in the taxi on that damp day on an island far from home, I wondered how to have more ‘contiguous conversations’ under more typical circumstances.

Which is the next chapter in the story.

NEW BEHAVIOURISM AND WHY TALKING WITH PEOPLE IS ESSENTIAL

 

The Art of Conversation has been on a sabbatical for a few months. The Art of Silence. It’s been refreshing. And it’s also good to be back.

Loads has been happening in research while we've been off air, especially in relation to science and technology. There is huge interest in all things behavioural, which to a quallie with ethno leanings (like me) is all good. Well, it’s mostly good.

The thing is, I’ve also noticed a tendency for commentators to describe what I do (qualitative research) in terms I don’t recognize, then to denounce it for having these characteristics.

Detractors claim or imply that talking with people is worse than useless. It’s unreliable and non-predictive. People cannot be trusted. And it’s so-o last century. There’s an app for that now.

The assault on talking with people comes from advocates of brain science (BS), big data (BD) and behavioural economics (BE). It’s like the attack of the killer Bs. And there is plenty of it about. Especially the BS.

There is no doubt the research industry has been over-reliant on reported behaviour, which is why I welcome new approaches. But I fear that there are some risks heading our way from the perfect storm of technology and ‘New Behaviourism’.

When I started in research, we used to do research about people. Now, it's becoming unfashionable even to do research with people. Instead, given the rise of New Behaviourism, are we starting to do research against people?

Take technology. At the last MR Summit the key words from the expert panel were: datafication, microsegmentation, geolocation tracking, sentiment analysis, neural coding and gamification. And only one of these is made up.

Technology, we are told, offers a better way of understanding behaviour by being able to predict it. Sensors already track buyer demographics at the shelf. Now Tesco will start scanning our faces as we enter their stores. Or should that be if we enter.

Some have even suggested that advances in technology and computer speed mean that market research is dead. Well, nobody's said that before.

The problem with the increasing mechanization of research is that it is reductive. If you focus only on behaviour without attempting to understand context and intention, you are stripping out an essential part of the mix, the messy, unclear parts.

As Sheila Keegan has said, all this mechanization may just be an attempt to make people more 'controllable'; turning them into data and making them more tidy and convenient to analyse and monetise.

But human behaviour cannot be 'literalised' or adequately translated into bite-sized chunks of data. Research needs to explore and understand the whole experience of human beings, complete with contradictions, exaggerations and omissions.

This means continuing to have good conversations with the right people and using observation and other methods, rather than only using remote measurement, big data or other proxy research tools.

But New Behaviourists aren’t having that. A leading thinker recently wrote in ESOMAR's Research World that ‘traditional research' (note the framing) has been getting it wrong for ages, by talking to people. Such a practice is to modern behavioural science as blood-letting is to medical science. Ouch.

Mark Earls (for it is he) is an exemplary writer, thinker and speaker and all-round good chap. He is advancing his argument (Herd Theory) by first softening the opposition. Putting in a few early bouncers, as it were.

Mark does this using the principle of the Unreliable Narrator, (or sometimes unreliable witness, or poor witness). It is a central conceit and a delivery worth examining, since it is itself, in my view, unreliable. A no-ball.

The argument goes that people cannot be relied upon to give an accurate or reliable account of their own behaviour and for that reason there is no point in seeking their account.

“We are all unreliable witnesses to our own lives”  

There are three things wrong with this, as applied to research. First of all, it assumes that we take what people say as gospel, as having some direct link to their behaviour. But who on earth does that? We all know that everybody is selective and reactive, exaggerates and fabricates. Knowing that enables you to start to deal with ‘narrator bias’.

Secondly, the unreliable narrator comes from literature, a created world, as a partial or selective account, a story. The value of stories is not whether they relate to facts on the ground, the-world-as-all-that-is-the-case, but how they relate to our shared, inter-subjective experience of the world. In other words, any narrator is ‘unreliable’ (ie partial or subjective). That is inherent in the idea of narration.

Thirdly, the New Behaviourist attack sometimes takes the form of people being a poor or unreliable witnesses and cite evidence from police interviews etc to say that people’s accounts of their experience are susceptible to influence. But we are talking about buying toothpaste and not witnessing a crime. It’s a brand extension, nobody died.  And the job of the researcher is to encourage the person to be a better witness of their own experience. This can be done, but can take time and is not easy. It makes for useful training courses but does not make for interesting conference speeches.

But it relies on an authentic relationship between researcher and research participant, something which Roy Langmaid discusses comprehensively in his blog, the Langmaid Practice.

So the fact that we are, as I would put it, partial narrators of our own lives is prime territory for the kind of research I do, rather than being a reason to ignore it or not to do it. 

I have been watching a wall near our offices over recent months, which is a site for one of Candy Chang’s ‘Before I Die’ installations. Every time I looked, people were reading it or adding to it.

Of course, many of the comments are not serious. But what struck me about this social art intervention is how it tapped into some fundamental human needs and desires. Such as the need to make sense of things, the desire to make a difference, the desire to leave one’s mark, the desire to explore one’s values, the desire to poke fun at social art installations. Not forgetting our basic, human curiosity.

What machine will measure these things? What can big data tell us about our dreams?

What does this tell us? Maybe that being 'unreliable' narrators is part of what makes us human. That we are not only all all storytellers and all want to make something out of our own experiences and our shared experiences (and these are linked).

