Lost in Translation, or why I was lucky not to have an outraged Bahraini mob stone me…

A couple of years ago I did some work out in Bahrain, indirectly for the Crown Prince. It was a very unusual project, looking at the social impact of a major series of planned economic, social and employment law reforms. This required us to interview a range of Bahrainis both from the Shia majority and the ruling Sunni minority. As recent events have gone one to prove, Bahrain has its fair share of religious tensions so the project was a bit of a roller-coaster.

The project included a number of ‘firsts’ for me:
– I had previously never seen a man get so angry that he took his shoe off and started banging the table in front of him (actually a bit scary, he was a big chap)
– We interviewed a number of more religiously conservative Shia women who,of course, were all wearing Niquabs. This meant that all I could see were their eyes and consequently I had no idea which one was talking at any particular time. I ended up relying on minute movements of the head to work out who was speaking.

One evening in my hotel, after a long and stressful day, in temperatures in the mid 40s I thought I would indulge myself in that classic Middle Eastern delicacy – a water pipe, also known as a Shisha pipe or Hookah. Some time previously, whilst working in Cairo, I’d been introduced to them and, having got steadily stoned on an Apple Wood pipe I realised why the Muslim world has no need for alcohol to unwind after a busy day.

Since I was staying in quite a nice hotel in the centre of downtown Manama, the capital, I felt pretty sure they’d have one so I confidently turned to the waitress and asked if the hotel had any Hookahs. She shook her head vigorously with a look of growing disgust on her face. I assumed that was not understanding me and so I persisted, this time using my fist to vigorously go up and down towards my mouth, trying to mimic the act of sucking on the water pipe. Her horror only increased and she rapidly fled. This puzzled me greatly and my confusion only grew when the manager sidled over to tell me and, in an oddly furtive manner, told me that whilst the hotel was unable to oblige my request, there would be some Belly Dancers on later; which seemed at the time a complete non-sequitur – I wasn’t interested in Belly Dancers, I wanted a Hookah.

It was only some time later that the grim realisation struck me that perhaps the hotel had assumed I was seeking a different type of, ahem ‘entertainment’…..tricky word ‘Hookah’, easily mis-construed I find.

Lamborghinis, Scooby Doo and the cohort effect

Back in the 1980s when I was a lad I had a poster of a Lamborghini Countach on my wall. At the time it represented the absolute pinnacle of teenage automotive fantasy:

To my eyes the car looked from another planet, particularly in white. The other car I lusted after was the Ferrari 308GTB (as driven by Tom Selleck as Magnum PI:

…sheer poetry in metal….

During those same spotty teen years I also liked (in no particular order): Starsky & Hutch; Tintin, Scooby Doo (I always had a soft spot for Velma) , the Sweeney, Miami Vice (very difficult to pull off the white jacket and pink trousers look in a small Suffolk market town, but I gave it a go) and Kojak.

Wind the clock forward to the digital 21st Century and spotty youths like my self are now in the lower foothills of their 40s and find themselves in positions where they finally have a bit of spare cash and are in positions where they can actually take decisions and influence things. The result? The secondhand prices of Countach (now 30yr old car) are a faintly ridiculous £250k and rising. Starsky&Hutch has been re-made as a film, as has Scooby Doo, Miami Vice and Tintin. Ray Winstone is now appearing in the new film of the Sweeney (I can’t wait to see him say “shut it!”).

It’s all part of a phenomenon called the cohort effect. People of roughly the same age have shared experiences – music they liked, films they watched, cars they thought were cool but could never afford. When these people grow-up they get to live out their fantasies: buying the car of their teenage dreams, making the film of the TV show they loved when they were 13.

Brands occasionally tap into this but as often as not they do it by accident rather than intentionally.

…so here goes with my own very personal list of micro-trends that will get big/valuable/be re-made some time soon:
Films dying to be re-made: Beverly Hills Cop, Where Eagles Dare, Police Academy, Spitting Image (ok that one’s a TV show, but it was hilarious and surely worth a revival)

Music due for a surge in popularity: Roxy Music, The Jam, The Style Council, The Scorpions (my tastes were eclectic), the Pet Shop Boys (the played at the Paralympic Opening Ceremony so it ma ybe happening already)

Cars whose values should rise: Porsche 944, Porsche 928, Audi Quattro (already on the rise thanks to ‘Ashes to Ashes’), Audi 100 (the original ‘Vorsprung durch technik’ car)

…and last, but not least, a catchphrase that should be revived: ‘Wotcha’ (an all purpose word which has all the elegance of an Anglo-Saxon ‘ca-va?’

expensive, impractical, cramped and I want one!

I was walking down a road near my house over the weekend and saw a Renault Twizy. For those of you unaware of this automotive oddity it is a tiny electric car, without proper doors, only slightly bigger than a large scooter and with two seats (one behind the other). This is what one looks like:

When I saw it, it made me smile. Largely I think because it had personality to it; it was quirky. Of course it is wildly impractical (crap range, takes ages to re-charge, hardly any space in it…and it hasn’t got proper doors for God’s sake!)

