Universal concepts like motherhood, beauty, achievement and power, which many of our clients' brands are built o, can mean very different things across cultures. As growth for global brands increasingly starts to come from culturally diverse Asian markets, it is becoming critical to develop more precise, market- specific strategies to truly unlock the opportunity here. There are significant historical and cultural differences that shape consumption and brand choices in these markets; which make them remarkably different not just from developed markets but also from each other. We contrast China and India in this paper, with examples of how the same need can mean different things, and the same global positioning strategy can translate to quite different executions in each country.
The prevailing celebration of technology-enabled access to 'raw' consumer realities is challenged in this presentation. While acknowledging the many benefits that video-ethnography and social media bring (emotional engagement, richness and texture, more impactful storytelling), they have also led to a focus on the anecdotal story, on data rather than analysis, and on micro-reality at the cost of the macro view. Furthermore, to remain relevant researchers must reclaim their role as meaning makers and framers of reality as interpreters, and not merely cameras.
As global marketing and market research efforts increasingly become centralized, one of the fallouts has been a loss of intuitive cultural knowledge that has traditionally been built into consumer insight and marketing communication by local teams working within their own cultures. Formalizing implicit, unstructured cultural knowledge is challenging, and what we are sorely missing is a common language and framework that allows us to compare markets on the most important elements that define culture. This presentation reviews efforts to develop a universal, archetype-based framework to understand and compare cultures.
In recent years there has been a growing body of evidence about the value of studying real experiences and behaviour rather than perceptions and future intentions. Among other things, this has proven useful in understanding brand loyalty and change, as well as in understanding shopper moments of truth. One of the fallouts of this is a need for research methodologies that help access real experiences accurately and in sufficient detail.Cognitive Interviewing is a memory-reconstruction technique that helps generate more powerful, vivid and textured narratives of consumer experiences with brands and categories. It helps us get past conscious memory, to access the fleeting, trivial and forgotten or omitted details which either registered subliminally, or may be too distant or too unimportant for respondents to remember, but are vital for piecing together our understanding of what was going on. Widely used as a police interrogation technique, Cognitive Interviewing was developed to enable eyewitnesses to remember minute elements of the cene of the crime. This paper discuss the theoretical underpinnings of the value of studying real memories, outline key principles and techniques used in Cognitive Interviewing, and discuss its applications with examples of how the technique has been used.
The fortune at the top of the Asian / Indian pyramid has been an established notion for some time now, with more and more affluent urban Indians (like other Asians) being in the market for luxury goods and highend technology products. This is where most marketers, especially in high-end categories, have initially focused. However, given the sheer size of the base of the pyramid, the bigger fortune does indeed lie there, and it is time for these industries, particularly telecom, to turn their attention here. But doing so is not an easy task, despite the optimistic statistics in circulation, because the magnificent growth posted by the telecom industry has actually scratched just a fraction of the surface. The real opportunity is much bigger, and finding the right buttons to convert it is a tricky task. This paper presents a case study that attempts to provide direction on factors that will spur further growth in the low income / rural markets in India.
Successful NPD is one of the foremost challenges that the marketing fraternity grapples with today. Always an uncertain territory, it has become even more of a battle in the present context, with a fatigued consumer overloaded with sameness. An attempt to get the consumer attention in this crowded space has increasingly led to NPD efforts that have an exaggerated focus on the 'radical' and & 'cutting edge'. This paper shares learnings in the arena of new product development. While the successes are obviously important to demonstrate 'best practice' an analysis of the failures is also critical to develop sensitivity to the pitfalls and likely blind spots inherent in innovation exercises.
The potential of the web as the object of study has remained underexploited in market research. As a rich source of data on people's lives, interactions and opinions, the web offers tremendous possibilities in the years to come.This presentation illustrates the promise of this method through two 'webnographic' case studies: one among youth, examining the interests, attitudes and needs of this segment as expressed in online forums; and the second focused on feedback on a range of models launched by Nokia.
Innovation and differentiation are the buzzwords in any client organization - and if market research is looked upon as lacking the ability to provide creative solutions - or, even worse, as killing the creative spark - then we as an industry are in a danger zone. This presentation addresses solutions to the perceived (or real) absence of creative thinking among the research fraternity. The focus of this presentation is on three main areas: how creativity is defined; what prevents researchers from being creative; and where we can look for solutions.