It tells us that engaging with people, with the whole person, not a stripped out, stratified segment of a person, is essential in research. Talking with people, done well and for the right reasons, is still one of the best ways in research to understand why people do what they do.

More on stories to follow. Shorter stories, next time.

Blinded by science

I passed an Adshel poster for this new Boots product and I had to stop to take a closer look.

Great packaging, looks expensive. But what caught my eye was an ingredient and the small print.

I thought that the key ingredient was 'Reversatrol'. As in, 'reverses the signs of ageing'.

So the product was some kind of elixir of youth ('fountain' of youth).

Was it a joke? Or has marketing come full circle and we are back to snake oil merchants?

Then I noticed that the active ingredient was actually 'Resveratrol'.

As found in red wine.

I set off home, needing no further encouragement.

Dyslexics of the world, untie! 

A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE - FINAL EPISODE

So there we were, three researchers in Borough Market, one Friday lunchtime with two pink tables, some pink chairs (thanks to Better Bankside) and bottles of soft drinks.

Oh and a large picture of an ear on a stick, plus fliers with bad puns (is there any other kind? In this case, ‘we’re ear to listen’) which we used to invite people to come and chat to us.

Our first ever pop-up group discussions.

It was strangely unnerving at first. It made me realise how much most paid-for MR is within our comfort zone. Normally, we call the shots.

Of course, a lot of people didn’t really get what we were doing. What was the catch? This is a good reminder of the importance of context.

But people came, they sat down and they talked. We listened.

It’s a powerful thing, really listening. Not just Active Listening but Unconditional Listening, ie listening without judging.

I think that clients and maybe also us as qualitative researchers take this for granted - we should make much more of it.

Between us we had about 12 conversations of up to 25 minutes with a variety of passers-by. We said that we were interested in whatever interested or mattered to them, no agenda, no commercial interests, just a conversation.

Afterwards we compared notes:

• Spontaneously convened conversations with strangers really worked. It was surprising how quickly and how easily people moved to deep and quite sensitive topics (see below)
• We covered a huge range of topics, from government, politics, royalty and personal identity, via banks, the financial crisis, immigration to career, prospectsand work/life balance
• The setting and the fact that people knew they could go whenever they wanted, helped give the feeling that everything was out in the open.
• With no clients, no interview guide, no materials, it was very freeing, far less performance anxiety.
• Several people found it cathartic to rant and vent their feelings to someone who wanted to listen. How much anxiety and mind space do these issues normally take up?
• Handing over control and the agenda to the public helped to make the conversations very productive: as one person said at the end, “It’s good to let people dance to their own tune … (I) feel better for it, it’s been good to let it out.”

Here is an excerpt from the start of one pop-up group. It took less than 30 seconds to get on to ‘the ultimate question’. The participants were three men in their 20s who were work colleagues.

Intro … we’re just interested in what matters to you …

    1. “Well I’m at an early stage in my career so I’m wondering where is it heading …”

    2. “…or is it heading?” (laugh) 1. “… yeah and is it the best?”

    3. “It’s the ultimate coin toss. The three of us, in suits, but is it the bohemian lifestyle, spending     time travelling, or doing a job?”

    1. “Do you commit your life to fiscal gain, getting material things, property, or you can live, I     suppose, by other values, more spiritual values maybe.”

    3. “It’s the ultimate question, how do you live your life?”

Indeed. We intend to repeat our Listening Post experiment. One question which arose was, how can an ‘agenda-free’ conversation be made of value to clients? Some possible answers in the next post.

Or maybe the next but one.

Jakarta, revisited

I went on a business trip last week to Jakarta, aka ‘the Big Durian’. It’s my second visit. On the surface it’s not the nicest place - the heat, the traffic, the pollution etc – but it has a certain fascination. It is ‘a city we learn to love but never to like … a giant living laboratory’.

This time, I went on the ‘real Jakarta tour’, run by Ronny and Anneke Poluan, which visits tourist spots such as Old Batavia, but spends longer in some of Jakarta’s many slum areas. Money raised from the tours goes directly towards community projects and to the Yasayan Interkultur Foundation.

It was fascinating and obviously rather shocking. But the people we met could not have been friendlier and more welcoming. I learned more from this tour than I could have from any kind of ‘official’ tour. It was the unvarnished truth.

 

The tour is heavily criticized by the authorities who say that it ‘shames’ the city by showing visitors some of its poorest areas. The opposite is true. You come away with a strong sense of the pride and resourcefulness of many of Jakarta’s poorest.

What is much more shaming is what local government is doing about the city’s infrastructure. Running right past the Old Town is a stinking cess pit of a river. Many buildings look in a worse condition than those in Old Havana. And the roads and pollution are appalling and life-threatening.

Indonesia’s growth rate currently is around 6%.

All of which was a reminder of the need to get the right perspective: the truth is down there on the ground among the people you speak to.

What comes down from on high is something else. Perhaps similar to what ends up in Jakarta’s rivers.

Governor of Jakarta, Joko Widodo, recently said he wanted to change the image of the city:

“We have to build the right brand for Jakarta that makes this city distinctive. To date, foreign people still hold perception that Jakarta is congested and flooded ... We have to gather ideas from the grassroots level.”

Governor Widodo would get a lot of grassroots ideas from the real Jakarta tour. I would go back for that.

