MRIA Vue Magazine - May 2014 (Do not use)

vue

the magazine of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association

MAY 2014

SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS FOR DIRECT MARKETING Is a Good American Ad Always a Good Canadian Ad?

Canadian Publications Mail Agreement #40033932

Some Face to Face Observations From the UK Doorstep Finding and Deciding: Making the Shopper Connection Face Off: Google Glass: Practical or Practically Useless?

Cover photo: Chris Long

MRIA Conference Insert included

vue MAY 2014

VUE MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY THE MARKETING RESEARCH AND INTELLIGENCE ASSOCIATION TEN TIMES A YEAR

Commentary 4 Editor’s Vue 6 Letter from the President 8

Letter from the CEO

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Ottawa Presidents Tour – April 3 & 4, 2014

SPECIAL FEATURE 12 Social Media Analytics for Direct Marketing Chris Long

Features 16 I s a Good American Ad Always a Good Canadian Ad? Scott Megginson 18 Some Face to Face Observations From the UK Doorstep Alan Sloan 20 Finding and Deciding: Making the Shopper Connection Carla Flamer 24 Face Off: Google Glass: Practical or Practically Useless?

Timothy Lynch and Melanie Courtright

Industry News 26 Your Vue 27 Qualitative Research Registry (QRR) 30 Engaging Audiences Across the Board: Highlights of the 2014 CMA/MRIA Customer Experience 32 People and Companies in the News 34 Chapter Chat 36 Research Registration System (RRS)

MRIA Institute of Professional Development 37 Courses

Columnists 38 It’s a Qual World 38 Off the Deep End 39 Ask Dr. Ruth

Book Reviews 40 A Review of Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies 41

A Review of How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know

ADDRESS The Marketing Research and Intelligence Association L’association de la recherche et de l’intelligence marketing

94 Cumberland Street, Suite 601 Toronto, ON M5R 1A3 Tel: (416) 642-9793 Toll Free: 1-888-602-MRIA (6742) Fax: (416) 644-9793 Email: vue@mria-arim.ca Website: www.mria-arim.ca PRODUCTION: LAYOUT/DESIGN LS Graphics Inc. Tel: (905) 743-0402, Toll Free: 1-800-400-8253 Fax: (905) 728-3931 Email: info@lsgraphics.com CONTACTS CHAIR OF PUBLICATIONS, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Annie Pettit, PhD, Chief Research Officer, Peanut Labs (416) 273-9395 annie@peanutlabs.com MANAGING EDITOR Anne Marie Gabriel, MRIA amgabriel@mria-arim.ca ASSOCIATE EDITOR Fiona Isaacson fisaacson@gmail.com COPY EDITOR Diane Peters diane.peters@sympatico.ca Interested in joining the Vue editorial team?

Contact us at vue@mria-arim.ca 2014 ADVERTISING RATES Frequent advertisers receive discounts. Details can be found by going to: www.mria-arim.ca/advertising/vue.asp Please email vue@mria-arim.ca to book your ad.

The deadline for notice of advertising is the first of the previous month.

All advertising material must be at the MRIA office on the 5th of the month.

Original articles and Letters to the Editor are welcome. Materials will be reviewed by the Vue Editorial Team. If accepted for publication, they may be edited for length or clarity and placed in the electronic archives on the MRIA website.

The opinions and conclusions expressed in Vue are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association.

Publishing Date: May © 2014.

All rights reserved. Copyright rests with the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association or the author.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association or the author.

All requests for permission for reproduction must be submitted to MRIA at publications@mria-arim.ca.

RETURN UNDELIVERABLE CANADIAN ADDRESSES TO The Marketing Research and Intelligence Association L’Association de la recherche et de l’intelligence marketing 94 Cumberland Street, Suite 601 Toronto, ON M5R 1A3 Canadian Publications Mail Agreement #40033932 ISSN 1488-7320

COMME N TARY / CO MME NTAIR E Editor’s Vue Annie Pettit

With the annual MRIA conference bright and shiny in front of us, it’s a good time to share a few presentation tips. Whether you have experience presenting to 500 people or five people, these ideas will go a long way to making people love the time you spent with them.

La conférence annuelle de l’ARIM approche à grands pas. J’aimerais en profiter pour vous offrir quelques conseils de présentation, tout aussi bien valables que votre auditoire soit de cinq personnes ou 500. Voici donc quelques idées qui vous aideront à gagner et intéresser votre auditoire.

1. Stay for the day. Great talks inspire great questions and there’s nothing better than spending one-on-one time with every single person who wants to learn from you. It’s helpful for growing your business and making new friends too. Whether your presentation is at 9 a.m. or 3 p.m., stick around, meet and greet, and soak all in the inspiration.

1. Soyez présent toute la journée. Une présentation réussie entraîne toujours de bonnes questions. Votre disponibilité à discuter face-à-face avec chacune des personnes qui souhaite vous parler est une occasion en or de faire connaître vos services et de nouer de nouvelles amitiés. Que votre présentation soit à 9h ou à 15h, prévoyez être sur place toute la journée et profitez-en pour faire de nouvelles connaissances et vous tremper dans l’athmosphère de l’événement.

2. Share everything. Take care to only talk about case studies and ideas that you are authorized to share publicly, in their entirety. If your audience can’t take pictures of every slide and tweet every brand name that you mention, choose a different case study to share. Your audience is eager to learn from and be inspired by you, and it’s hard to do that if they are disappointed that they can’t share what they learned with other people.

3. Educate. This one is simple. Or so it seems. Try doing your entire presentation without saying any of your company’s brand names. You don’t even need to say, “My company.” Instead of branded messages like, “We used our mobile and online survey products,” choose method messages such as, “This study incorporated mobile and online surveys.”

This will ensure that your audience is focused on your story instead of wondering what’s for lunch. (I wonder what Saskatoon delights will be for lunch!)

Remember, the audience isn’t your target market, they are colleagues who want to learn from success stories, not hear advertising messages.

Whether you’re in the audience or in front of the audience, I hope you have a great time in Saskatoon.

Be sure to share your best pictures with me. You just might see them in the next issue of Vue!

2. Partagez tout. Ne parlez bien sûr que des études de cas et des idées que vous êtes autorisé à présenter, mais faites-le sans rien cacher ni retenir. Si votre auditoire ne peut avoir accès à toutes vos diapositives ou ne peut gazouiller toutes les marques que vous mentionnerez, choisissez une autre étude de cas. Il faut donner aux membres de votre auditoire tout ce dont ils auraient besoin pour présenter eux-mêmes vos idées à d’autes personnes.

3. Informez. Simple et évident? Pas toujours semblet-il. Essayez, par exemple, de ne pas mentionner une seule fois les marques de votre entreprise, ou même de dire « ma/notre entreprise ». Plutôt que de recourir à des messages de marque – « Nous avons utilisé nos logiciels en ligne et en mode mobile. » – dites plutôt « Cette étude se fonde sur des sondages mobiles et en ligne. » Vous retiendrez ainsi l’attention de votre auditoire, souvent distraite par l’heure de la pause qui approche. Enfin, n’oubliez pas que votre auditoire n’est pas votre marché cible. Vos collègues veulent apprendre, s’informer, mais il ne veulent pas être bombardés de messages publicitaires.

J’espère que vous vivrez tous une expérience enrichissante à la conférence de Saskatoon. Si vous y prenez des photos, expédiez-les moi. Peut-être se retrouveront-elles dans le prochain numéro de Vue.

Annie Pettit PhD, Chief Research Officer / Directrice de la recherche, Peanut Labs Editor-in-Chief, Vue / Rédactrice en chef, Vue • Email: annie@peanutlabs.com • (416) 273-9395 • t @LoveStats Please share your opinions about Vue articles and columns, or submit your cartoons and infographics to the Editor.

