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!

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!

Market Research is at its best when clients know they don’t have all the answers…only then do they really listen

I work in market research and , when I interview people to see if they are right to join our company I often ask them “what brand would you most like to work on?” If they say Apple or Nike I immediately know they aren’t right.

The thing about marke research is that it is very bad at helping hugely successful brands:
1) These brands often succeed by doing smething totally different, something consumers would not have thought of
2) the brand owners are supremely confident – their brand can do no wrong – so they rarely listen that closely to consumers

The moment when a brand does start listening to its consumers is when it all starts to go wrong – sales have suddenly crashed, a new competitor has turned the market upside down. Its that moment of vulnerablilty where they have a crisis of faith. The brand team no longer feel they understand their consumers, they may even feel they no longer understand their own brand all they do know is that whatever they have been selling is something people don’t want anymore….so they turn to research to help them re-connect.

This is why brands such as Blackberry, the Liberal Democrats, News International, HMV need research more than Apple, the Conservative party or the Evening Standard.

Research isnt a panacaea; it won’t magically turn a crap product into one people want; sometimes the market changes and a brand ceases to be relevant…but at least by connecting with its consumers, a brand stands a fighting chance of working out if it can survive or not.

Market Research is at its best when clients know they don’t have all the answers…only then do they really listen

If brands can’t be optimistic, then who can?

I recently conducted some research into what it is like to be Middle Class in the middle of a recession.

It was striking how disillusioned many people felt – as if the economy had let them down.

All envisaged a recession that would rumble painfully on for another five years and many were seeking to find simpler pleasures, reassessing the value that they placed on spending time with friends and family.

To some degree, this is making a virtue out of necessity – if you can’t go on a mega shopping spree and you aren’t going to become a millionaire then you’d better find other ways to feel good about yourself.

Its quite striking how brands are starting to pick up on this and are keying into ways to make their consumers feel better about themselves by valuing and celebrating simpler pleasures.

A few examples I’ve seen recently:

Timberland making us feel better about going on a camping holiday and not on the usual wallet-wilting 2 weeks in the sun

Dorset Cereal’s website similarly  makes us feel good about a similarly hearty ‘stay-cation’, celebrating the simplicity of a British sea-side holiday.

Vodafone’s site goes one step further and gets us to apply for a competition, where the prize is to be an ‘everyday hero’ by giving our time to one of their selected charities.

My own personal favourite of this new wave of feel good about what we have advertising is the recent Budweiser ‘good times…they’re out there’ campaign

I believe that these campaigns really show the way forward for brands in this recession.

Brands essentially havethree potential ways to respond to recession-fuelled consumer fear:

a)Ignore it and act like nothing has happened? (Feels out of touch)

b)Try and ‘feel our pain’ and offer ‘recession-busting price-cuts’? (no-one argues with lower prices, but this depressing and adds no long term value)

c)Go for a ‘Blitz spirit’ we’re all in this together approach? (patronising)

…or, as these campaigns do, seek to reflect and accept the mood in the country and to turn it into a positive – the bad times don’t have to be bad…

“Recession pah, what recession”…or alternatively “we’re all doomed!”

Want to see if you’re the only one who feels optimistic/gloomy about next year? The only way to find out is to vote….go on, admit it, you’re curious

Status Anxiety…or the silver lining to the 50% tax rate

How do you tell people you’re successful without being vulgar about it?

In the old days you used to just whip out your Amex Gold Card and everyone was duly impressed.  Now that it seems everyone, probably including Lidl offers customers a ‘Black card’, with ‘concierge services‘, how do you let your friends and colleagues know of success?

…simple, you moan about having to pay the 50% tax rate.

I’ve noticed this as a recent trend.  When having a drink with an aquaintance who had just got a new job he complained about the top tax rate.  Another friend had just been promoted and similarly moaned about 50% tax.

What they were both doing is quietly telling me that they were earning north of £150k….without having the vulgarity to discuss a dirty thing like money.

