Serendipity Book

Research as scapegoat

From this event report on the Marketing Society website it sounds like market research took a real bashing from UK marketers once again (along with their usual agonising about arguing with finance directors and bitching about not being on the board - is it any wonder I didn't bother to go this year?).

On the research front, the usual themes came up:

1) Most research artificially disconnects us from our consumers (Roisin Donnelly, P&G)
2) Most research is reactive and focuses on the past not the future (James Dyson)

And the usual answers were offered:

1) Donnelly's answer is to spend extended periods of time (a month?) with consumers.
2) Dyson's was to ignore research altogether and just focus on the technology.

Market research is, of course, never going to provide definitive answers for marketers and they are wrong to expect that it will.

Our modern research techniques were derived from the social sciences of sociology, psychology and economics whose practitioners have a much harder time getting to answers than their opposite numbers in the natural sciences.

Whilst the natural sciences of physics, biology and chemistry study observable matter, social scientists study humans whose observable behaviour (what they say and do) can rarely be relied on to tell the full story.

As most social scientists will readily acknowledge, humans are difficult to understand because they have free will, are often irrational and have incredible imaginations which are capable of creating  multiple alternative versions of reality.

But just because the answers we get back are subjective it doesn't not mean that we should give up conducting research altogether as Dyson suggests. We have a lot to learn from spending more time with our consumers as Roisin Donnelly suggests.

The real issue with research, of course, is that it is very expensive and time consuming to do it properly.

Planning Idea Generator

Is Jeffre's brief-o-matic a crime against planning, a blessing for time-starved strategists or just a bit of fun?

The Orange Launch & Last Mover Advantage

I just read the truly inspiring 1995 APG and 1996 IPA papers submitted by Charles Vallance (then at WCRS who went on to be a founding partner at VCCP in 2001) on the launch of the Orange mobile phone network.

My favourite bit is where Charles explains how being a late entrant provides a great opportunity to review the category for opportunities for differentiation. He goes on to explain why a late entrant can stand out by defining their own rules using this great example:

"We would have to invent a new category, and exercise the ultimate right of the last born. To be first in what you decide to be, rather than last in what others have decided for you. Everyone knows the name of the first man to fly the Atlantic, no-one remembers the second guy (Bert Hinkler). However, they do remember the name of Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly the Atlantic. What Amelia had succeeded in doing was inventing a new category."

You can get hold of the APG paper by buying the book directly from the APG or downloading the paper from WARC.

Fresh Athens

Whilst I love the aesthetic (and value) of the Design Hotels chain there is, of course, a trade-off: some do tend to be in the wrong part of town.

I'm in Athens to present an updated version of Wildfire to a seminar at the Greek Advertising Awards tonight. I decided to stay in Fresh because it is halfway between our local agency and the Olympic Tae Kwondo venue I will be presenting in later.

Whilst the decor is great and the rooms are well thought out and spacious, this particular hotel really suffers from its location...

1) My colleagues advised me to probably not to go out in the area at night.
2) The view from my room (8th floor) is largely of derelict buildings.
3) There were prostitutes hanging around outside the front door.
4) Roadworks were going on outside until 4am last night (yes, I did hear it up here).
5) There have been protestors screaming at each other with bullhorns for most of the morning.

Still, the staff are lovely and I've got some Illy and Wifi so I'm happy enough.

A Musicovery

Andy Hobsbawm kindly tipped me off to a wonderful little online music recommendation site called Musicovery which was created by Frederic Vavrille who also brought us the music recommendation site MusicPlasma (now called LivePlasma).

Musicovery takes the idea of streaming radio based on preferences developed by Pandora and Last.FM and adds the music recommendation capabilities of LivePlasma.

In addition, Musicovery gives you the ability to choose the music you want to listen to based on mood and tempo within genre and era. You can select to stick to the hits, express a preference for non-hits or opt for discovery mode.

If that's not enough, it also allows you to browse the forthcoming music with a lovely little visualisation. The lo-fi version is ad supported and doesn't put any registration nonsense in the way of first use which is nice.

Those who know me will know that the mood browser is of course bound to appeal to me because it uses a simple 2x2 matrix with one axis stretching from dark to positive and the other from energetic to calm. 

Take a look at the result if you choose calm, positive metal from the 80s: Black Sabbath with 'Paranoid'.