La rédactrice vous invite à lui faire parvenir directement vos commentaires, opinions, caricatures ou infographies.

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COMM E NTARY / COMME NTAIR E Letter from the President Anastasia Arabia

Years ago, when I began volunteering with my MRIA chapter, I started getting requests to speak at post-secondary institutions about the marketing research industry and to spread awareness of MRIA. This past month, I’ve had the opportunity to speak to three different marketing research classes – at University of Alberta, Algonquin College and Grant MacEwan University.

This one of my favourite things to do. I get asked all kinds of questions: What do I do on a daily basis? What are some of the favourite projects I’ve worked on? How do you get a job?

Sharing passion and enthusiasm is infectious and inspiring, and undoubtedly by the end of the class students are very interested in getting more information about MRIA and the research industry. And why not? Who wouldn’t want to be a part of an extremely vibrant, growing industry that lets you use your creativity and intellect to support your clients to make great decisions. We have the best job in the world.

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À mes débuts comme bénévole au sein de ma section régionale, il y a de ça des années, j’ai souvent eu le plaisir de m’adresser à des étudiants du cycle post-secondaire pour leur expliquer ce qu’est la recherche marketing et la place de l’ARIM dans ce secteur. J’étais donc en terrain connu le mois dernier quand j’ai rencontré des étudiants en marketing de de l’Université de l’Alberta, du Collège Algonquin et de l’Université Grant MacEwan.

J’adore ces mandats. On me pose toutes sortes de questions : Que faites-vous au quotidien?

Quels ont été vos projets favoris? Comment trouve-t-on un emploi dans le secteur? Ma passion et mon enthousiasme doivent être contagieux, parce qu’à la fin de ma présentation les étudiants semblent vraiment inspirés et me demandent encore plus d’information au sujet de la recherche marketing et de l’ARIM. Je ne m’en vante pas. Qui ne voudrait pas participer à un secteur dynamique au possible, un secteur en pleine croissance qui mise sur la créativité et l’intelligence de ses gens pour aider la clientèle à prendre de bonnes décisions. C’est bien simple : nous avons « la meilleure job » au monde.

I believe our relationship with the next generation – today’s students – offers one of the greatest opportunities for MRIA. Canadian schools are full of young, brilliant minds eager to become involved, and we can do more to connect with them.

Les rapports de l’ARIM avec la prochaine génération, les étudiants d’aujourd’hui, revêtent une importance capitale pour l’avenir de l’association. Les universités et collèges du Canada recèlent de nombreux esprits brillants qui souhaitent ardamment s’impliquer – à nous d’aller les chercher.

Here are some initiatives we are considering to strengthen and broaden our relationship with students: • Alliances with all post-secondary institutions across the country. We have some strong relationships now, but need to reach out and create a more nationally focused plan.

Suivent quelques initiatives auxquelles l’ARIM songe dans le but de consolider et d’élargir ses rapports avec les étudiants.

• Des alliances avec tous les établissements d’enseignement post-secondaire au pays.

Nos rapports avec eux sont déjà étroits mais nous nous devons d’élargir nos horizons et de préparer un plan franchement national.

• Free student memberships.

• L’adhésion gratuite pour les étudiants.

commentar y commentaire • A mentorship program for students leaving post-secondary school.

• Un programme de mentorat au bénéfice des étudiants fraîchement diplômés.

• A national student competition.

• Une compétition étudiante nationale.

• Speakers bureaus across the country made up of volunteers from our chapter boards and members (some chapters already have this in place) so that professors have place to go when they want to organize a panel session or find a speaker. These speakers would be supported by materials from the national office for a consistent message across the country.

• La constitution de banques de conférenciers régionales – des bénévoles actifs au sein de nos sections régionales – vers lesquelles les professeurs peuvent se tourner quand ils organisent une table ronde ou un événementcauserie. Le siège social verrait à leur fournir toute documentation utile, afin que le message soit normalisé d’un océan à l’autre.

• Emerging leaders events at conferences and chapter events.

• A student focused part of our website – where things such as job postings, information about CMRP, events, student contests, etc. are easy for them to find.

• Encouraging students to submit pieces to Vue. The truth is, when I speak at these events I get just as much out of the experience as the students do.

Speaking with students and sharing my love for our industry always leaves me inspired and upbeat.

I would highly recommend you get involved! Stay tuned for news on ways to get more connected to the future members of our industry. Do you have thoughts about how to better connect with students? I’d love to hear from you.

• Des rencontres avec des leaders émergents à l’occasion de nos conférences et événements régionaux.

• Une section « étudiante » dans notre site Internet, où les futurs chercheurs trouveraient facilement annonces de postes à pourvoir, concours et renseignements au sujet de l’agrément PARM, par exemple, ou de nos événements.

• Inviter les étudiants à proposer des articles pour publication dans Vue. Pour tout vous dire, je pense que je retire autant de bénéfices de ces présentations que les étudiants. Ces séances ne manquent jamais de me dynamiser et de m’inspirer. Faites de même et vous verrez que je n’exagère pas. Je reviendrai d’ailleurs sur ce sujet pour proposer des façons de communiquer efficacement avec les futurs membres de notre secteur. Vous avez des idées à ce sujet? Faites m’en part!

Anastasia Arabia, Partner / Partenaire, Trend Research Inc. President, Marketing Research and Intelligence Association / Présidente, L’Association de la recherche et de l’intelligence marketing Email: anastasia@trendresearch.ca • 780-485-6558 ext./poste 2003

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COMM E NTARY / COMME NTAIR E Letter from the CEO Kara Mitchelmore

While Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) comes into effect on July 1, 2014, there is still a considerable amount of ambiguity regarding how CASL will be applied and how it will affect various industries, including marketing research.

The good news is that MRIA has received definitive confirmation from the federal government that the new law won’t apply to legitimate marketing research where there is no attempt to solicit. Conversely, CASL will be triggered by a solicitation that was disguised as a research request. In effect, this provision means that we’ve been successful in obtaining yet another legal barrier to prohibit mugging and sugging (marketing and soliciting under the guise of research).

The area, however, that is less clear for marketing researchers is whether CASL will be triggered when an incentive is used to encourage participation in a research project. Take the following example: A marketing researcher sends an email to a recipient inviting participation in an online survey. But to induce the recipient to participate, the researcher offers the recipient an incentive of a gift card.

Do marketing researchers have to be concerned about the application of CASL in this situation?

While the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has provided MRIA with written commentary that CASL does not apply to “legitimate online marketing and survey research,” there is still uncertainty whether the electronic communications sent by researchers that contain incentives, as described in the scenario above, would trigger CASL. For those who wish to mitigate the possibility that the CRTC and/or the courts may come knocking in the event of a complaint from the public, we recommend that all obligations under CASL be complied with as a best practice, including obtaining the requisite consent. The following provides sample language for use by market researchers:

La Loi canadienne anti-pourriel (LCAP) prendra effet le 1er juillet prochain. De nombreuses ambiguités subsistent toutefois quant à son application et à ses conséquences pour divers secteurs, notamment la recherche marketing.

Une bonne nouvelle : le gouvernement fédéral a assuré l’ARIM que la nouvelle loi ne s’appliquera pas à la recherche marketing légitime, qui ne comporte aucun volet de démarchage. Par contre, la loi s’appliquera si l’élément recherche maquille en fait une tentative de démarchage.

Cette distinction, que nous appuyons, constitue un autre empêchement juridique aux pratiques de « mugging » et « sugging », soit le marketing et le démarchage sous le couvert de la recherche.