View from the bottom to the top

The Marketing Society held a great-sounding event last night, 'tough at the top', interviews with 50 CEOs, which was held on the 28th floor of the Shard, Europe's tallest building, which is very near our offices. 

I couldn't make the event, sadly, but I happened to be taking some photos yesterday lunchtime, including some of the Shard, seen from the bottom.

What occurs to me is that the best CEOs (in my limited experience of meeting them) did not get to where they are today by having only the view from the top.

They come across as quite 'grounded' and have a good appraisal of different perspectives, from the person in the street right up to those in the boardroom.

The best research is like these CEOs. It is able to distinguish the client agenda (top down view) from the interests of those on the ground. It is valuable to the former and true to the latter.

And incidentally, it may be tough at the top, but it was blooming perishing at the bottom.

Take a Walk on the Wild Side - part 2

All Roads lead to Rome

The AQR/QRCA conference is a wonderful review of qualitative research around the world. Rome 2012 was the 6th in the series and represented the latest developments. 

For my conference paper, with other researchers I interviewed 26 clients in six countries: France, UK, China, Australia, Brazil and the US.

The key trends in qualitative research methods, according to these clients, were:
    •    more online qual, eg panels and communities;
    •    more behavioural focus (observation, user-generated content);
    •    other forms of face-to-face than focus groups, eg workshops, direct interaction between clients and consumers (‘co-creation’ methods).

However at its heart the qualitative inquiry was still based on core skills such as curiosity and empathy:

    “The fundamentals have not changed. The basic skill is (still) about wondering why people do what they do.” (UK client)
    “be wide-eyed and curious”. (Australian client)

Of course, in the world of qualitative research methods, one method is disproportionately represented, which is the focus group discussion.

Focus groups as partial conversations

Focus groups were first used in 1941 by Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton at Columbia University to examine the impact of media on people’s attitudes towards the involvement of the United States in World War II.

If you believed what you heard within marketing services nowadays, you’d think that ‘doing focus groups’ was to marketing what ‘using leeches’ was to modern medicine.

So when Diageo launched its 2012 Consumer Planning Team manifesto ‘Say No to Focus Groups’ what it really meant was, ‘say no to doing qualitative research badly for the wrong reasons’.

The qualitative inquiry clearly lends itself extremely well to face-to-face conversations, which I would call our spiritual home in methodological terms, the source of our power and purpose.

But qualitative researchers have become so associated with focus groups that this gets in the way of clients seeing the real power of the qualitative inquiry.

A focus group is actually well suited for tackling issues within the client agenda, for which it was designed (waging war being perhaps the ultimate client agenda).

A focus group is well suited for tackling issues within the client agenda, for which it was designed (waging war being perhaps the ultimate client agenda). But focus groups are less well suited for exploring consumers’/citizens’ interests. 

Being so closely associated with focus groups makes us like gardeners who are only ever seen working in a greenhouse. Isn’t it time for us to explore further the garden outside the greenhouse, then hop over the wall and take a walk on the wild side beyond?       

I think this is what clients want us to do, to be braver and bolder and to go where our skills take us, to get further into consumers’ experience. So after Rome I decided to do an experiment into research using ‘real conversations’.

The age of conversation

Business in today’s social media age is awash with ‘conversation’.

The Cluetrain Manifesto back in 1999 declared that ‘markets are conversations’. More recently, Tom Fishburne’s keynote address at Google’s marketing conference in September, 2012, declared:

  “In today’s two-way conversational world with brands and  consumers … we need a variety of things to say (and) … we need to relinquish some of the control in brand communication.”

So if the new marketing agenda is all about a genuine conversation with consumers, in order to find out what is worth saying and sharing, how can research tap into ‘real conversations’? 

There is a range of conversation types, from completely natural (‘wild’) to those that are more familiar, structured and artificially-induced:

1.    conversations overheard/eavesdropping
2.    naturally-occurring conversations
3.    invited conversations with real people
4.    loosely structured, invited conversations with respondents
5.    tightly structured Q&A with respondents

‘People’s history’ is a hot topic right now, building up a picture of society from naturally occurring or invited real conversations, as in the BBC’s Listening Project which is based on StoryCorps in the USA.

Studs Terkel, ‘the world’s greatest interviewer’, was a famous gatherer of people’s stories across America. He believed that "everyone had the right to be heard and had something important to say”.

In Don’t Log Off, journalist Alan Dein talks to random people on the internet and has some surprisingly intimate and deep conversations.

Spurred on by such activities, I set up an experiment last summer in Borough Market, called the Listening Post. Where could an unplanned, impromptu conversation with members of the public possibly go?

 

FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NEXT, FINAL EPISODE!

(This post is based on AQR's In Depth paper, Autumn 2012)

 

 

 

 

AQR PARTY

You can say what you like about the AQR, but they know how to put on a party!

This year, they not so much threw caution to the wind, as twirled it around provocatively then tossed it nonchalantly aside. 

The venue was Volupte, just off Chancery Lane, in the heart of Lawyer Land.

I admit I was slightly apprehensive (nervesque?) before the fist act. 

But all four performers knew their stuff and wowed the slightly cerebral audience of qualitative researchers.

I'm told that in this field it all comes down to experience.

It was easily the best burlesque event I have ever attended.

And as a party it was totally glamoresque, frivolesque and rather alcoholesque.

All of which may have contributed to this thought ...

... if Hugh Gant's ex-girlfriend performed an elegant but chaotic striptease, would it be a Hurley burly-esque?

