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Augmented Research, Blog, Innovation, Insights, Social Media

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The Death of Surveys: What Next?

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Mountain PeaksFlickr: By The Paperclip

This article was originally published in Research World Magazine‘s March/April 2012 issue. In it, Andrew Needham, Face CEO and Founding Partner, discusses what needs to be done for social media analysis to provide real research insights.

“Will Social Media Replace Surveys as a Research Tool?” This Advertising Age headline from March 2011 sent ripples through the industry. Joan Lewis, the top research executive of Procter & Gamble, the world’s biggest research buyer, predicted a dramatic decline in the importance of surveys by 2020 due to the rise of social media.

Her reasoning was simple: with so much real-time data about our customers, structured research is less relevant. The decline of surveys was used as one example in a much bigger debate about how the research industry must change if it is to keep up with emerging client needs. As she said, it is less about methodology or sample representation and more about finding that game-changing insight. But in a consumer landscape that is changing so quickly, how do you efficiently extract meaningful insight from all the ‘big data’ consumers are producing? How do you connect all the dots?

The answers to these questions lie with technology and learning new skills. The research industry needs to embrace technology to develop social and community-based tools that are better configured to the needs of client CMI departments. In terms of dashboards, tools such as Radian6 and Sysomos are very good when it comes to social listening, but we are in the business of generating social media insight. Crafting quality insights requires customised data, and bespoke algorithms and modules. Clients are demanding more depth when it comes to understanding audiences’ relationships with a brand via the social web. A key challenge has been anonymity. Trying to pinpoint an audience demographically has not been possible, but it has been possible to track relationships through passions and interests. By developing a more dynamic and real-time approach to audience segmentation, brands can deliver content that is relevant and meaningful.

Technology can also help researchers extract more meaningful insight from the data by moving beyond analysing conversations by volume and doing more to understand the data’s impact and influence – its ‘visibility’. This requires weighting the data using specific algorithms for each social media channel. Furthermore, all current social media mining tools look only at content, and overlook context and behavioural data. This means that most of them are not making the most of the data feast. When it comes to community platforms there is much that can be improved, but integrating social media data in real time is key. Real value comes from mapping the data onto the rest of the research toolbox.

These innovations need to come thick and fast because clients want to be able to connect the dots between different data sets to better project what is going to happen in the future. To do this effectively requires more human analysis and consulting working alongside technology. The industry needs to look outwards so it can attract different types of people with different skill sets. Finding researchers who are also technologists, or technologists who are also social anthropologists is difficult, but we are going to see a greater mix of technological skill sets with more traditional ones. This mix will lead to the development of new methodological frameworks, powered by technology, to help gather and analyse those game-changing insights in a consumer landscape that is changing so quickly.

As Joan Lewis said, “When we’re doing it, we need to do it well. It’s really been easy for people to take the idea that the world is changing as an excuse to do really poor work. And there’s no excuse.”

Insights, sxsw

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Brand Patterns

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The Brand Paradox
One of the most interesting sessions I attended last week at SXSW was the panel “Brands as Patterns,” which we mentioned in our post “5 Panels for Researchers to See at SXSW“. The title for this session comes from a paradox. Traditionally brands have been definitive, singular and complete focused on the 3 year brand plan to deliver consistency using repetitive messaging while consumers interactions with a brand are more iterative, varied and changing in real time. Brands today though need to be both consistent and different, definitive and iterative. One way to help us make sense of this paradox is to see them as patterns – patterns create consistency through difference.

A person spinning clay

Photo by BLW Photography on Flickr

The shape of Brands is changing
We all know that the shape of brands is changing. At Face we see them much more as social entities because of the interactions, conversations and content consumers are sharing with each other, in and around the brand. This dynamic means that what the brand can be or mean to consumers is constantly shifting. Hence today brands are more about shared experiences defined as much by the user as by the brand manager.