Le flou demeure cependant à l’égard du recours à un incitatif pour encourager la participation à une activité de recherche.

Un exemple : une chercheuse marketing expédie un courriel invitant son destinataire à participer à un sondage en ligne.

Pour l’encourager à ce faire elle lui offre une carte-cadeau en contrepartie de sa participation. La LCAP s’applique ou pas?

Les chercheurs doivent s’en inquiéter ou pas?

Bien que le CRTC ait informé l’ARIM, pas avis écrit, que la LCAP ne s’appliquerait pas « aux sondages en ligne et à la recherche marketing légitimes », il n’est toujours pas clair si l’offre d’un incitatif dans le cadre d’une demande de participation légitime (voir l’exemple ci-haut) constitue une infraction aux dispositions de la LCAP. Nous conseillons donc à ceux qui veulent éviter toute possibilité d’ennuis juridiques d’adopter comme meilleure pratique la conformité à toutes les dispositions de la LCAP, y compris celles ayant trait au consentement. Suivent quelques exemples de textes que les chercheurs peuvent utiliser.

Please respond to this email if you would like to participate in our online survey/panel and receive [incentive ABC] from us.

Prière de répondre à ce courriel si vous souhaitez participer au sondage/table ronde en ligne et recevoir [incitatif ] en contrepartie de votre participation.

This email is being sent to you by [MarketResearchCo. Ltd]. You can contact us at [123 Anywhere Street, City, Province, A1A 1A1], or by email at [info@ marketresearchco.com]. Please visit our privacy policy [link to a url containing the policy] for more information.

Ce courriel vous a été envoyé par la [Société de recherche ABC].

Vous pouvez communiquer avec nous par la poste [123 rue Principale, ville, province, A1A 1A1] ou par courriel [info@ rechercheabc.com]. Pour plus de renseignements, nous vous invitons a consulter notre politique de confidentialité, à la page (lien url).

You can stop participating in our online survey/panel at any time, by clicking here [link to an unsubscribe service].

Vous pouvez cessez de participer à notre sondage/table ronde en tout temps, en cliquant ici [lien à la page de déinscription].

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commentar y commentaire MRIA has been and continues to work productively with Industry Canada and the CRTC (the key departments involved in the administration of this legislation) to ensure the federal government communicates the fact that CASL will not apply to legitimate research. We see this as integral to the success of the law’s implementation.

L’ARIM continuera de coopérer activement avec Industrie Canada et le CRTC, les principaux responsables gouvernementaux de ce dossier, dans le but de recevoir l’assurance que la LCAP ne s’appliquera pas à la recherche légitime. Nous sommes convaincus qu’une telle assurance est essentielle au succès de l’application de cette loi.

While there may be a few hiccups, CASL has the potential to create a better environment for Internet research, as marketers and fundraisers work to comply with one of the world’s most stringent anti-spam regimes, hopefully resulting in more receptive universe of respondents on the web.

Malgré ses carences, la LCAP devrait favoriser un climat plus sain pour la recherche en ligne. Les agences de marketing et les collecteurs de fonds devront pour leur part se conformer à une réglementation anti-pourriels parmi les plus strictes au monde, dans l’espoir d’une réaction positive chez les participants potentiels.

Canada’s anti-spam legislation received royal assent on December 15, 2010, and comes into effect on July 1, 2014. The goal of the law is to protect Canadians from spam, malware, including phishing and spyware, and other electronic threats. With its broad scope, steep penalties, and private right to action, CASL is widely considered to be the toughest anti-spam legislation in the world.

La Loi canadienne anti-pourriel a reçu la sanction royale le 15 décembre 2010 et prendra effet le 1er juillet 2014. Elle vise à protéger les Canadiens contre les pourriels, maliciels, espogiciels, pratiques trompeuses et autres menaces électroniques. Son champ d’application, les pénalités qu’elle prévoit et le droit d’action individuel qu’elle autorise en font une des lois du genre les plus strictes au monde.

For more information on CASL, please contact the MRIA or visit the following resources:

Pour tout complément d’information, prière de communiquer avec l’ARIM ou de consulter l’un des sites qui suivent.

Government of Canada: www.fightspam.gc.ca

Gouvernement du Canada : http://fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/fra/accueil

CRTC: www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/casl-lcap.htm

CRTC : http://www.crtc.gc.ca/fra/lcap-casl.htm

Industry Canada: www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ecic-ceac.nsf/eng/gv00569.html#q14

Industrie Canada: http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ecic-ceac.nsf/fra/gv00569.html

Competition Bureau: www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/eng/03390. html

Bureau de la concurrence : http://www.bureaudelaconcurrence. gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/fra/03390.html

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada: www.priv.gc.ca/resource/op-vpel/spam_index_e.asp

Commissariat à la protection de la vie privée du Canada : http://www.priv.gc.ca/resource/op-vpel/spam_index_f.asp

Kara Mitchelmore, MBA, FCMA, Chief Executive Officer/Présidente-directrice générale Marketing Research and Intelligence Association / L’Association de la recherche et de l’intelligence marketing Email: kmitchelmore@mria-arim.ca • (416) 642-9793 ext./poste 8724

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COMM E NTARY / COMME NTAIR E Ottawa President’s Tour – April 3 & 4, 2014 The MRIA National President’s Tour started in Ottawa on April 3 & 4, 2014. It was a whirlwind two days filled with a luncheon, a class visit, and an Ottawa Chapter Board meeting.

On April 3, Kara and Anastasia spoke to the business and research community in Ottawa at a Chapter luncheon.

Anastasia gave an update on what has been happening at National to date and also the outcomes of the 2014 Strategic Plan – the top priorities for the next 3-5 years are Quality Growth, Member Value, and Operational Excellence. Kara shared some information about her first six weeks in the office as well as some of the tactics that have already been developed to support the plan. This was followed by a planned speaker, Cam Davis, on where our industry is headed. After the luncheon finished, Kara and Anastasia stayed for questions and discussion, and actually didn’t leave the venue until 4.30!

The next morning was a class visit and discussion at Algonquin College. The students were highly engaged and asked so many great questions. Students shared their thoughts on how MRIA could support them. Interestingly, students had little to no awareness of MRIA being a National organization with seven Chapters and presence across the country. This was very useful to them as many were interested in or open to moving for their career. Also, students requested a place on the MRIA website that specifically shared information relevant to student needs and interests.

After that, Anastasia and Kara attended an Ottawa Chapter Board meeting. This was a great reminder of how many hardworking and dedicated MRIA volunteers we have. It was fascinating to be part of their board meeting and see that they are well-organized and very involved in their research community. It was great to hear from the board how National could better support their needs. The feedback will be incorporated into how we communicate and develop materials for the Chapters. A larger discussion the Ottawa Chapter would like to have is how to balance the fine line of providing member value at events at the same time as trying to break even or make money at events. This was a great topic of discussion that we will continue with across the country and at National.

From the board meeting, it was off to the airport to get ready for the next President’s Tour stop!

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L’ARIM a lancé la Tournée des présidentes à Ottawa les 3 et 4 avril derniers. À l’ordre du jour, bien chargé d’ailleurs : un déjeuner-causerie, la visite d’une classe collégiale et la réunion de la section régionale d’Ottawa de l’ARIM. Kara et Anastasia ont d’abord rencontré les chercheurs et chercheuses de la région d’Ottawa à l’occasion d’un déjeunercauserie le 3 avril. Anastasia a présenté un bilan provisoire des activités au niveau du Conseil national, de même que les résultats du Plan stratégique de 2014, soit les priorités de l’ARIM au cours des trois à cinq prochaines années : une croissance de qualité, la qualité de l’offre aux membres et l’excellence opérationnelle. Kara a pour sa part parlé de ses six premières semaines en poste et des tactiques qui appuieront le Plan stratégique. Cam Davis, le conférencier invité, s’est ensuite penché sur l’avenir du secteur. La période de questions subséquente, à laquelle Kara et Anastisia ont participé, a cloué les participants à leur siège jusqu’à 16 h 30 !