It has its ‘social uses’ does this 50% tax malarkey

Insight is dead

Hands-up who thinks ‘insight’ is an over-used word.  It’s like the word ‘Luxury’ when applied to an Ikea bathroom suite or the word ‘Executive’ for a motel bedroom.  It’s so prevalent that it has lost all sense of its real meaning.

For an industry obsessed by insight, the funny thing is that we’re not short of it.  In fact, quite the opposite, we’re tripping over it.  Most professional, consumer-focused client companies have been commissioning research for decades.  They regularly segment their target audiences, then revise their segmentations to keep them up to date.  They do innovation research and advertising research, they subscribe to the relevant industry reports and monitors.  They probably have an agency on retainer to monitor web chatter about the brand.  They may even have a Facebook group to get them closer to their peeps.

In fact, most organisations are now suffering from a serious case of insight indigestion.  Insight Managers now have so much information coming at them that insight itself has ceased to be the issue.

At the end of a successful project, the agency comes in, does their debrief and makes their recommendations.  It’s at this point that one of a number of factors kicks in:

–          The debrief came too late and the end client has already made a decision

–          The debrief contradicts the last piece of work so is doubted

–          The debrief gives bad news and disses an idea that was popular internally…so findings are ignored

–          The debrief gives good news, everything is hunky dory…in fact so much so that everyone wonders why they  bothered with the research in the first place (it didn’t really tell us anything new did it?)

As I will go on to argue, this isn’t about the quality of insight, it’s about what happens to it once it has been unearthed.

The former CEO of IBM – Lou Gerstner once said that, if he left IBM’s strategic plans on an airplane seat they would be useless to any competitor…because business success is not about grand designs; it’s all down to how you execute your plans.

The same holds true for Market Research – we all obsess about finding the break-though insight, the idea or the angle that no-one else has thought of and which will drive brand differentiation and desire. No-one, at least on the agency side, seems to spend much time thinking how these ‘break-through insights’ are going to be executed and how the agency and insight manager are going to get the end-user of the research to actually use the insights.

Insights have zero intrinsic value.  Knowing that your target consumers behave or think in a specific way is not immediately of commercial value to an organisation.  The insights need to be applied to the business and used to change something before the value is realised.  Too often, as researchers, we are guilty of sweating over a project and then, once we have come up with some smart consumer insights, we sit back – job done, aren’t we clever.  It still leaves the end client having to make sense of the research findings and working out how to apply them to their business.

Consumer Insight Managers face a constant challenge to engage with their end customers and to demonstrate the power of research to the business.  Any large consumer-facing business will have spent millions on market research.  They have ‘insight’ coming out of their ears.  Finding killer insights isn’t the issue any more (…and anyway, if it’s a decent insight, you can bet that your competitors have also come across it).

The challenge is to find ways of making sense of that insight within the business – engaging with decision-makers in a way that enables the insights to be immediately actioned.

Many clients can be somewhat cynical about attempts by agencies to ‘get closer’ to their business.  Suggestions to run an ‘insight workshop’ instead of a conventional PowerPoint debrief are often rebuffed on the grounds that there is not enough time, or that it won’t add enough value.  There is something comforting about the controlling environment of a debrief – debates are not opened up, things that have been agreed upon don’t get the chance to suddenly be discussed again (and potentially ‘un-agreed’).

However, I would argue that a two hour meeting that consists of a researcher reading a deck of 50-80 PowerPoint charts and then fielding a few questions is a very poor way to turn research-fuelled insights into actionable decisions for a business.

When done properly, a 2-3hour workshop can be a more effective way of actually carrying ideas into the business and turning them into something that end clients can immediately use.

The value of an insight workshop rather than ‘just’ a regular debrief is clear. Debriefs are like University lectures – someone stands up at the front and the audience sits and listens – it’s very ‘broadcast: receive’ and as such it actively discourages discussion, things need to be closed down not opened up again (particularly with the European Sales Director in the room…she’s an absolute nightmare!).

A good insight workshop helps to set the research within its wider context, both historical and going forward.    As Donald Rumsfeld said, “there are things we know we know, there are things know we don’t know and there are things we don’t know we don’t know (…perhaps he was channelling the spirit of a market researcher when he said this).