Happy 2013 *

Back to work at Wardle McLean Towers after a full two-week break.

And we have to say, it's good to be back. In many ways.

Nice to see that Prospect has listed ten things to be cheerful about and to look forward to. It's a good time of year to have future plans and positive things up ahead.

Once again, we dispensed with Christmas cards and sent out an e-card instead. And once again it crashed our e-mail server.

For Christmas 2012 we donated money to St Mungo's. In 2011 over 5,600 people slept rough in London, an increase of 43%.

 

 

 

St Mungo's opens doors for homeless people and helps them to rebuild their lives.

 

We have donated to help them rebuild a local hostel round the corner from us, at Great Guildford Street, Southwark.

One of their projects is Street Stories, St Mungo's Oral History Project. Worth a listen. 

It helps to put things in perspective and to remind us of what there is to be thankful for, in the year ahead.

* as featured on Typepad's 'Featured Blogs'. I thank you.

Take A Walk on the Wild Side - part 1

A tale of two agendas

There is an old joke: “I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure”. 

Some of the time, it seems to me as if everything has changed in the relationship between advertisers and consumers. At other times, these changes seem more superficial.

Can both things be true? (Probably, according to this excellent debate in Market Leader).

In commercial qualitative research we are paid by a company to talk to 'consumers' about things that matter, ultimately, to that company. We mediate between the two sets of interests: the client’s commercial interests and what interests consumers.

Normally, where there is overlap or mutuality of interests, there is business to be done. They launch a new shampoo; I see it as making me look better, shared interest, sold. But if they launch a new shampoo and I see it as just the same but more expensive, not sold.

What is changing, I think, is that:

• people are becoming more aware of their interests-as-consumers and of companies’ interests-as-companies.
• companies are starting to embrace this more open, more interactive relationship with consumers.

It’s as if the building that houses companies no longer has walls of bricks and mortar, so we can only access them via the front door and look in the showroom window.  Now the metaphorical walls around a company are transparent, we can look into how they operate, their standards, sources of production, employment practices and so on.

It is now widely accepted that 21^st century marketing is about a two-way, interactive engagement, rather than one-way selling. At the start of mass production, Henry T. Ford is said to have declared: “you can have any colour as long as it’s black.” (Except that nobody knows if he ever said this!) Nowadays, you can have all of the colours in all of the sizes and much more besides.

This ‘relationship’ is not a real or a personal relationship, of course, but a metaphorical one. I am not really related to Unilever or to any of their brands, although I may buy them. It’s a figure of speech we use to ascribe meaning and importance to brands.

There is no such thing as 'consumer loyalty'

As a side note, it is interesting that linguistically we both exaggerate meaning by personalising marketing (‘relationship’, ‘brand loyalty’, ‘brand preference’, etc) while simultaneously depersonalising it with the ‘consumer’ construct. Marketing traditionally has wanted to have it both ways.

But consumption is simply an economic transaction, a unit of economic currency. Consumption seems measurable and predictable, which fits with traditional models of production and makes it sound as if a person can 'be' a consumer.

But ‘consumer loyalty’ is an oxymoron; a consumer can no more be loyal than a robot can fall in love, even though both are easy to imagine, through our use of language.

The point is that qualitative research is in the middle of a subtle but noticeable shift in the power relations between companies and their agenda and people-as-consumers who have a different ‘agenda’ or interests.

Everything and everyone at a crossroads  

Having just attended Most Contagious 2012, I have heard more and more evidence for this. We are at a crossroads. Everyone is saying it.

Procter & Gamble's Jim Stengel has challenged marketers the rethink the marketing function: "the age of telling and selling is over". 

Not to be outdone, Keith Weed, Chief Marketing Officer of Unilever, this year described marketing as at a crossroads: 

“We’ve got marketing too much as a sales machine, and we need to think more about how we get back to serving consumers.”

Capitalism itself is at a crossroads, according to economist Umair Haque in The New Capitalist Manifesto (2011, HBR). 

“Business to date has produced ‘thin value’ - short-term economic    gains that accrue to some people far more than others … (and needs to) learn to create authentic, lasting value for (people), ‘shared value’.”

It was this sense of a shift in the corporate and the consumer/citizen agendas that led me to research and give a presentation this year at the AQR/QRCA conference in Rome: “Qualitative research at a crossroads: where to now?” Together with seven other researchers around the world, we interviewed 26 clients in six countries: France, UK, China, Australia, Brazil and the US.

MORE TO FOLLOW - FIND OUT WHAT WE DISCOVERED!

(This article appears in full in the current issue of AQR's "indepth" - the hub of qualitative thinking, Autumn 2012)

 

STREET SIGNS, VANS AND THE POWER OF BLOGGING

Here is more evidence of the persuasive power of blogging*.

Southwark Council used to have street signs around Borough so tall they could only be read from upstairs on a double decker bus, as we reported. Twice.

Now look at them. Beautiful. And so ... head-height.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nila, the food service delivery people, used to use sexual innuendo and bad graphics to advertise their wares.

Then we got on their case and their whole communications strategy changed (if not the graphics).

Their latest idea is to use a subtle Olympics theme, cleverly avoiding any direct references, which were banned.

The moral of the tale is never give up. And always carry a camera.