Le lendemain, les présidentes ont rendu visite à une classe du Collège Algonquin. Les étudiants, fort intéressés, ont posé de nombreuses questions et suggéré des façons que l’ARIM pouvait mieux les servir.

Curieusement, ces étudiants ne savaient pas que l’ARIM est un organisme d’envergure nationale qui compte sept sections régionales, un avantage considérable pour ceux – et ils étaient nombreux – qui sont prêts à déménager pour faire avancer leur carrière. Ils ont demandé que le site Internet de l’ARIM propose une page « étudiante », où ils trouveraient de l’information pertinente à leurs besoins et intérêts particuliers.

Kara et Anastasia ont ensuite participé à une réunion du conseil régional d’Ottawa, qui est fort bien organisé et sérieusement impliqué dans le monde de la recherche. Ses membres et bénévoles sont à la fois dynamiques et engagés.

Sa rétroaction sera d’ailleurs fort utile et servira à rehausser les communications, documents et services à l’intention des sections régionales. La section a aussi lancé l’idée d’une discussion au sujet du délicat équilibre entre la qualité de l’offre à l’occasion des événements de l’ARIM et le souci de la rentabilité de ceux-ci, un sujet que nous aborderons maintenant dans le cadre de la tournée et au niveau du Conseil national.

Le tout s’est terminé par une course vers l’aéroport, en route vers la prochaine rencontre à l’horaire de la Tournée des présidentes.

SPECIAL

FEATURE

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Social Media Analytics

for Direct Marketing Direct marketing is most effective when it demonstrates to the customer that it has been personalized to their interests and habits, and is able to respond to these habits in real time.

Chris Long Direct marketing is most effective when it demonstrates to the customer that it has been personalized to their interests and habits, and is able to respond to these habits in real time.

Now, more than ever, customers expect to be understood, and will only pay attention to marketing messages that are relevant to them.

Thanks to social media, marketers can gather a wealth of information about consumer opinions, influence and habits; insights that are actionable with the right analytics capabilities in place.

Direct marketing usually involves combining historical data elements about customers with whatever information can be gleaned from their online patterns and habits. Until recently, this essentially meant tracking website activity or hits on a corporate website after a customer has identified themselves in some way. However, this has shown to be ineffective overall, and as Katie Pain, author of Measure What Matters, puts it, “HITS = How Idiots Track Success.”

To truly understand a customer’s digital signature on the web, marketers need a more sophisticated approach. With Web 2.0, a marketer’s job has become exponentially more

complex: it’s no longer enough to simply track what a customer is doing on the web, it is also crucial to listen to what they’re saying about their experience. Additionally, marketers now need to understand how loud somebody speaks, what channels they choose, how truthful they are and the sentiment of their messages. Social media now provides a platform for marketers to target and broadcast directly to different social groups online, blurring the lines between above and below the line marketing. However, this has proven high risk because messages produced and broadcast by marketers are often subject to scrutiny, and can easily be high jacked by a sceptical public. My advice is simple: approach this not as social or digital marketing, but instead just marketing in a socially digital world.

Web 2.0 What started as an idea in 1999 and sounded like an unlikely new version of the World Wide Web has grown into what we now call social media.

Web 2.0 represents a formal shift from static content to something much more interactive that allows the internet-using public the ability to post

SP ECIA L FEAT URE Figure 1. Google defintion of Web 2.0

their own content, share content, or comment on content or the comments of others. This, along with other Internet-based platforms, has led to an ecosystem that allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated digital content in a virtual community.

Direct Marketing to Social Media In the digital era, marketers are applying direct-marketing tactics to new social media channels; however, they often make mistakes in what can be a very unforgiving environment. The problem is that most marketing organizations don’t properly understand how the netizens of social media interact with their brands online. For example, when attempting to create a trending dialogue with their brands, both McDonald’s and Rogers Communications have withstood hijackings of their paid topics by a public that was eager to disparage their brands. As one journalist noted, “Their #HashTag became a #BashTag.” Instead of the intended positive stories trending on Twitter, both companies’ topics became a lightning rod to voice displeasure about their respective brands.

McDonald’s wanted people to share fun stories associated with the brand through the promoted hashtag #McStories.

But the crowds on Twitter quickly added #McFail to the conversation and shared unpleasant accounts about McDonald’s. Similarly, Rogers’ plan to promote its new Rogers One Number (RON) service by using the hashtag #RogersOneNumber backfired when customers used the hashtag to vent about lousy service – even though most customers surveyed said they were very happy with the RON service.

Both of these #TwitterFails were due in part to the companies’ lack of experience using Twitter, and failure to understand the netizens to whom their messaging was directed.

My advice to any marketer thinking about using social media to directly market to an audience is to first listen to what people are saying about you and your brand, and think about what they could potentially say. Only after you are armed with this knowledge should you market to your target audience through trusted channels.

What’s Being Said?

We are familiar with social media as a virtual place where people can post photos, videos and other digital content, but what is most useful for marketers is the ability to analyze the comments and conversations around this kind of content. In

other words, this is the science of text analytics: understanding what is being said and the context in which it is being said.

The first step when developing a marketing effort is to pick which sources of social media to listen to. With so many options, this can be challenging as social media goes beyond Facebook and Twitter to include forums, blogs and comments sections well. Also gaining in popularity are platforms like Google+, Instagram and Pinterest – just to name a few – with more platforms launching all the time.

In order for this data to be useful, it needs to be pulled from a listening post and filtered based on interest, then categorized and tested for sentiment. Luckily, the technology now exists to allows us to ask questions from this unstructured textual data.

What’s being said about our brand and, more specifically, our products and services? What is the emotion associated with it?

Also, what’s being said about our competitor’s brands, products and services in the same context? What is the context? Is there a conversation about this? Is it potentially viral? Is it trending negative or positive; what is the general mood?

Figure 2. Language Taxonomy Brand Acronyms/Symbols Industry Terminology Modern Colloquialisms Localized Changes

Native Language

The more successful approaches to social media marketing demand the creation of a changing taxonomy that represents a native language at its base, but will also include many dynamic entities that continually change and evolve over time. This is not limited to just language and emoticons, but channel specific meaning words, i.e., “like” on Facebook or “follower” on Twitter have to be considered for each native language.

Internet slang furnishes a great example of the linguistic nuances of understanding online sentiment across cultures, regions and different online communities: in English we might call someone a troll, but in Chinese we might call them bái mù; both nicknames refer to someone blindly talking nonsense over the Internet. It has also become necessary to define all product/ services names we might be interested in hearing views about, whether it’s our brand or a competitor’s. This can even include nicknames that your customers have come up with. In any case, this taxonomy should become a living entity that requires constant change with the times.

Once you have a taxonomy created, you can use it to filter conversations, look for patterns with text mining and test for emotion and sentiment. Today, marketers have the power to segment customers by influence, sentiment towards a topic, historical profile and channel of choice in social media. vue | MAY 2014

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SPEC IA L F EAT U R E Understanding the Author of Content What does it mean to understand customers in this way?

Aside from understanding the documents posted to social media channels, we need to also understand the profile of the author. In the world of social media, everybody is an author of documents, whether that document is a 140-character tweet or a 12-page exposé. Marketers are able to rank authors in terms of how much clout they have (e.g. for Twitter this is combination of how active they are and how many followers they have), and also take into consideration how influential and active their followers are as well.