Key project stakeholders are invited (it needs to be a small action-oriented group and not a wide audience of anyone who is vaguely connected to the project).  These key stakeholders can bring vital context to the findings:

–          How do they compare to previous research findings

–          Does it fit with what the business believes to be the correct way forward, or does it challenge held beliefs

–          Has the business moved on since the research (often things have changed since the research was conducted, some insights may no longer be relevant)

The researcher’s job is to actively engage with the project stakeholders, getting them to in-put into the insight process.  This can lead to arguments of course – whilst they know more about the brand or product than the researcher does, the researcher has come ‘fresh from the insight coal face’.  I believe that these arguments are in fact a crucial part of the process – it makes sure that any recommendations coming out of the research have been properly debated and understood.  They not only reflect what the research said, but also the realities of the business.

At this point I suspect some of you will be throwing your arms up – this sounds like the purity of the research has been corrupted by the evil client.  Who cares if it has?  This is about using research as a conversation that enables the business to reach the correct decision.  It isn’t about the researcher coming down from the mountain with ‘the truth’, the way that the client has to follow if they are to succeed.

To mis-quote the saying, ‘Insight is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration’.  This approach is not without its risks and it requires Client Insight Managers as well agency researchers to stick their necks out a bit, but the benefits can be huge.

By allowing the discussion to encompass not only insights from the project (respondent insights, insights about any specific target audiences), but also a discussion that sets these within the context of the business, the research is able to see the bigger picture and to take the business to a higher level.

In any discussion, the final and most important element must be a debate (sometimes heated) as to what the insights mean for the business – what should the next steps be?  This is the part most researchers feel uneasy with – the further away they get from the project insights, the more naked they feel.  Yet, despite the risks, of saying something foolish or just plain wrong, this is where researchers need to go in order to really deliver on the insight.

Researchers get marginalised precisely because they refuse to engage with the realities of business.  We need to move beyond insight if, as an industry we are to demonstrate the value of research…and the value of research is not in delivering insights, it comes from delivering sustainable competitive advantage to companies (using insights).

At Volante Research, we believe in this so passionately that we don’t even charge for running an insight workshop (otherwise, it would be too easy for it become something that clients drop in order to save some budget).

This isn’t just about engaging with the consumer, but rather it’s also about engaging with the end-user of research.  This is where the battle should be for the 21^st Century.

Insight is dead, long live diffusion!

(this is a longer version of an article that was recently published on the ResearchLive web-site

‘Found in Translation’ – why Japan is once again a glimpse into the future for consumer technology brands

I’ve recently returned from a trip to Tokyo, where I was talking to consumers about the future of mobile phones.

It’s such an amazing city Tokyo.  Generally when you go to a new country if it feels very different to home, it’s because it’s poor – they don’t have Starbucks yet and the roads are unpaved.  Japan, and Tokyo in particular, is massively different even to other global cities such as London or New York.

A view of Shibuya taken from my hotel window

What inspires about Japan is also what is frustrating from a marketing and research perspective. Japan has taken a different journey to other developed markets.  With its triple-decker highways and fascination with the minaturisation of all things tech related it’s is tempting to assume going to Tokyo is like travelling forward in time  – giving us a vision of what consumers in London, Paris and Chicago are going to be doing in a year or two.

Until recently, most marketers felt that Japan rather than being ‘further down the track’ than the rest of us, was on a ‘different track’ – i.e. things would work and be popular in Japan that never make it elsewhere.

I think this is changing and that the two tracks are converging and that, at least as far as consumer technology goes, success in Japan is in fact becoming a good predictor of future success elsewhere.

Back at the turn of the Century (the 21st Century that is) I was in Japan looking at mobile phone behaviour and everyone was enjoying ‘Navi-walk’ (a basic form of sat-nav for your phone) and M-payment (a cashless payment system that allowed you to pay for things via your mobile phone bill.  At the time, both ideas seemed light-years ahead of what was on offer in Europe or the US.  Fast-forward to 2010 and anyone with a smartphone takes it for granted that they will have sat-nav and location enabled tracking on it (e.g. ‘find my nearest…’).