 * we have no reason to believe that we had no role whatsoever in bringing about this change

Olympic sponsors torch relay

With the Paralympics now under way, I was reflecting on the day it all started in earnest, the day the Olympics came to our neighbourhood – and to within an hour’s travelling of 95% of the population – the Olympic Torch Relay.

We all dutifully lined up to catch a glimpse of the torch. There was quite a buzz and a sense of expectation.

And a lot of people and vehicles which preceded the torchbearer.

Some of them got a big cheer, like the police on motorbikes doing high fives with the crowds.

The biggest cheer of all went to the bloke doing some ambush ‘anti-marketing’ on an adapted Barclays bike.

I almost missed the bloke with the torch. At first I thought it was one of the rather fit looking people dressed in grey.

Until I glimpsed the bloke dressed in white, holding the torch.

The three presenting partners all did a good job in helping to whip up enthusiasm.

 

 

I noticed Samsung’s bright blue clappy things and very high tech bus.

Coke had the sexiest mobile disco and best merchandise.

Lloyds had bouncy stilts but rather lame streamer things.

But the medal positions were as follows:

Bronze to Samsung: glitzy and bright but vapid, running on empty

 

 

Silver to Coke: unseemly queue for their giveaway product, trying too hard

Gold to Lloyds: unfancied runner, won by being less sales-y and more low key (this is the Olympics after all) and having the best bus (retro, full of character) and for not having ‘for the journey’ everywhere.

See what they didn’t do there?

Also from reading about their National School Sports Week and Local Heroes programme, surely the best behind-the-scenes activity.

Shame we didn’t really know anything about the torchbearers. Must have been an amazing experience for them. Lots of details about them missing on the website.

Good effort all round, though.

London 2012, the end of brand arrogance?

 

We've been debating the question, is the client agenda and the consumer agenda drifting apart? 

Smart brand owners get this. Some are coming round (cf Unilever, recently). Some still seem oblivious.

Then I saw this poster. What is a 'G&T experience'? Let alone the ultimate one. What does that actually mean? 

I know what they are getting at. I have been in those meetings. They want to say, there's more to this brand than product points about botanicals etc.

But whose 'brand experience' are we talking about? 

The poster was on a rather run-down site in Shoreditch. Locals (probably) love the brand, but would have scoffed at this presentation and would probably resist anything that compromised their own experience of the brand

We are entering an era where brands have to genuinely take notice of consumers' agenda. To pretend that a brand does by adding the word 'experience' is no longer enough. And the turning point is London 2012.

Towards the end of the last century, 'experience' started appearing everywhere. The BBC museum became the BBC Experience. The company packaging 'our' millennium celebrations was the New Millemmium Experience Company.

And Tony Blair et al really looked like they were sharing our experience, that night at the Millennium Dome. No discomfort or disconnect there, then?

It was in this same era, not long before (2007) when Wolff Olins revealed their designs for London 2012. Not so much a brand identity as a brand identity experience. As somebody no doubt said.

Back then, 'Wally' Olins described the logo as "a powerful brand taking its place in a brand-savvy world."

But the trouble is, being more brand savvy means people are less tolerant of a brand identity so far removed from their genuine experience.

Hate to say we told you so, but we suspected as much at the time.

When the Olympics arrives, will we grow to like and respect the identity and the typeface? An identity which is "bold, spirited and even discordant (to) echo London's qualities as a modern, diverse and vibrant city".

Let's just hope that our experience of the Olympics is even better than the designers' hyperbole about their creation. I personally rather like the way that 'london' is written. And those five rings.

And let's hope we have now entered a new, brand savvier era, where we are no longer at the mercy of arrogant professionals whose own agenda was the only show in town. 

Listening Post

Our first experiment with pop-up groups in Borough Market went well.

The experiment was an inquiry into doing research without a client agenda.

Would people take part? What would people want to talk about, if we just wanted to listen?

We called it a Listening Post. We handed out fliers and held placards.

People came and sat down and talked. We got straight into some really interesting topics.

A proper write-up coming soon.

 

In praise of … better conversations

(image by Nox Dineen) 

As qualitative researchers, we’ve always valued good conversations and consider them revealing and rather important in their own right. They are also in danger of being overlooked in today’s digitised, atomised, ‘just do it’ culture. It turns out we’re not the only ones who think this.

Last week I went to the School of Life class, ‘How to have Better Conversations’. The School of Life (‘ideas to live by’) is amazing. It is based in a small shop in Bloomsbury and runs ‘a variety of programmes concerned with how to live wisely and well … a place to step back and think intelligently about these and other concerns’.

The class was very civilised and thought-provoking and covered the history of conversations, tackling difficult conversations and how conversations shape our thinking and our relationships.

Far from being a trivial matter, conversations strike at the heart of what it means to be human. Conversations that are open and honest broaden our horizons and shift how we look at both ourselves and the world (Theodore Zeldin).

Having a good conversation takes a certain commitment and practice. There were a number of ways identified that people can have better conversations:

-        being curious

-        not fearing vulnerability

-        not assuming or judging

-        adventurous openings

-        empathy

-        courage

There are three reasons why this matters in relation to marketing research:

1. people are increasingly critical of ‘talk-based’ research, but when handled properly good conversations are intellectually more nutritious than any other form of engagement, IMHO. Conversations are a source of ‘whole person’ ideas and insights and include emotions and other non verbal elements (‘structural conversations’). 