The fast-food restaurant Subway was propelled into the spotlight under accusations that its sandwich bread contains azodicarbonamide (ADA). This idea was perpetuated by Vani Hari, a popular blogger and self-described “food babe,” who, although influential, is not qualified to make determinations on food. Vani decided that this chemical substance added to bread at Subway restaurants is bad and launched a petition for the removal of a dangerous plastic chemical called azodicarbonamide from Subway sandwich bread – the same stuff used in yoga mats, shoe rubber and synthetic leather.

Although her allegations contained some truth, she failed to mention the chemical’s safety at the levels used.

This is reminiscent of the dihydrogen monoxide scare that was started in the 1990s with true statements such as, “A key component in acid rain!” and “Deadly if inhaled!” The entertainment group Penn and Teller did a skit about this and got people to sign a petition to ban it. To this day, you can donate to a cause to promote public awareness of its dangers.

Dihydrogen monoxide is of course H20 and like ADA, is found in baby food and the processing of certain rubbers – as well as bread. The point is that an author’s popularity and voice should Figure 3. Marketing execution flow

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be thoroughly understood, as they can sway uninformed public thinking in the same way that stories like these can play on the public’s scientific illiteracy.

Simply put, we need to be aware of cranks and popularity, rank them, and treat them accordingly. We can also learn quite a bit from a person’s chosen medium. In the past, bloggers would simply post a blog that was really just a web page supporting comments, but today they will also link other social media sites to that page. Marketers need to understand which of these channels an author uses and what the channel says about them and their message.

Understanding the Channel Marshall McLuhan once said, “The medium is the message,” pointing out that the vehicle used to convey the message is just as, if not more, important than the message itself. Marketers need to do more than just understand what is being said, but also consider the context of the media containing the message. Is the news item originating from Twitter? Facebook?

Mainstream media? Is it coming from comments on a mainstream media article? All of the above?

A contentious statement about your brand on an obscure blog site shouldn’t be interpreted differently than sentiment of your brand in a story trending in The Wall Street Journal.

There are so many ways a statement or discussion about your brand can come up, possibly even in a forum completely unrelated to your business. Once, while tracking Citibank, I noticed an influential author had mentioned a recent theft of information from that bank. It was a blog about photography – not a usual place to discuss retail banking – but his Twitter account had over 100K followers and what he said was tweeted and retweeted to hundreds of thousands more.

Figure 4. Example of marketing process flow

We might have a segment of trolls with limited reach that we don’t care about, but another segment of trolls who are very influential exists and we need to understand that they are customers who also voice opinions about your brand.

Marketers now have the tools to understand authors of social media content, their history, and amplification of voice.

Further, marketers can link social media profiles across the ecosystem of social media and also to traditional customer profiles using various strategies.

So how can a marketer put this understanding to good use?

Where I’ve seen success is simply applying your marketing strategy as usual and using whichever tactics make sense for your business without forcing the use of social media to broadcast your marketing messages. In short, use social media to better understand your customers and use this information to enhance dialogues with them. See Figure 3.

seen is to leverage traditional customer intelligence, things like lifetime value and risk, while also supplementing these things with robust digital profiles and segments. See Figure 4.

We can leverage existing campaign execution techniques in place today and augment them with information about our customers extended by social media. We can separate out the customers that use social media and then market to them directly, armed with topics of interest and sentiment that apply to them, but also understand the indirect ramifications of their influence in social media. Finally, we can measure success and test these techniques and compare lift.

Marketing Execution As we have learned, direct marketing is rapidly changing. In my experience, most marketers agree that conversion rates of traditional outbound channel-based campaigns are on a steady decline. Today, consumer attention is at a premium and it’s becoming less effective to interrupt them with marketing messages in the mailbox or on the phone – if the message is not relevant to them. One of the most effective strategies I’ve

Chris Long is a strategic technical and marketing consultant in the SAS Canada Customer Intelligence practice. He has over 15 years of experience helping organizations with analytical marketing and real-time marketing strategies, including social media. He can be reached at Chris.Long@sas.com.

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Is a Good American Ad Always a Good Canadian Ad? As a Canadian marketer, have you chosen or been required to air American creative instead of developing your own?

Did you run the ad without confirming its relevance in our market? Maybe it performed well for the brand in the States, so why shouldn’t it perform well here?

Scott Megginson

It is likely that most of us would say “yes” to these questions if we have spent any time in a global corporation. After all, there are many compelling reasons why companies opt to pursue global advertising platforms. In The Global Brand,i Millward Brown’s chief global analyst Nigel Hollis outlines five universal benefits of global creative: 1. Consistency of message 2. Risk management (proven success in key markets) 3. Production cost savings 4. Management cost savings 5. Globalization of media Although these would hold true with many of us, at one recent presentation the elephant in the room was identified by a client who added, “because head office told us to.” While this resulted in a good laugh, it also begged the question of the strength of our local case to challenge such demands.

In 2005, Millward Brown partnered with Ogilvy & Mather to examine a global database of almost 24,000 ads. This included matching over 500 ads that ran in more than one country and that were in the top five per cent of our database for both impact (enjoyment, branding and 16

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involvement) and persuasion. We found that only 11 per cent of these ads remained “exceptional” in another market. In fact, 40 per cent performed at “average” or “below average” when aired elsewhere.

In addition, our teams looked at 26 paired countries with at least 30 ads shared, and determined that an ad’s performance in the first country only predicted 22 per cent of its impact in the second country. It was concluded that the rest is down to other factors that we know from experience are primarily brand and advertising heritage, as well as culture.

According to The Global Brand, some of the key reasons behind these deviations are: brand status (different levels of equity and development across markets); category development (the size or life stage of a category can vary between countries); clutter (the sheer volume of TV ads running in-market bringing down the performance of any given creative); the kinds of advertising consumers are used to (for example, rational versus emotional approaches, explicit versus implicit messaging, presence or style of humour); cultural differences (levels of individualism can differentiate cultures, as well as issues such as societal gender roles); and consumer identification (ethnicity and

FEAT URE socioeconomic factors). These factors have a much greater impact on an ad’s ability to travel than performance in its first country.

Although we understand that there are differences between countries, we also see research that highlights clusters of culturally similar regions. We can map some of these clusters by crossing two global indices: the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index from 2010 (which assesses the overall level of market development of each country), and an indexing of Geert Hofstede’s work on cultural dimensions (which identifies five dimensions to assist in differentiating cultures). When we combined development and culture indicators, we saw Canada in close proximity to the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Germany. We also undertook an analysis of our global copy-testing database, which showed similar shared characteristics of successful ads in these markets, but even closer ties between those in English Canada and the U.S. Looking at such a broad analysis, there might be increased confidence in the ability of American ads to perform just as well in Canada. However, it is at this point that we need to better understand the differences between these markets.

There are some key differences between specific characteristics of successful ads in the U.S. versus Canada.

Although both countries see a high presence of fast pacing, humour, mood and even animals (who doesn’t like puppies and kittens?), successful Canadian ads are much more likely to use nostalgia or vignettes, while American ads are more likely to include the presence of a celebrity. This last point is important, as our research shows that the relevance of a celebrity to a market and that celebrity’s fit with the brand are the two major success factors for an endorsement. As an example, consider the impact that an American Olympic champion’s endorsement might have in Canada, compared to a story about Sidney Crosby learning how to play hockey.

