You are what you drink.
As a way of understanding the culture of a country, the role that beer plays within it is not a bad place to start. Beer is unrivalled in the variety of needs it meets for drinkers; the individual, the social, the wind up, the wind down. To be locally relevant Global breweries must understand the importance of and context in which these needs are satisfied in each market.
USA VP of R&D and Offer Innovation, Zoë Dowling, takes a look back at ESOMAR’s 2011 3D Digital Dimentions Conference , and reviews the challenges facing researchers in a digital age…
In the two years since I last attended the ESOMAR Online conference, it is interesting that relatively little of the conversation has changed in that time. Reoccurring themes included what to do with social media, the usefulness of online communities & co-creation, mobile as poised to take over the world and Web surveys being in real trouble. Gamification was a prominent newcomer which made quite a splash throughout the conference, while notably there were a few absent topics: panels, data quality and, to a degree, neuroscience. Read more…
Scott Porter, our VP of Methods in the US, recently attended the first annual Southern California Machine Learning Workshop (SoCaML), hosted by UC Irvine. Scott asks: in the context of research and insight, why should we care about what the Machine Learning community is doing?
For those not familiar with Machine Learning, it is a scientific discipline related to artificial intelligence. But it is more concerned with the science of teaching machines to solve useful problems as opposed to trying to get machines to replicate human behavior. If you were to put it in Star Wars terms, a Machine Learning expert would be more focused on building the short, bleeping useful R2D2 than the shiny, linguistically gifted but clumsy C3P0—a machine that is useful and efficient as opposed to a machine that replicates behaviors and mannerisms of humans. Read more…
On a hot weekend in Summer, a group of highly-energetic, super-charged, muscled humans gathered for an international event in Marathon, Greece. At 16:30 on Thursday 8th September the contestants were lined up and, on the whistle, rushed forward to prove their worth and choose their place in the glory of the event. No, it was not the Olympics, it was the WPP Stream 2011 ‘un-conference’ and the muscle in question was the brain. The contestants were vying for a place to make their chosen subject the discussion of the day, and define what’s next for the industry.
Time was, the path to success was fairly linear: Get good grades, go to college, and pursue a profession that offers a decent standard of living.
If you were good at maths and science, become a doctor. If you were better at english and history, become a lawyer. If your verbal skills needed work, become an accountant.
People post millions of videos, photos and messages on social networks every day. But, once this content is uploaded, who actually owns it? Social exchange service MyCube has created an information graphic that raises the issue that all this content is owned by the networks rather than people who upload it. Read more…
Recent data suggests that consumer declared enthusiasm towards sustainable initiatives is waning. Ethicity’s annual Sustainable Barometer in France reports that 49% of respondents claim to be « very sensitive to planetary environmental issues » vs. 62% in 2006. Nielsen research in the UK tells the same story: the number of “ethically enthused” respondents dropped from 20% in 2008 to only 11% two years later. Read more…
Over the past several years, tremendous strides have been made in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience which help us more deeply understand how people process and respond to the world around them.
There have been several new providers entering the marketplace, who measure not what is said by respondents but, instead, what is being experienced neurologically and physiologically by them when exposed to various marketing stimuli, raising a multitude of questions. Read more…
“Rather than being exclusively online or in-line, many community ties are complex dances of face-to-face encounters, scheduled meetings, two-person telephone calls, emails to one person or several, and broader online discussion among those sharing interests” (Wellman 2001: 237).
Why is social networking so popular? There is little doubt that it has something to do with how life is speeding up, and the need for instantaneous social interaction, especially in an increasingly globalised world. Read more…
How do you quantify a market opportunity to be certain that it’s the right way to go? How do you measure the potential for return on a new product in a new market? How do you guide cautious stakeholders to invest wisely in innovation?
Who can answer these questions? Cheskin Added Value’s OpFinder™ can. Read more…