 

 2. the rules of engagement between people and organizations are changing. People are no longer prepared to toe the line or be addressed in certain ways, so companies have to re-learn the art of conversation

 

 3. ‘conversation’ is very widely but very loosely used in the digital realm (cf #MRS2012 today) - I am not sure that people know what a digital conversation means, let alone how it translates into the real world

Could the characteristics of better conversations outlined in the class exactly match the characteristics of good research (eg curiosity, honesty, empathy, imagination)?

More than a coincidence? Maybe.

But that is another conversation.

Facts and fictions about beer, blokes and Belgium

This is one of these Quite Interesting things we've noticed (like the street sign so high up nobody could read it). It's the new Stella ad campaign, which raises interesting questions about what we believe.

Stella has been doing lavish, stylish, French-looking ads for ages. This campaign is very stark by comparison. And very Belgian.

Belgium is not much known about (cf famous Belgians etc), apart from for its (excellent) beer. So Stella is Belgian! Probably not a lot of people knew that.

Except that it isn't. Or not really. Here the facts and the impressions start to get a bit blurred. The brewery was founded in Belgium in 1366, but the beer started in Canada in 1926.

So the 'We' in the headline above is the brewery, not the beer talking.

Companies are not alone in wanting to put out a version of events which favour them, of course. We all do it. We create myths because of what we want others to think well of us, or not to think badly of us.

Stella became hugely popular in the UK but then 'did a Burberry' (according to the Mail) and came to be known as 'wife beater', to the extent that people believed that there was something about Stella that made men aggressive (rather than the amount consumed).

The Wikipedia entry for Stella Artois and the entry for 'wife-beater' were said to have been altered by a PR company. Or so it says on Wikipedia.

So, what to believe? It is just as well that brewing heritage is just not very interesting to most people (even blokes). At least not until you drink beer. Drinking beer makes all sorts of things Quite Interesting, such as the history of Belgium.

And the information and the tone of voice in the posters is just right, in the style of the ‘did-you-know …?’ facts (or factoids) that men like.

I am looking forward finding out more quite interesting things about Stella. Or Belgium.

Nila Watch, 5

It is 2012 and change is in the air. Revolutionary democracy spreads across the Arab world. In Greece the fate of the Euro hangs in the balance. In Switzerland scientists are poised to unlock the sub-atomic secrets of the universe.

Meanwhile, in a small corner of north London, another revolution unfolds quietly, almost unnoticed. Thanks in no small part (or possibly in no part) to this very blog, mobile food service advertising takes a small but significant step towards the 21st century.

Nila’s the name, sexual innuendo was the game, until we came along. The full story is explained here. The illustrated backstory is here.

Nila started out with images of a blatantly sexist nature (or, was it effective?).

They then toned this down to 'phnerr phnerr' level. The latest development sees them downgrade again, from risqué to more playful and frankly, well, cheesy.

They have developed the role of product integration and also introduced a modern twist with consumer engagement (note the model’s teeth).

In a parallel move, Nila have transitioned from ‘the final name in food service’ to ‘we care more’.

And in a bizarre, if unrelated, twist to the story, Nila’s website was designed by a company with the same name as our studio, Propeller Studios. Could this be their revenge?

Nila themselves were unavailable for comment at the time of writing.

Crisis, what crisis?

Illustration by Victoria Wainwright

This January we donated to the charity Crisis, the national charity for single homeless people, which is dedicated to ending homelessness by transforming the lives of homeless people and by preventing people becoming homeless. 

We are posting this now, as an auspicious start to the 2012 Chinese new year, the year of the Dragon.

(Which is about as pathetic an excuse as any excuse in the history of excuses ever given for anything, anywhere.)

But incidentally, Dragons are driven, passionate, unafraid of challenges and willing to take risks. So what could possibly go wrong?

This is our visual reference, for the sake of anyone under 40. A fine album it was, too. In its day.

Incidentally, I used to live in the flat above the saxophone player for Supertramp.

Not a lot of people know that, either.

Big Ad campaign

I love flying and I’ve flown quite a lot recently, everyone from Etihad to Easyjet. (More Easyjet unfortunately). I used to choose BA every time. It felt homely, it offered good service, reasonable food, and I did not treated like an inconvenient idiot. 

So I ought to have liked BA’s recent Big Ad campaign, said to have cost £20m, from BBH who make excellent ads. A return to form, a confident, forward-looking statement of intent?

Instead I saw an ad intended to be nostalgic which just felt a bit dated. It’s meant to be about customer service, but it comes across as rather self-obsessed. 

And for some reason the agency seems to think that showing lots of aircraft (from different eras) flying together will make viewers' hearts sing, rather than make them think of mid-air collisions.

I know that harking back to emotive, bygone eras helps to reinforce the brand's heritage and dial up implicit trust, which is clearly very important for an airline. But I could not help feeling that the brand came across as rather out of touch with the idea of service (ironically).

I can understand why some current and former employees love it. I can imagine that the client is very happy with it. But customers?

They could win me back. I want to want to fly BA, but I think I would have to feel that the service really had improved, that they were interested in me, rather than just their own a long history of being fine chaps flying with great courage.

We play our games and the sky goes on

I was on the road last week, around Birmingham and Manchester, talking to people about money and bank accounts and the like.

Two things occurred to me, both quite obvious things I suppose.

The first thing is that, doing research 'out there' where people live is probably something we should all do more often.

The places where we often talk to people in a research context condition what we learn.