…and yet I infinitely preferred it to more other sensible eco-cars like the Toyota Prius.

Cars, perhaps more than any other type of discretionary purchase are one of these areas where the heart can rule the head. Having carefully assessed performance, practicality and cost you often still find yourself drawn to the one that looked a bit more fun, was a bit different…made you smile.

If I was in the market for a 2 seater run-about for the city, a Renault Twizy would be top of my list (and I don’t care if I’d get soaked every time I drove it in the rain!)

An Englishman, an Irishman, a Brazilian, a Nigerian and a Pole walk into a bar

The recent debate around a referendum in Scotland over independence had me thinking that really London should be holding an independence referendum as well – London as a ‘city state’!

London is totally different to the country it finds itself in.

For a start, it is massively more productive than the rest of the UK: despite making up only 12% of the population, London creates 19% of UK GDP and 15% of jobs.

In 2010, London’s GVA per head of population was 71% above the UK average (GVA – Gross Value Added is a measure used to assess the contribution of a region to the economy as a whole).

London also has the highest number of export-oriented businesses (49% of all start ups)

It is also more ethnically diverse: Altogether, over 300 languages are spoken by Londoners. Nearly every race and nation in the world is represented by at least a handful of Londoners. In the 2001 Census, 30% of Londoners had been born outside England – that’s 2.2 million people.

The result is that Londoners, in terms of who they are, what they do and how they think have more in common with other ‘city states’ such as Singapore and New York than they do with the Home Counties, the Midlands, or Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

This isn’t just a capital city effect, London is far more diverse and disconnected from its ‘parent country’ than other major international cities such as Paris, Madrid, Moscow or Shanghai.

London is simply different…now then we just need to design a nice flag and compose a half-way decent national anthem (perhaps London Calling by the Clash?)

Think like an entrepreneur

For those of you who missed the January issue of Research Magazine, here are my ‘pearls of wisdom’ for doing better debriefs

…Danny Russell from SKY also appeared in the same article, with advice to ‘think like a CFO’.

Either way, it’s clearly time for researchers to STOP thinking like researchers.

Brand suicide

When I worked at JWT as a planner, one of the techniques that we used to use to evaluate new brand ideas was called ‘Brand Suicide’ – the idea was simple: pick a brand and then come up with NPD ideas that superficially fit the brand but would ultimatley be destructive (the idea being that, by understanding what the brand couldn’t do you would have a much clearer picture of what it could do). The example that was always used to explain how it worked was to imagine that After 8 mints had just launched a chewing gum. Both are mint flavoured so superficially there is a fit….although on further reflection the aspirational qualities of the brand are at total odds with gum so it would be hugely destructive to the brand’s core values of accessible aspiration.

…so imagine my delight when I saw this:

The After8 McFlurry, available only at McDonalds…love it.

Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief

I’ve recently been working on three very different projects:
– interviewing long-term unemployed men for a suicide prevention campaign
– interviewing prisoners (again for a suicide prevention campaign)
– interviewing millionaires (most of whom seem to work in the City) for a major financial institution

When interviewing people at the extreme margins of society (both high and low) some weird similarities emerge:
Prisoners and millionaires are both quite wary at first. Perhaps this is down to a suspicion that they will be judged (and maybe disliked) on the basis of what they are not who they are (‘you’re a crack dealer so I disapprove of you’; ‘you’re a Hedge Fund dealer so I disapprove of you’). It takes time to build a rapport, to get them relax and to be honest with you

The long-term unemployed, prisoners and millionaires also share a mutual aversion to reading lengthy texts
– in one case this is often down to poor reading skills, in the other due to an advanced form of attention deficit disorder that seems prevalent amongst very busy rich people.

What is striking is that, if you take the time to get to know them first, BEFORE you start bombarding them with questions, all three groups really open up. It turns out many desperately want to share their story – be it one of triumph or tragedy.

Market research in general could learn something from this – too often we are overly quick to jump into whatever we want to interview people about…without taking any real time to ever understand who they are.

Porridge or the Shawshank Redemption?

My image of prisons used to be based on a combination of the TV series Porridge and the film Shawshank Redemption. Prisons are like oil rigs, we all know they exist but we have no idea what really goes on inside them or what kind of person really goes there.

We’ve recently been doing some work for Samaritans(www.samaritans.org ), exploring how to encourage prison inmates to get over the stigma associated with talking about their feelings (prisons are supremely macho environments). Suicide, self-harm, bullying and drug use are endemic in UK prisons, so the service Samaritans provides is sorely needed.

Part of the work has involved interviewing prisoners, both in adult prisons and Young Offenders Institutions). We’ve talked to those in for GBH, ABH, crack and heroin dealing, robbery and burglary.