Brands need to be coherent rather than consistent
Marc Shillum from Method who was one of the panellists agrees stating that brand value is defined by this two way experience and continued iteration. He goes further by saying the brand should be the interface of these experiences so “put the brand in the interface not on it”. Seeing brands as patterns and moving the debate from brand consistency to brand coherence is key. Shillum argues that “It is better to strive for coherency, where consistency in design is married with a system of meaning that people can believe in and choose to be a part of: the brand. This belief comes from the brand, and tying the two together - interaction and brand – in a coherent system will facilitate experiences that are far richer and longer lasting. So we must create the brand pattern. By understanding as much as possible what the brand means, how that meaning is constructed, and what elements make it unique, we can begin to explore and define patterns of behavior that help support the brand meaning in a way that is also valuable for people”.

Brands need to be Active and have a Rhythm
The theme of brands as patterns was continued by Greg Johnson the Global Creative Director of Hewlett Packard who talked about casting a set of principles and context to “pour the brand into”. This helps the brand to be coherent and distinctive by owning signature expressions that are varied but recongnizable, giving continuity to how the brand manifests itself but in a fluid and iterative way. In his view brands need to be active, built by what it does not what it says. Robin Lanahan, Brand Strategy Director from Microsoft talked about pattern language in brands being about the story – the story endures as the context changes so brands need to have a rhythm.

A violin on sheet music

Photo by M-Trudeau on Flickr

Brands need to have smart variation
Finally Walter Werzowa, Composer, compared composing to developing a brand. If music is too repetitive it is boring, too changeable then it is chaotic – both result in losing your audience. But if brands display smart variation like Beethoven then that’s different. I’m no musician but apparently in the first part of Beethovan’s famous 5th Symphony you hear the same motif 45 times yet he only repeats the motif in exactly the same way 4 times – the other 41 times there are variations to it yet we still recognise them to be  connected to the same motif. So we lose audiences with either too much chaos or too much repetition. He argued that patterns are a driving force in our brains so we are open to pattern recognition.

What this means for research
Of course, this is still just theory and observation, but it does pose some questions that researchers can explore, such as what does a successful brand pattern look like and what does a poor brand pattern look like? Researchers now have the challenge of creating a real time measurement model that can bring this to life with simple visualisations, and this is something we should be all be looking into now.

Social Media, sxsw

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Data Lockers: The Future of Personal Data?

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One of the themes that is running through SXSW this year for me is how a major shift is taking place where all the data we are creating as consumers will not be owned, controlled and monetised by brands or companies but by us. New business models, tools and apps are putting us in control of our own data and this is very empowering because it means that we can start to shape the world around us, our interests, our passions, our whole lives.

lockers

Photo by Cristina V on Flickr

This theme is at the heart of Fran’s blog which challenges the whole Brand as API model by asking “What if, instead of focusing on what the API allows the user to Pull we start focusing on what the API allows the user to PUSH, meaning allowing the user to ingest a controlled and owned selection of brand-relevant personal data into the brand API such as user context, passions, interests and behaviours?” He rightly points out that if he could feed for example his location data into the API of his mobile network operator (plugging in his mobile gps, Foursquare or Sonar data) then he could get the most customised international plan based on his travel habits. In effect we’re turning the transaction model on it’s head – as a consumer I have lots of data and information that is really valuable to you Mr Brand and I will trade this for something that I can get in return from you.

This was at the heart of two other presentations I went to today:

The first was by Amber Case the Co-Founder of Geoloqi.com, a Cyborg Anthropogist, who painted a picture in her talk “Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface” of a world where technology helps to shape everything around you without the need of a laptop, iPhone, iPad or any interface. Almost unimaginable, I know, but it’s a world where technology takes a back seat, where the interface is completely reduced so you don’t have to do a search, follow a little pin on Google Maps or load an app. The best technology she said should be invisible and help you to live your life in the way you want to. This is a very big thought re-inforcing the theme of putting the individual at the centre his/her world.

The second presentation “Data is the New Oil: Wealth and Wars on the Web” by DJ Patil,  the Data Scientist in Residence at Greylock Partners and Owen Tripp, the Co-founder of Reputation.com focused on the challenge of turning what they called “data vomit” to data action. One of the key ways to help make data actionable they said was to make the consumer part of it and give benefits back to consumers for sharing their data (including returning data back to the user so its actionable so it  adds value to them). At the moment people give away their data while companies and brands make money so why not create personal data vaults where we store all our data and related content for multiple purposes. If enough of us did this we would turn our own data into a form of personal currency which if it achieved scale would turn the tables on brands and companies.