Ironically, in some ways Japan feels a little behind the curve now.  Many local brand mobile phones in Japan are rather clunky looking flip-phones and, as in every other developed city in the world, the i-Phone is the super-cool device to own.

Some of this convergence is being driven by 3G networks – if your phone is on 3G then it will work in Japan (unlike any previous handsets).  Moving forward this makes it a lot easier for tech to migrate from one market to the next.

With 4G just around the corner (think broadband download speeds), I wonder what will happen next?

A personal prediction is that phones are going to get both bigger and smaller (a tablet device that can also make calls and/or a micro screen that has fewer functions but is super thin)

How do you advertise to an audience of 200, all of whom are dead?

We were recently set a difficult task by Samaritans and their ad-agency – Arthur London.  Apparently about 200 people kill themselves every year by jumping in front of a train.  Most of them are men.  Samaritans (and Network Rail who were helping with the costs) wanted to reduce this number.

Our job was to find out how advertising could help reach these men before they killed themselves.

If you’re anything like me then your image of Samaritans is pretty simple – they’re the people you call when you’re standing on the lip of a bridge and are about to commit suicide.  This is kind of true, but only a fraction of what they do.  Samaritans does indeed get calls from the suicidal, but it gets far more calls from people who are simply desperate and, for one reason or another have no-where else to turn to.  Their phone lines (as well as text, email and drop-in centres) are staffed 24hours a day by unpaid volunteers who, thankfully go through a psychologically very rigorous selection process (rather like the SAS, 9 out every 10 applicants don’t make it to be a volunteer).

Those of you who are male will not be overly surprised to read that they struggle to get men to call them. Buried deep within the male psyche is deep-rooted feeling that to talk about your feelings is weak.  Most men will only talk about ‘stuff’ with their wife or partner. But who do you talk to if your wife has left you, or your girlfriend has thrown you out of the house because you keep nicking her dole money to pay for your smack habit?

Anyway, back to the task Samaritans set us:

Working with Arthur London and using data provided by the British Transport Police, we were able to build a rough profile of the sort of backgrounds that they came from. Most of those who killed themselves by jumping in front of a train were male, aged roughly 30-50yrs and came from a background in manual labour (construction, steel furnaces, mining). Many had a history of drug and/or alcohol dependency and some had spent time in prison.

As a group, they are hard to talk to. Mainly because they regard talking as failure. They define themselves through actions not words. The ad agency had come up with a concept for advertising aimed at getting these men to call Samaritans before things became too much for them.  It was built around the image of a boxer (a classic male archetype).  The message was a simple one: its ok to have feelings and to need to talk to someone about them, even a tough nut local boxer needs this.

My colleague Carl and I spent a month going up and down the UK talking to the ‘target audience’ (it somehow feels wrong to use marketing speak here).  We went to the Pollok estate in Glasgow, to Redcar near Middlesbrough, to Romford and to Solihul. We wanted to talk to men in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Men who worked in blast furnaces, car factories and contruction sites. We knew that some would be unemployed, others would have alcohol or drug dependency issues.  We needed to get them talking to us about their lives. To do this we had to talk to them one on one and it needed to be on ‘neutral’ territory so we chose local community centres.

Only after we had talked for nearly an hour did we show them the ideas for the advertising that was aimed at ‘them’. Over many different sessions, we worked closely with the client and the ad agency to help fine-tune the campaign – getting the wrong image or using a phrase that showed you were a poncy University-educated agency type was all it took to trigger instant rejection. Who wants to be patronised?

It is humbling and depressing to rummage through someone’s private pain as you explore why they were sent to prison or what it is like to be unemployed for 15years.  But what became very clear is that there is a real role for Samaritans and a real need to get men, in particular, talking more. The campaign has just broken, see its coverage in the SUN.

We’re about to go into a prison to talk to prisoners about the campaign to see if could be adapted for use in HMPs.

Its not often that, as a market researcher you can feel that you’ve helped save lives. The campaign is a powerful one and, having spent time talking to the sort  of men it is aimed at, I believe it will work. I intend to do blog about the research in prison (once we’ve done it), but in the meantime, have a look at the campaign on the Samaritans site