The interviews have been profoundly depressing and I thought I’d share some insights into what is a closed world to most of us:

First off, a few of statistics:
– 65% of adult male prisoners have a reading age of less than 8
– 55% of women in prison have a child under 16, 33% a child under 5 and 20% are lone parents (think about that last one for a minute and what it implies)
– 58% of all prisoners re-offend within in 24 months of release and for those aged 15-18 the figure is 88%.

The younger you are when you go to prison the more likely you are to re-offend

For many, their prison ‘career’ begins at a young age (12-15yrs). Some have been convicted of robbery or burglary or a minor drugs offence. It can be a hard cycle to break – if you are in a gang, they will be there for you upon your release, expecting you to get involved in their activities again. This is one of the reasons why young boys who are determined not to re-offend end up by doing exactly that – they have no-where else to go.

Prison can be a violent, frightning place:
Many prisons are designed to recieve inmates from local courts. This means they spend their sentence closer to where their families live, thereby making it easier for them the visit. The downside is that it also means it is more likely that you will meet people on the inside that you had problems with on the outside (“I recognise you, you stabbed by cousin”). This can lead to considerable violence, including being ‘kettled’ (take one kettle of boiling water, add one bag of sugar, tip over your target = the boiling water sticks to the skin and causes permanent scarring).

For some, the prospect of being released is as frightening as that of being arrested
– some may have been disowned by their family or may have lost their council home, leaving them with literally no-where to live
– others fear meeting their enemies and rivals again
– for many there is simply a fear of ‘will I be able to cope with the outside world?’

…and yet for others people, Prison is no longer a deterrent
Having been imprisoned a few times, some inmates know what to expect and regard it as an ‘occupational hazard’ – boring but not a deterrent to re-offending

…and yet there are signs of hope:
– whilst inside, some manage to gain additional qualifications (or even learn to read for the first time)
– Samaritans run a scheme called the ‘Listeners’ scheme, whereby they train volunteer prisoners to be Samaritans inside prisons. These inmates are on call 24 hours a day to be with a fellow prisoner and to listen to what they may have to say.

My top tip to you all – keep your nose clean – going to prison…it ain’t worth it!

I am not a number, I’m a customer!

I’ll come out and say it up-front, I hate HSBC.

They have been our corporate bankers for the last 2 years now. My loathing is driven by their inability to treat us like a customer. As a brand research agency we conduct much of our work outside the UK.

This means regularly having to get Dollars, Euros, Yen and Remnimbi. It also means regularly having to pay suppliers in other countries.

We have recently moved all our foreign currency transactions out of HSBC and into a company called Caxton FX, this is why:
the HSBC website doesn’t allow us to see what transactions have gone in and out of our Euro account (it only shows the balance)
– Caxton have a simple on-line dashboard that shows you your balance and recent transactions
– Caxton even ring you up when funds arrive in your account!

HSBC require any foreign currency transaction over about £3,000 to be done in person in a branch (you can’t use the phone or web)
– Caxton let you do anything up to I think £100k over the web, they also let you email instructions and ring them

After 2 years someone from HSBC rang to say that we were big enough to warrant a relationship manager. They said they be in touch to arrange a meeting to get to know us better. They never rang. Someone else at HSBC rang to ‘see how things were going’, having been blasted by me they said they’d get ‘our’ relationship manager to ring. They never did
– Caxton give every customer a relationship manager automatically (they even have a direct line and email…and they respond!)

No-one at HSBC seems to be empowered to solve problems – it is always handed on to someone in a processing centre somewhere
– the person you speak to at Caxton is generally the person who can resolve any problem you have.

HSBC give REALLY uncompetitive FX spreads and charge £30 per transaction
– Caxton make no charge and the rates they quote are light years better than high street banks

…oh and Caxton also sent me a bottle of wine at Christmas. We’re not a massive client of theirs and it wasn’t a vintage Bordeaux, but it’s the first time ANY financial institution has treated me like a valued customer rather than a commodity.

Come on guys, it isn’t rocket science – its called the Financial SERVICE Industry for a reason

(…and in case you’re wondering Caxton FX didn’t put me up to this)

Sticking your nose into other people’s business

If you are of even a remotely nosey disposition then consider a career in market research – it gives you licence to poke around in people’s lives, trying to understand who they are, why they do what they do and most importantly what might influence them to do something else in the future.

To bring this point to life, here is a short description of some of the bizarrely diverse projects we are doing/have just done/are about to do:

– interview super-affluent individuals about their spending habits and their views of hig-end credit card and concierge services
– interview female prisoners about depression, self-harm and suicidal feelings
– talk to builders and plumbers about which trade outlets they use and why
– understand why people donate items to charity shops and how they might be persuaded to give more
– look at ways of getting people to download and pay for more things via their mobile phone
– measure advertising recall for a Pan European ad campaign for a tech brand
– oh yes and a few months ago we went round people’s homes in California, looking at their usage of new technologies (like the i-Pad)

as I said, it helps if you’re nosey!