Beyond the characteristics of ads, we see also a confirmation of different societal values. Environics Research conducts values research in Canada and the U.S. (the basis of Fire and Ice by Michael Adamsii) and has been following a large gap in perceptions of male versus female roles in the household for a number of years. As recently as 2007, almost half (48 per cent) agreed with the statement, “The father of the family must be master in his own house,” compared to less than one quarter (22 per cent) of Canadians.iii Perhaps some of these differences can be explained by social and demographic differences such as broader acceptance of same-sex marriage, lower marriage rates, lower affiliation with a religion, and a different multicultural construct overall. But basically, Dad the Provider and Mom the PTA Volunteer might not play as well here.

Another factor is lower general levels of advertising acceptance in Canada. The great David Ogilvy claimed to want to buy almost everything he saw advertised. The data from Environics Research suggest that over one third (36 per

cent) of Americans agree, “It is very likely that if a product is widely advertised, it will be a good product,” while about half that level of Canadians (19 per cent) would concur. Our 2013 global AdReaction study would support this point, as we saw almost half (49 per cent) of the American sample claiming to have a favourable reaction to TV ads, but this was shared by only about one third (36 per cent) of Canadians. In essence, Canadians appear to be less accepting and less motivated by advertising, creating yet another hurdle for foreign content.

For the final part of our analysis, we looked to our own local database of ads tested in both countries. We were able to match almost 40 ads, and observed that global patterns of ad transference seem to hold true in our market. About onethird of the ads fell into different tertiles for our effectiveness measure of short-term sales likelihood (which accounts for both breakthrough and persuasion); about half fell into a different tertile for enjoyment (a key driver of ad efficiency).

In both of these cases, the American ads performed worse in Canada. In essence, most ads performed well in Canada, but a concerning proportion failed.

In summary, there are some compelling reasons to consider U.S. creative for Canada. We also see that a greater proportion of strong American ads will succeed in Canada than will fail.

However, if the motivation to import is driven by efficiency, it is critical to consider the higher costs of media versus production. If one third of “slam dunks” miss the net, then a considerable amount of working dollars will not have been invested efficiently. Given that larger American production budgets sometimes allow for multiple executions around a strategy, it is advisable to validate the effectiveness of these ads with your customers to determine which will provide the best return for your valuable media investment.

i N igel Hollis. The Global Brand. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ii Michael Adams. Fire And Ice; The United States, Canada, and the Myth of Converging Values. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2003. iii Data courtesy of Environics Research.

Scott Megginson is the president of Millward Brown Canada, and was formerly at PepsiCo Canada, Adams Canada (Warner Lambert) and The Angus Reid Group. He sits on the research agency council for MRIA and is vice-chair of the advisory board for the research analyst program at Georgian College. He can be reached at Scott.Megginson@millwardbrown.com and tweets at @ScottMegginson. vue | MAY 2014

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Some Face-to-Face Observations

from the U.K. Doorstep

You may be doing your in-thefield research in-house, or through a subcontractor or agency, but the interviewer on the doorstep will still be your interviewer, talking to your client’s respondent – and the more support you can give those guys on the doorstep, the better for everyone.

As an interviewer with over 10,000 hours of practical experience, I am Alan Sloan taking the liberty of offering some expert observations. There may well be some cultural and working practice differences among readers for which I hope to be forgiven.

Field managers, executives and clients appear to see face-toface interviewing as a simple “sink or swim” function subject to minimum performance requirements, with little need for professionalizing and further training. Initial training here in the U.K. is limited to a few days, with little ongoing support, depending on the organization. Quality control is usually limited to verification of a few details. There is certainly sense in losing some less capable human resources at an early stage, but training replacements is expensive. If a more effective means of dealing with common problems were to be found then it would be most sensible to apply them.

Industry standards of concepts, quality control and methodology are extremely useful. They eliminate a damaging race to the bottom. ISO 20252 contributes to a consistency in the knowledge base across continents. But just following the rules can lead to working down to a minimal economic, operational standard, as opposed to working up to the maximum achievable potential of the respondent. The interviewing process itself, being out of sight, tends to get managed up to that minimum standard and subsequently put out of mind on the basis of being “good enough.” Yet the quality of the whole dataset depends very largely on the data collection process. I personally believe that my very own F2F work delivers the highest possible quality, for many reasons – including rampant vanity – as well as some more serious ones.

The range of comprehension and capacity to respond to any given set of questions will vary between individuals for many reasons, and response rates will vary with a different set of criteria. Many of these factors are outside of the control of manager and interviewer alike.

But first, one has to understand the problems associated with field research, which include: 18

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• N o respondent response means no data from that respondent.

• Low response means unrepresentative data.

• Bad scripts return poor quality and/or irrelevant data.

• Repetitive and long scripts invite satisficing and corner cutting.

• Questions that fail to communicate a clear and direct meaning may need explaining, but interviewer’s responses to respondent needs are uncoordinated.

The solutions may not be so obvious – they include: • An experienced, pleasant, trained and motivated face-to-face interviewer will win you a high response rate.

• A well-designed and comprehensible set of questions will yield accurate, useful and reliable data.

• Accuracy in data collection – keying in errors can be the least of our problems; they are probably greatly outweighed by the mood swings, comprehension and articulacy of the humans involved!

• Introductions, interview style and language, line management style and interviewer training can all be addressed with differing levels of commitment, and positive and negative cost.

The difference between 20 per cent and 80 per cent accuracy, which can be maintained by more sensitive interviewing, is obviously worth striving for and may well be worth investing in.

There is not really any substitute for direct experience in the field to stretch one’s understanding of what the norms and capacities are in your target population. The ideal would be that executives are experienced interviewers capable of running 20 or so live-pilot interviews, personally, with real respondents (not colleagues in the office). And they’d also have a good idea of the capacity of those interviewers that will be eventually employed to deliver the job.

Interviewers are people, but most research businesses keep a distance and line-management structure between executives and fieldwork staff to minimize costs, reduce personality factors and maximize control and some types of quality. Whether this is motivated by psychological, commercial or practical reasoning is irrelevant to us at the moment; it just happens and we have to deal with the deleterious effects on quality.

A unique reliance on line management to filter feedback is dangerous, but equally a high level of judgement would be also be required to deal with a deluge of unfiltered feedback from open-ended “downward consultation.” A general lack of high-quality interaction is the result with whole items, nuances

FEAT URE and negatives being filtered out in the reporting process. The result is very often that we are not aware of problems at an early enough stage. It is my modest hope that the following suggestions are useful to the process.

Introducing the Survey The big advantage of F2F is response rate, which can range from 30 per cent to 80 per cent or even higher. Internet, phone and mail score around two per cent. So to capitalize on the advantages of F2F we need to know how to maximize response.

Written introduction scripts can be very useful to introduce the interviewer to the purpose and parameters of the survey, but if actually used, they often work against the purpose of the exercise. In practice, the interviewer will tailor their introduction to suit themselves and their respondent with the sole intention of getting the interview. This has been shown to be effective by quantitative work on telephone interviewing.1 Reading from a script generates lower quality through lower representativeness (in the form of lower response, i.e. penetration of a given sample), a drawback that may outweigh the benefits of standardization. This theme of positive flexibility, training and trust in the interviewer is also reflected in the academic research on conversational techniques.

If it is important not to mention the subject or sponsor of the survey, state that clearly and prominently. Look for the shortest possible route to the point, and stick to the promotion of a few keywords. Long and repetitive sets of instructions are boring and get skipped, so avoid cutting and pasting from previous surveys and use direct and engaging language.

Interviewing Style and Language It has been demonstrated that simpler, more direct and more informal language can lead to higher respondent and interviewer satisfaction in online sampling.

