In the second of our reviews from last weeks Esomar Conference in Athens, Face Founding Partner Andrew Needham gives his views on the event, Face’s place in the market research world, and debates methodological approach.

I attended Esomar’s World Congress in Athens last week along with 800 fellow researchers – the good, the bad and the ugly – of our profession to listen and learn about the latest trends and developments.

It was an important event not least because Philip McNaughton, one of our Research Directors, was speaking with one of our key clients, Coca-Cola on Project Hijack, but also because it gives me a global snap shot of the leading innovation driving the world of research.

From this I can see how we stand up against other agencies and whether we are still at the forefront of the industry’s thinking.

I am happy to say that some of the hottest topic areas at Conference were those methodologies and approaches where we have been playing a leading role with our thinking and client work for the last couple of years namely co-creation, netnography and social media research.

It is clear from this Conference that a core group of Esomar companies are now emerging as true pioneers in the industry.  At Face we are determined to continue playing this leading role.  We are restless in our pursuit of innovation  (see our recent nomination for MRS Best Innovation 2010 Award for the launch of Pulsar our social media research tool), we love learning from both our peers and our clients, but we are also very aware about how we mix our research methodologies- combining both on-line and off line techniques in a coherent and well thought through approach.

This is vital if we are to keep up with today’s fast changing consumer landscape, but also if we are to meet the demands from our clients to uncover genuine consumer insight.

It is why Neil McPhee’s paper, “Is there a future for “real” qualitative market research interviewing in the digital age,” is asking the wrong question.

It seems that this question was only posed because he had already decided the answer to it. And the answer of course to this question is yes but there is so much more. The presentation however did not move on the debate about the role face to face needs to play in the future, which would have been more interesting. Instead it focused on how qualitative research on-line was not up to scratch, and not as good as traditional face to face qualitative research.

So I would draw attention to any researcher reading this blog, to Philip and Beth’s paper on “Project Hijack” – the work we have been doing with Coca-Cola and teens.

There are a number of principles that we can learn from their approach to highlight the importance of combining a mix or “fusion” of on-line and offline methodologies to help uncover genuine insight and turn it into action.

Shopper/consumer principles:

• Real conversations mean real insights: listening to and observing young people talk to each other rather than us delivers richer insight
• Playtime all the time: encouraging community members to use a variety of “game” orientated and multimedia tools allowed them to co-create with Coke’s brands across a number of different areas. This in turn led to richer and deeper insight because Coke stakeholders were working WITH consumers and not just asking them questions
• On-going and real time: Working with teens over a lengthy period of time meant Coke stakeholders were able to capture real behaviour rather than just some edited highlights in a final de-briefing presentation.

Some of the stakeholder principles:

• Limited formal debriefings: meant stakeholders had to roll their sleeves up and get involved, not rely on being spoon fed insights;
• Removing filters: helped the Coke stakeholder team to go on a journey one where they could participate in and experience first hand the lives of teens; with findings going straight to their desktops
• Borderless project scope and outputs: The project had business wide objectives and this drove simple business-wide outputs

Turning insight into action:

• Coke’s on pack promotions were more focused with simple messages using ideas and currency that were relevant and targeted to teens. A text promotion for example is one of the best promotions Coke has ever done.
• Helping develop Brand Platforms because video & written diaries helped Coke to shopper strategy & the vital role of getting it right in marketplace
• Shopper strategy & getting it right in marketplace because all the shopper video diaries showed Coke how many and how often young people changed their minds at the point of purchase

Further Reading

Just as our approach with Coke showed the importance of mixing different methodologies to deliver more genuine insight, so there were other examples at Esomar that highlighted this as well. I recommend getting hold of the following papers:

• Conquest’s Esomar paper entitled Looking for the fire not the smoke – it’s all about their new tool Infexious which has been nominated for MRS Best Innovation
• Harnessing the power of the consumer by Spring Research
• Vive la difference by Virtual Surveys
• Exploring the world of water by Insites
• Beyond the buzz and towards robustness by Linkfluence;
• How social media is democratizing research by Peanut Labs
• Semiotics of Behaviour Change by GFK
• Digital Characters”or “Digividuals by Brainjuicer.

Happy Reading!