There are a number of start ups such as Personal who are doing this. There are also start ups in the education field that are building portfolio platforms that allow students to learn from their own data and share their data with other students. This is driving a whole movement of students who want to own their own data. It was a movement of students that started Facebook, so could this be not only the next big thing but the answer to the privacy debate around Big  Data.

Relevance for Researchers: As the control of data moves from the brands and platforms back to the consumers, the way the consumers relate to the brands and receive brand communication will have to change by necessity. We have to be aware of this shift in order to appropriately track this shift for our clients.

Pulsar, Research Communities, Social Media, Word Of Mouth

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Driving success in the earned and created media space

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With the arrival of networked consumers have come huge amounts of user-generated content, shared conversations and the explosion of Big Data. As a result we now live in a new marketing ecosystem where the shape of brands is changing. At Face we see them more as social entities where the coating of the brand core is shrinking and the layer of earned and created media space is growing (see diagrammes). Even though it is still just as important for brands to carve out distinctive, emotional, enduring spaces that people can rally around, we need a more adaptive, continuous and real time research and marketing model to make this happen.

For researchers this is exciting because it means so much is up for grabs. With change comes opportunity; the opportunity to meet emerging client needs head on. One of these is how to ensure an idea has the best chance of success in the shared and created media space. It was a question that was at the heart of a recent project we did for a major ice cream brand. The brief was about launching the brand successfully in a social way in a new country with a discerning taste for ice cream. It allowed us to show how our new thinking delivers better results for brands craving success in the earned and created media space.

The Consumer controls more of the marketing dialogue

The 4Cs Proposition

There were four key stages to our approach that fed into each other namely, conversation, content, communities and conversion. Our model is powered by our philosophy of co-creation (doing things with not at) and technology (our social media insight tools). It is circular and iterative more of a loop or series of loops as we believe that the new marketing-cycle is no longer linear, planned over 3 years and populated with campaigns that have a beginning and an end. The role the consumer plays in each of these stages is crucial but I am just going to talk about the first two for now.

Conversation

This stage is all about identifying and understanding your key audiences within the context of the brand landscape in real time. By using Pulsar we have developed a more dynamic way to map audiences through the social web. This helped us to identify four key cohorts within the brand’s target audience. One of them we identified as the group most likely to embrace and propagate the social mission of the brand based on their passions, interests and behaviour. It was this cohort that we invited into the community and to co-create the creative platform that would best link the brand mission to content and conversations consumers were already engaged with. This stage highlights why brands need to stay on top of what’s truly important to audiences at any given time. It is less about isolated market research data and more about understanding your customers, in the moment. This requires a data processing and data analytics model that will allow a more real-time, agile and active approach to planning based on what people are doing and saying with each other as it happens.

A new marketing and research model

Content

Co-creating with the right cohort of the target audience through an on-line community and face-to-face co-creation workshop allowed us to do two things very well. The first was the ability to generate a range of creative platforms rooted in genuine consumer insight that linked the brand mission to the target audience in a relevant and credible way. The second was the ability to generate hundreds of ideas within the umbrella of the creative platform that leveraged existing consumer content and enabled the brand to join current consumer conversations and activity in an engaging way. This stage showed that building platforms by co-creating with consumers is the best way to finding and sourcing potential areas of content that either already exist, could be created or added to that can inform a content strategy to support the given creative platform. Once this is in place consumers working together with the brand can populate the content areas with loads of ideas that have the potential to start lots of little “fires” some of which will take off and some of which will go out.  The involvement of consumers though means that brands will have worked out why they have permission to be in that consumer space as well as what role they can play there.

Curating diffusion

The work we did with this ice cream brand was a brilliant example of how to tackle the challenge of creating ideas that have legs in the shared/created media space. The role the audience plays in making this work is key and understanding there are many community cohorts within a target audience you can potentially co-create with and getting the right one to do this with is important if you want to be successful. This helps the brand to understand and identify those content areas within the creative expressions of the “Big Idea” that are already in play in the lives of consumers. The next stages namely Community and Conversion are all about curating “diffusion and monitoring what we call return on engagement. But more of this another time.

Blog, Co-Creation, Communities, Insights, Social Media

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2012 through the lens of client needs

  • Date January 11 2012
  • Posted by Andrew
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Technology is changing faster than consumers. Consumers are changing faster than organizations. Therefore, organizations need to change faster if they are to keep up. Many are finding this difficult to achieve.