But one can legitimately go a step further – in laboratory testing of “conversational” techniques, respondents answered accurately in clearly defined simple (typical) situations, but in response to more complex (atypical) questions, accuracy very much depended on support from interviewers. So, while the conversational method in general is criticized for deviating from the standardized survey interviewing method (which most F2F interviewers in my orbit are trained to follow, and is part of the ISO standards). Since there is the possibility that interviewers may lead, it has been shown that focusing on the meaning of a question does in fact produce more relevant and accurate responses overall,2 albeit at some extra cost in interviewing time.

In my experience, including clear and brief ongoing scripted clarification instructions is key. And I suggest that training of interviewers in supporting respondents during the interview will produce significant quality improvements in data at a very minimal extra cost.

Interviewer Training and the Value of Briefing This is often regarded as no-brainer stuff, but it is important and if you have an interest in this but have not read the

Figure 1. Response accuracy for five Interviewing techniques

standard advice, then you should.3 In the U.K., the Materials Research Society provides minimum standard training criteria that all members must follow. In commercial situations everywhere, field training is pressured to tend toward the “good enough” at the expense of the “excellent.” But the huge difference of response rate between a good and a poor interviewer suggests that, even as a remedial measure, training is going to be important and Source: Conversational Interviewing and Data quality. Conrad & Schober

economic. It is not a standard practice; coaching in some aspects of demeanour may require specialized skills.

Respondents need to know why they should invite a complete stranger into their home, and interviewers need to be able to explain why. Information is important, and keeping it brief is important too! Briefings on computer-assisted personal interviewing can nowadays be paid for separately, signed off, confirmed via timings and interviewer comprehension can be tested if necessary.

Field Management Otherwise good managers lacking patience may not have read this far. They know all this and more, so as a final word I’ll make a couple more points. Technology can enable better allocation of interviewers, so use it. Scoring of interviewers on preferences and performance can be easily accessed through data searches and fed through into overall gains in several dimensions.

Good relationships depend on openness and honesty – in the race for efficiency too often it is forgotten that a good briefing enhances motivation and becomes, in turn, a higher response rate. Critical feedback is useful to interviewers, but you need to know how to deliver it.

In the field, the relationship between supervisor and interviewing staff is crucial – some staff prefer informationrich contact and others like succinctness while others respond best to a relaxed chat about family and weather. Front-line managers, supervisors and work allocators need to be flexible and open in how they relate to interviewers, and should be capable of developing that loyalty that counts for so much in keeping us out there. “ Effects of Introductions in Large-Scale Telephone Survey Interviews,” Sociological Methods & Research, February 2000.

2 “Conversational Interviewing and Data Quality,” Frederick G. Conrad, Michael F. Schober, 2010.

3 http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/intrview.php 1

Alan Sloan, a.k.a. Tim Box-Ticker, is a dedicated interviewer, field supervisor, coach and trainer at Ipsos MORI in the U.K. He can be reached at alansloan@tiscali.co.uk. vue | MAY 2014

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Finding and Deciding:

Making the Shopper Connection

Carla Flamer

Many manufacturers and retailers are investing in shopper insights exploration these days. Unfortunately, this research often focuses on broad generalizations about how consumers purchase overall or, at best, at a category level. However, recent R&D and on-the-ground experience suggest that shopper research needs to be much more granular. We need to start looking at pre-store and in-store behaviour within a more comprehensive framework.

Generally speaking, there are two ways in which to grow a brand. The first is through brand marketing; creating the desire for the brand in the consumer’s mind. We are able to measure the strength of this desire via metrics that are highly correlated with a brand’s market share. This desire (or attitudinal equity) does not correlate perfectly with share because, of course, there are reasons why we may be blocked from buying a brand that we want (due to location, distribution, price tier, etc.).

Enabling shoppers to find and buy the brand they want, whether in-store or online, is the second half of what we call the brand growth equation. Shopper research can be much more effective when it focuses on why a brand is or is not achieving a level of sales that would be predicted by the level of desire for the brand.

Consumers engage with brands mostly on a higher level, where building brand awareness and familiarity, as well as brand positioning, are key to maximizing consideration and desire. Indeed, branding matters. The higher the brand equity, the more likely you are to buy that brand. And brands that have stronger attitudinal equity are more likely to withstand competitive pressure at the shelf.

But a shopper has a relationship with the brand and the retailer. The brand is important, but so too are the promotional communications 20

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and the in-store/virtual accessibility and brand cues. Some marketers appear to assume that loyal consumers are immune to in-store cues. This is absolutely not the case. Our R&D shows that in-store promotions and changes to product placement can make even core consumers change their mind once they are shopping. Therefore, shopper research must diagnose what is happening in store and how to either take advantage of the environment or minimize the damage to a brand due to the in-store environment. This research must look at the path to purchase (or nonpurchase) in a realistic and focused way.

The Consumer Journey: the Path to Purchase While each purchase has its own path, there are some fundamental aspects that have been found to be universally valid. Generally speaking, shoppers take a decision path that includes some selfinforming or planning, pre-conceived ideas about the retailer or channel, an event that triggers the need to shop for the category, and manoeuvering through the purchase environment in-store.

R&D suggests that in order to diagnose a specific shopper journey, these four steps, based on the general path to purchase, should be considered:

FEAT URE • W hat are the triggers for the category of interest?

• To what degree do shoppers plan or get informed about the purchase?

• What is the rationale behind the retailer or channel selection for this purchase?

• To what degree is the purchase planned at the category or brand level?

The answers to these questions are critical for informing shopper strategy development around in-store touch points and influencers. In some of the shopper work I’ve seen, the research has focused on the overall or category shopper mission, and perhaps some differences in demographics between shopper groups that are expected to “explain” the differences in shopping style.

But I would challenge shopper insights-focused researchers to look at this in another way. If we want to understand whether or not a brand is as successful as it can be, we need to look at the degree to which it capitalizes on its pre-shop desirability. In other words, if a brand is highly desired (has a high share of desirability) but achieves a lower level of purchase on the most recent shop, there is what we might call a “shopper effect” in play – something in-store or during the pre-store decision cycle is impacting that brand’s fair share of purchases.

And we can quantify the impact of this shopper effect and find out what is causing it.

In the “dummy” biscuit category example below (see Figure 1), Brand A, B, and private label brands are getting at least their expected share of purchase in the store based on their desirability (their shopper effect index is 100 or above). Brands C and D, in contrast, are getting a significantly lower share of purchase than expected, with large shopper effects (and SE index below 100).

typically end up buying the same brand most of the time.

These shoppers tend to be less influenced by in-store stimuli.

Deciders are those who decide which brand to buy or consume at the point of purchase, and would be heavily influenced by stimuli at the point of sale.

Based on how shoppers decide on the category and brand, we can differentiate between four paths-to-purchase “segments.” This is much more precise than simply looking at the shopper mission, a shopper’s usual brand and size of household – the importance of this segmentation of shoppers bears out in R&D. • P lanned Finder – they know exactly what they want and have made both the category and brand decision before entering the point of purchase.

• U nplanned Finder – they have a brand preference selected before arriving at the point of purchase but the category isn’t decided upon until they are in the store.

• P lanned Decider – they arrive with a category in mind, but do not select a brand until in-store.

• U nplanned Decider – they make both category and brand purchase decisions when in the store.

What follows (see Figure 2) is the development of a retail strategy that will differ for the four segments. For planners, this is typically to ensure that key brands are stocked, and that there is easy access to grabbing these brands off the shelf. For other brands, trying to get noticed in the category or to get the attention of in-store Deciders, the focus is often on special displays, in-store communications, promotions and new shelf plans, or secondary placements to shake up the category.