Remember The Dozers

I had cause to squeeze the dozers into my work this week ...

Let Mii have a Wii

I think we will be having some major tournaments in the office in the runup to Xmas

Full 2 minute version here.

Viz Top Tips are still great

Viz Top Tips still do it for me  ...

ESTATE agents. Please look up the words luxurious, stunning and spacious in a dictionary so as I don't have to spend my weekends being shown around badly-built shoeboxes.

EXPERIENCE the thrills of a skiing holiday without the expense. Simply sellotape two planks of wood to your feet, sit in your freezer for three hours, then run into a tree as fast as you can.

FOOL your friends into thinking you use expensive butter by simply using cheap margerine and ripping holes in the bread.

MOBILE phone users. On trains always choose a seat in the last carriage. Then, when a train enters a tunnel, run as fast as you can towards the front of the train. This will ensure that you are in the tunnel for the shortest possible time and are less likely to miss that all-important call.

As the publisher says, Viz is a national institution.

How common is my surname?

Thanks to this little online app I now know that there are 3,385 people in England & Wales who share my surname (McEwan). I was surprised to find that there are nearly twice as many people with the alternative spelling of McKeown.

The ten most common surnames in England & Wales on this dataset are:  SMITH, JONES, WILLIAMS, TAYLOR, BROWN, DAVIES, EVANS, THOMAS, WILSON and JOHNSON. Given that the population of Wales is far smaller than that of England this clearly demonstrates the concentration of Welsh family names.

A few directed searches then revealed there were 419 people who are burdened with the surname of Daft and 31 with the surname Slapper!

Which reminds me of a story ... I worked for BT back in the early 90's whilst I was studying for my Masters. Back then they more or less had a monopoly on fixed line telecoms. Twice a week I used to sit in a dreary open plan office for 14 hours at a time taking customer complaints to their "151" fault line. On one excrutiatingly quiet Bank Holiday afternoon I rather childishly searched their vast customer database for names that contained any one of a number of expletives or pejoratives. Strangely I found that the database always returned the same woman! Apparently she was the ex-wife of one of the engineers. He had entered a series of pseudonyms into the database alongside her name (slapper, cow, whore etc.) and if you searched for them, up she popped! Nice.

Picture Credit: Spell with Flickr

More than one British family decided to call their kid Superman!

The Sun and The Times both picked up on some research by an enterprising genealogy website called findmypast.com.

They reviewed the last 20 or so years worth of British birth registrations and instead of looking for the common ones, they have dug out the least common names.

The Times pulled out some of the gems:

"AS IF Peaches Honeyblossom, Pixie Frou-Frou and Fifi Trixibelle were not enough of a cross to bear, Britain now numbers among its youth 6 Gandalfs, 39 Gazzas, 2 Supermen and 36 Arsenals of both sexes. Children, it appears, are in growing danger from their parents of name abuse. Among the worst reported cases are Dre, Tupac, Jay-Z and Snoop."

“It seems that many of us are happy to take hero worship to a whole new level, naming our children after the stars we admire. However, it would appear that the British sense of humour is alive and well with Gandalf, Harry Potter and Superman.”

For some reason the boys names just seem to be more bizarre - perhaps because I expect boys names to be more traditional.

From The Sun (with their trademark capitalisation!):

"A survey of British birth certificates has found six boys with the first name GANDALF, the wizard played by Sir Ian McKellen in Lord of the Rings, one HARRY POTTER and two lads called SUPERMAN.

Some 1,120 boys have been named KEANU, following Keanu Reeves’ success in movies such as Speed and The Matrix.

Rap has made an impact too, with 426 boys called DRE, after Dr Dre, 27 called TUPAC, seven JAY-Z and even three named SNOOP

FOOTIE-mad parents have named 36 boys and girls ARSENAL as a craze for wacky names sweeps Britain.

Three lads have been given the first names DAVID BECKHAM after the former England skipper and 28 BROOKLYN after his eldest son.

Another 29 were dubbed GAZZA, despite the ex-soccer genius’s off-field troubles.

Golf nuts named 1,191 sons TIGER while other sports fans stick with brands — two children being called REEBOX and three named ADIDAS."

Picture Credit: Uploaded to Flickr.com by Stephen Poff