A recent IBM Global CEO Study that covers 1,130 CEOs across 45 countries and 32 industries showed that organizations not only felt bombarded by change but many are struggling to deal with it. 8 out of 10 CEOs saw significant change ahead and yet the gap between the expected level of change and the ability to manage it had almost tripled since the previous study in 2006.

There are many different manifestations of this change (too many to cover here) from faster product life cycles and globalization (the shift of budgets to emerging markets), to changing demographics and the challenge of ageing populations on Western economies. But one of the biggest is the impact of the social web on everything we do. EMarketer predicts that the tipping point will happen in 2012 when 60% of all marketing budgets will become social. Linked to this is the arrival of Big Data. In 2010 the human race created 800 exabytes of information. To put this into context between the dawn of civilisation and 2003 we only created 5 exabytes; now we’re creating that amount every two days. By 2020 that figure is predicted to sit at 53 zettabytes (53 trillion gigabytes) – an increase of 50 times. As Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist said “We used to be data poor, now the problem is data obesity”.

This presents us with a number of new challenges that I have set out below as hardening client needs. I have concentrated on just a few with some suggestions on what research companies need to do to make sure they’re in a position to meet them.

1. Moving from Big Data to Big Insight

Making sense of all the data out there and simplifying it so that we can derive valuable meaning and insight will be one of 2012′s client mantras. Social listening will give way to social media insight. Having researchers in your team that are also technologists e.g. digital anthropologists that can help to analyse real time social data will become a required skill. Being able to augment different data sets from the virtual and real worlds so that we can help to create one closer view of our customer will depend on our ability to mix different on-line and offline methodologies in a coherent and credible way.

2. Quality without speed is not enough

One of the greatest demands from clients is how to deliver fresh, robust and relevant insight more quickly and cost effectively than we have ever done (or needed to do) before. Qualitative research companies need to lead in the use of technology so that we can become quicker, faster and more responsive in the ways in which we gather insight about our clients’ consumers. We also need to develop research and planning tools that are less generic and more focused on the CMI client needs of today and tomorrow.  This does not mean replacing human analysis – to the contrary the role of the researcher has become even more important than before because of the need to find real quality from the huge quantities of data that is out there. It must also mean we can do better than relying on tools such as the TGI Index.

3. Logic needs to give way to more magic

We are going to see more emphasis on qualitative research as a robust exploratory tool to understand better consumers’ emotional drivers as well as to help improve the quality and shaping of social ideas and social content before things go too far and way before the quantitative testing stage. Too much blind reliance on testing things to death has seen some of the “magic” and “creativity” in marketing lose out to the “logic”. Creating magic today means creating social brand stories that are contagious and can be propagated effortlessly by key consumer cohorts. Co-creating with these consumers, involving them much earlier in the marketing process, leveraging their content and creativity as part of the marketing process will have an increasingly important role to play here. If what goes in is rubbish then testing what comes out will be rubbish. The Coca-Cola Company is leading the way and I am sure other FMCG clients will follow.

4. Creating content excellence

There is a new marketing ecosystem where content is more important than channel, where audience passions/interests are becoming more important than demographics and where the media model has changed – placing more emphasis on created and earned media as opposed to bought and owned. Understanding which “big ideas” have enough social currency  (it’s not what consumers are doing with your brand but what they are doing with each other that counts) and can work effectively across all platforms will attract much more focus. Understanding the different consumer cohorts within a brand audience and their influence will also be key to understanding what content areas will have the most impact when it comes to propagating ideas. Researchers need to come up with a new model here: one based on rational, emotional and social metrics that is continuous and adaptive.

5. New measurement models

With the increasing socialisation of brands and the importance “connected” brands are placing on new metrics such as social brand value and influence (see below), helping clients to understand, validate and measure what ideas work best in the earned and created media space as well as why it works will be increasingly important. Finding ways of proving that the more customers of a brand are interconnected the more they are willing to pay for the product and the more loyal they will be is vital. Working out a more real time model for measuring which big ideas have the best potential for success; are the most likely to be propagated and can work across all media is another area that needs close attention.

Understanding influence in social media
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