This Month
August 2011: Stickiness and stickability
There’s a moment in a creative development focus group you must never miss. It’s the point when a group of strangers are exposed to a new idea. There’s all sorts of questions researchers ask. And projectives that we use to uncover the territory that people can’t or won’t speak about. But nothing is so important as that first microsecond. When we don’t talk. We watch their bodies to find out how good the creative idea is. When they show us more than they know. A little body language tells us a lot about good creative ideas. But now we need a lot more. On my desk at the moment is a brief for starting conversations and building relationships with the brand. It’s a lot more complicated than checking advertising concepts. How sticky an idea is – will someone go back to it and play with it? And the stickability of the idea – will it be as engaging in 2 months time? Is the idea useful? Is it something that makes you warm towards whoever was behind it? These are much more difficult questions to answer. And we can’t count on instant reads of body language to evaluate them. Could we predict the appeal of the Harry Potter franchise by reading a couple of chapters from the first book? How are Sainsburys to pick a replacement for Jamie Oliver? It’ll take some puzzling to solve this one. How would you tackle this?
Brands as celebrities - A list vs Z list
Celebrities are just brands that walk about aren’t they? I’ve been thinking about what an A list brand is and how it gets to the top and survives there. In celeb land it’s easy. Your B listers have been coasting on that 80s TV series for far too long. And your Z listers who came to public attention via reality TV were never going to last very long. The key differentiator between the A listers and the rest is that the A listers perform. They own market share because they deliver. They drive revenue. Camden Market just up the road from us at Spring Research is full of merchandise featuring iconic celebrities from different eras. Similarly there are iconic brands who everybody loves to talk about even if not everyone can afford to buy them. This kind of fame isn’t the same as performance but the iconic brand has to be potent. It has to have been a great performer at some point. Z list brands are those which have become notorious. Famous for all the wrong reasons. Usually because of a catastrophic performance failure. The kind of damage that is very difficult to overcome. So where is your brand on this chart? Probably not iconic. But there’s no reason you can’t be an A lister if you focus on performance at all costs. And manage the fame that goes with that. It may be that you become a tribal brand with a loyal segment following you. For whom you will always be an A lister. But B list and Z list are options should be avoided at all costs. Invest in your brand. Avoid scandal. And perform, perform, perform.
Idea of the month: Psychogeography
It must be silly season. I am featuring an idea I don’t think has ever been aired in research circles much less among planners. But it has filled a lot of space in broadsheet newspapers. Here’s how you do it. Get a local map. Upturn a glass on it. With a pen draw round the perimeter of the glass. Then walk the circle writing about whatever you see. Psychogeography is a literary movement rather than a social science one. Ian Sinclair one of its celebrated exponents penned London Orbital from what he saw and reflected on walking around the M25 motorway that circles London. Guy Debord a founder described it as the study of the effect of geography on the emotions and behaviours of individuals. Sounds like a very relevant topic for marketers doesn’t it? If in research we sample a market randomly there’s no reason why we couldn’t use a circuit to recruit users and non-users as well as observing how a brand fit into local spaces and how locals were using it. Actually I really am serious about psychogeography. Researchers obsess over the need to keep respondents away from each other and from the client. Ethnography is a carefully planned, even clinical intervention. If we just set out on a circuit what would we discover that our rational methodologies are hiding from us? You know the real problem of course. Its so simple anyone could do it..
Up and coming
Sydney AMSRS conference next month where I hope to meet up with old friends and put faces to names I’ve been talking to for years online. I’m still blogging on Further and Faster if you have the time to drop by. I hope you get a bit of a break in the next month. If you have time for a coffee then call me - this month I am prioritising catching up with people.
Check out the blog at Further and Faster or follow johngriffiths7 on twitter.