The second thing is that, when you build in a little 'dwelling time', you notice more and learn more.

If you look around less familiar places you can see how people are being affected by the downturn.

Income inequality has never been greater.

A friend told me this staggering stat yesterday. The wealthiest 400 individuals in America have more money than the poorest 140 million.

It pays to take the time to look around.

As I say, obvious, really.

Men, cars and sheds: live your dreams

It's a funny old world. As they say.

Don't they also say, it's a man's world?

I've been thinking about funny old men this week. First I went to see a company that makes £100k performance cars. Then I went to talk to men about woodstain, sheds and things like that.

Men are notoriously reluctant to 'open up' and talk about their dreams, about what really matters to them in their life.

It is easy to get sidetracked by surface distractions.

Like cars and sheds.

But you can get glimpses into the deeper stuff, if you are lucky or approach it in the right way.

I hope that we get to study men and expensive cars.

Our method is to revisit the excellent 'From A to B tales of modern motoring' by Nicholas Barker/Martin Parr.

You should really try and get the book, or better still watch the series.

Alternatively, we shall concentrate on sheds.

Glorious in their own, deeply misunderstood kind of way.

pic by Beedle Um Bum

On the buses

We’ve been doing some behavioural research for Greener Journeys, exploring people’s habits and experiences around bus travel.

Our research informed their report, 'A step change for Britain’s buses: Maximising the economic, social and environmental potential', launched at the House of Commons yesterday.

It’s odd, buses are at the same time very familiar to us, yet rather overlooked, almost invisible to everyone except regular users. This applies to the public and also (I suspect) to politicians and business leaders.

Arguably we ought to be championing buses more, as they are obviously more eco-friendly than private cars (at least when reasonably full), they are cheaper and more flexible than trains and they also represent the ultimate in local, community transport. As ‘localism’ these days is all the rage (Big Society etc) why are buses so far down the political agenda?

Greener Journeys is a bus industry initiative trying to change this, to get buses noticed and taken more seriously within the legislature. And no, the Reg Varney image is not helping to modernise the image of the bus, but possibly does speak to the local community aspect. Interesting that the bus was used as a London Olympics icon.

Both of these examples are London and London is atypcial in relation to buses and so much else. We researched how the bus is used and seen amongst car-owning households outside London: what were the triggers and barriers which would encourage and hinder greater use of the bus?

We spoke to people at home, took a journey with them by bus that they would normally make by car, then invited them to reflect on their experiences and behaviour. (We call this method ‘co-discovery’).

We produced a report and made a film of the whole exercise, hopefully to be linked to here soon. Key highlights are:

• transport choices are habitual and the car is a hard habit to break, with many ‘short cuts’ which keep the car top of mind
• people who don’t use the bus rarely consider doing this (availability bias) and have forgotten some basic ‘bus habits’
• all too often the cost of going by bus and the ‘pain of paying’ count against buses
• buses have something of an image problem
• but the reality is better than the perception, buses are not nearly as bad as some people expect (although not as good as they want)
• and there are some unexpected rewards and benefits from going by bus

Visual communications

I can't remember where I found this fire poster, but I like it.

'OMG I'm on fire LOL'

It wouldn't have been in China, which I visited for the first time recently and where Twitter is banned.

Funny how paranoia soon sets in.

Not as funny as the poster below, found on innocent's blog.

Very postmodern. Or possibly not.

Loving the 'unbelievably'.

36 hours in Jakarta

On a business trip last week I asked the taxi driver to take me on a little tour on the way to the airport. 

Two things struck me:

1. I shall never complain about London traffic again having seen Shanghai then Jakarta *

2. How alike and yet how unalike we all are, citizens of these great cities of the world

 

* I may or may not stick to this

Reflections on the Insight Show

We enjoyed it, at least between set up and pack down.

If you've never been, Marketing Week Live is a massive marketing services exhibition at Olympia (data marketing, in-store, online and Insight).

At times, it's a bit like Dante's Inferno, with merchandise.

It's so overwhelming and noisy with so much going on that the whole experience is quite exhausting.

But there are not many times you can have lots of conversations with clients and potential clients under one (very large) roof. Or listen to talks by the Head of Marketing for Man Utd or the MD of Google, UK and Ireland.

(Sorry, I mean have 'an amazing opportunity to hear from leading global brands, interact, debate, question and network with truly inspiring marketing minds'. Marketing, remember)

More positives were that Judith and Lisa's talk on using trance techniques generated lots of interest, as did Siamack's new ethnographic app, EthOS.

Our insight cakes went down a storm (a fresh insight in every cake), every single one eaten.

Fortunately, we have the recipe for insight cakes, so if you want a supply of fresh insights, get in touch.

It was also great to catch up with friends and colleagues to share experiences and compare levels of exhaustion.

Glad to have done it, glad it's over.

 

Insight found in Olympia, shock

Forget anything you may have heard about insights. Including by us.

We can exclusively reveal that real, live insights can now be found, for two days only, in one small part of a  very large hall in west London.

The Insight Show is back and we are going to be there, at Stand D067, right next to the Quadrangle.

'We' is the whole family: Wardle McLean, Propeller, EverydayLives and EthOS.

That little baby is worth checking out, btw.

So come by and see how many insights you can carry away with you.

And if you're lucky and quick off the mark, you could even get to take Siamack for a chelo kebab.

Time for good ideas

Bizarre. I’d passed this poster a few times and assumed it to be a warning about pollution, leaks or the perils of (corroding) oil pipelines: the picture all gloomy and menacing, the headline with the problem, URL for the answer.

There was even a fake oil company name, Statoil (State Oil, as in Big Oil?). Why had Greenpeace or FoE not put their logo on it, though?

The reason (obvious now) is that it is an ad for Statoil, the Norwegian energy company. The most recent 'good idea' on the site seemed to be that King Harald V of Norway visited the Statoil stand on the opening day of the ONS show in Stavanger.

I clicked on ‘deep dives’ (see what they did there?) to find out that “gas is delivered directly to UK shores through an extensive pipeline system”.

Then even further into the site, “the main limitations for future oil supply are not below the ground, but in our heads … There’s never been a better time for good ideas”.

On the subject of not such a good idea, is this even bizarrer ad for blackcurrant Lucozade.

(Thanks to Simon for the spot.)

I know it's aimed at people younger than me and this is a rather reactionary point, but ... it's hard not to think that it tastes so disgusting that you want to spit it out.

'There's a word for it ... yeeuuurrgghh!'

Oh and that it is full of colourings.

A shame, because the Lucozade 'yes' campaign, especially the films of cool people roller blading somewhere Californian are really good.

Which all goes to prove … it’s not as easy as you might think, this communication malarkey.

In search of insight

Philosophy has been compared to ‘a blind man looking for a black cat in a dark room … which is not there’.

You could substitute ‘insight’ for philosophy. Insight is such a key ‘thing’ in research and marketing these days, that we are all looking for it and yet it is very hard to find.

The reason is that we are looking in the wrong place - for the wrong thing. To explain ... 

I went to an AURA debate at the RAF Club, Piccadilly recently (co-sponsor, AQR). The debate was headlined ‘who killed insight’? 

The RAF Club is a fantastic place, incidentally, where pint glasses have handles and men have striped ties and double vented blazers. And moustaches. For some reason, my mind drifted to David McCallum as the Invisible Man, apparently a 1970s TV series.

What if Insight (as a person) were a master of disguise, turning up as someone different in different places? Insight is only visible when it is ‘dressed appropriately’ according to the occasion and the company and the job in hand?

The debate consisted of four short talks from Christene McCauley, Global Consumer Planning Director of Diageo, Sinead Jeffries of Opinion Leader, Kathy Ellison, Head of Customer and Market Insight at Ecclesiastical and Rosie Campbell of Campbell Keegan.

My main takeaways from this most enjoyable session were that:

1. Insight moves invisibly among us, loyal to nobody; it is not dead but there are serial attempts to kidnap it, often in a white van marked ‘client property’
2. We should get to know our clients’ businesses better and trust our instincts more, if we are to befriend Insight more often
3. More events like this debate would help, otherwise the cultural divide between client and agency could widen and we and Insight could become further estranged

But something was still bothering me. Something was not quite right. Could it be an insight …?

Obviously Insight is not a person. But neither is insight a ‘thing’. It’s a process. You might say that there is no such thing as ‘an insight’. There is only ‘insightful’.

This is not a new thought. The idea was discussed in the 2007 ESOMAR paper by Wendy Gordon and Nitasha Kapoor of Acacia Avenue. They quote Jeremy Bullmore who says “it is not the ‘what’ of insight but the ‘how’ that makes it valuable.”

Something which is insightful in a high potency way has an immediate clarity and call to action about it; a ‘guiding idea that excites and inspires’. Something truly insightful will get passed on, remembered and acted on, whereas a mere ‘insight’ will stay ‘stuck’ in a document as the property of the originator. 

So, Insight, unmasked at last. Not a person, not a thing. Not even a cat. 

But available to all of us, if we work hard enough.

Nila Watch 4

Collecting is a sign of great intelligence, I think I read somewhere, once.

We are collecting Nila van advertising executions. Nila, the food distribution service, radically changed their advertising strategy in response (quite possibly) to our blog. They used to use innuendo and semi-nudity, until we exposed them. You can read the amazing story here and here.

In the latest dramatic twist, we saw this van yesterday at BBC headquarters, White City. They could be on the point of securing a TV series, based on the new trend for 'cringe comedy' (latest example, the excellent 2012).

Alternatively, they could have been delivering some extra large hamburgers. The image could be an oblique reference to the Gary Larson/B Kliban cartoon captioned 'never eat anything bigger than your head'.

But it's probably even subtler than that. And it's not about burgers. The woman is conspiring with us, as if to keep a secret. But who is the food for? Is it for her or is she delivering it, but to whom? Note how she holds the plate. Notice her forefinger, not just shooshing, but pointing. The lucky recipient? The angle of the plate suggests she is about the throw it away, to focus on her real mission. The tilt of the head and cheeky grin is designed to encourage a man to think that if he asked for a chip, she would give him one.

This is surely Nila returning to its core theme of seduction, with food on the side, which could upset people. A risque strategy, you might say.

We will have to wait for the TV series to find out what happens next.

Conversation as behaviour

 

"Conversation is a meeting of minds. It doesn’t just exchange facts but transforms them … doesn't just reshuffle the cards, it creates new cards."  Theodore Zeldin

I've been thinking a lot about Behavioural Economics lately. Hasn't everyone...?

It occurs to me that conversations, or at least some conversations, are a creative act; an act (ie behaviour) which creates/conditions other behaviour.