Figure 2

Figure 1

Now we know that Brand D has a problem, and the size of the problem, and we can begin to diagnose what this problem might be. We do this by looking more closely at where the shopper decision to purchase the category is made, and where the shopper decision to purchase the brand is made. We find two kinds of shoppers that differ on this element – the Finder and the Decider.

Finders are those shoppers who decide which brand to purchase before entering the point of purchase, and who

There are cultural differences in this behaviour, so we see different proportions of Finders and Deciders in different countries. These shopper types also vary by brand within the same category, most likely due to the difference in brandbuilding activities for each brand, as well as the difference in in-store marketing conducted by these brands.

Proportions of Finders and Deciders also differ by the type of retailer. Factors such as SKU availability, promotions, pricing, sales promoter staff, etc. differ across retailers and this, in turn, seems to lead to a difference in brand purchase decisions. Also, the shopping mission (be it regular grocery shopping, browsing, quick refill trip) differs by type of retailer and this impacts the shopper type. vue | MAY 2014

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FEAT UR E Now we have much of the information we need to diagnose what is going on with Brand D. When we put the shopper-type analysis together with the shopper effect index (see Figure 3), we find that the brand is stronger in the planned decider path but is underperforming (SEI below 100) in all other paths.

Why might this be happening and what can we do about it?

Figure 3

levers; display and promotions are having a strong impact (green circles), though are not reaching enough shoppers.

Importantly, variety, pack assortment and pricing, seen by most shoppers, are performing very poorly relative to competitors.

Brand D’s underperformance is not related to a lack of shopper interest (AE) or marketing support. It is related to specific product issues in the channel evaluated: high price and insufficient varieties were preventing the brand from achieving SE Index 56 99 49 92

Our next step should be to look at the impact (or lack thereof ) of Brand D’s pre-shop and in-store sales levers. Preshop sales levers include advertising, coupons, samples, website and direct mail offers. In-store sales levers include display, price, variety, packaging (assortment, attractiveness), in-store signage, in-store promotions and coupons, and price reductions in store.

In this case study, we find that the pre-store levers (especially advertising) are having a strong impact and this has helped to build Brand D’s attitudinal equity or desirability. On the other hand, as illustrated in Figure 4, there are issues with the in-store Figure 4

its fair share. But we can go beyond diagnosing the issues, and should be offering an estimate of the ROI or value in “fixing” the problem. Through the use of a simple simulator, we calculated that by increasing the number of varieties offered and reducing pack size to improve perceived absolute price, sales of Brand D could be improved by 55 per cent. Even for a strong brand, the in-store environment was key to enabling Brand D to reach its potential.

Our research demonstrates that in order to make shopper research actionable, shopper marketing plans need to be customized for each market and by different type of retailers.

One blanket strategy for all shoppers, or even by retailer or shopping mission, is unlikely to be very effective. As shopper researchers, we need to challenge ourselves to reach a more fundamental understanding of the various types of shoppers, their particular needs and perceptions, and the impact of the pre-store and in-store environment. We can make a brand stand up and stand out among the multitude of competitive shopper influences.

Carla Flamer is executive vice-president at Ipsos Reid Corporation in Toronto. Carla joined Ipsos 20 years ago, and has held local and global responsibilities in a number of sectors. She oversees the MarketQuest business in Canada, which includes market understanding, branding, and shopper research. She can be reached at carla.flamer@ipsos.com and tweets at @flametwin1.

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vue MRIA 2014 CONFERENCE

SHERATON CAVALIER AND DELTA BESSBOROUGH SASKATOON | SASKATCHEWAN

http://conference2014.mria-arim.ca/news

#mria14

the magazine of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association

MAY 2014

WELCOME TO THE 2014

MRIA NATIONAL CONFERENCE

Welcome to the 2014 MRIA National Conference 2014 National Conference Chair Corrin Harper Welcome, Delegates, to sunny Saskatoon and to Dig Deeper and Discover, the 2014 Marketing Research and Intelligence Association National Conference.

As the Conference Chair of the 2014 MRIA Conference, I am pleased and excited to welcome you to Saskatoon, the “Paris on the Prairies”, for our annual convention. If seeing is believing, then you simply have to see Saskatchewan. Otherwise, you won’t believe the expanse of the land, our connection to it, or the feeling of serenity that the constant, distant horizon brings to your soul.

You won’t believe the size of the endless sky overhead, or the vibrant colours that fill it at sunrise, sunset, or midnight. I look forward to sharing this with you.

Over our two days together, we will both inform and entertain. You will listen to, and learn from some of the brightest minds in our industry, participate in discussions on emerging trends in the field, and network with fellow market researchers and buyers. This conference is a great opportunity for you to learn more about the world of marketing research, and I am proud to be hosting it here in my home province of Saskatchewan, the first time the MRIA annual event has been held here.

In the true spirit of Saskatchewan hospitality, you’ll be treated to a culinary extravaganza featuring the finest foods from the province. Don’t be surprised to find Saskatoon berries in many of the dishes! With the Saskatoon Speakeasy Networking and Boat Ride Evening on Monday night, in the opulent gardens of Saskatoon’s famous Castle on the River, the Delta Bessborough, you will experience first-hand the beauty of the South Saskatchewan River. Join your colleagues on the Prairie Lily Riverboat to experience the Bridge City to its fullest. At MRIA’s premier event on Tuesday night, the Gala Awards Dinner, you will see what Saskatchewan was like in the 1920’s.

The Gala will be a prohibition inspired evening of awards and vaudeville acts as we celebrate the Speakeasy, where all levels of society partied and socialized behind closed doors. The 1920’s inspired evening will be comprised of comedy and dance, specialty cocktails, and wonderful food.

All that and more awaits you at the 2014 MRIA National Conference in Saskatoon Saskatchewan – so take your time to discover this beautiful place.

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BIENVENUE

À LA CONFÉRENCE NATIONALE DE L’ARIM EN 2014

Bienvenue à la Conférence nationale 2014 Présidente de la conférence 2014 Corrin Harper À tous les participants, bienvenue à Saskatoon et à Dig Deeper and Discover, la conférence nationale 2014 de l’Association de la recherche et de l’intelligence marketing.

Il me fait plaisir, en ma qualité de présidente de la conférence, de vous souhaiter la bienvenue à Saskatoon, « le Paris des Prairies », et à notre conférence nationale. La Saskatchewan, il faut la voir en personne pour pleinement l’apprécier : ses terres qui s’étalent à l’infini, son horizon lointain qui calme et réconforte, son vaste ciel et ses couleurs éclatantes, que ce soit à l’aube, au crépuscule ou à minuit. Oui, bienvenue à mon bien-aimé coin de pays.

Nous comptons, au cours des deux prochains jours, vous informer et vous divertir. Vous entendrez les esprits les plus brillants de notre secteur, participerez à des discussions sur les plus récentes tendances et établirez des rapports avec vos collègues et clients potentiels. Bref, vous découvrirez bien des choses au sujet de la recherche marketing. Je suis fière de vous accueillir en Saskatchewan, ma province de naissance, à l’occasion de ce premier événement national de l’ARIM à se tenir dans la province.

Les gens de la Saskatchewan sont accueillants, leur table aussi généreuse que délicieuse. Ne soyez pas surpris de retrouver l’amélanche (Saskatoon Berry) dans plusieurs plats–nous en raffolons ! Plusieurs événements vous attendent au cours des prochains jours : la réceptionréseautage genre Speakeasy du lundi soir, qui se tiendra dans les magnifiques jardins du Delta Bessborough, le « château » sur l’impressionnante rivière South Saskatchewan, la croisière à bord du Prairie Lily, qui vous fera découvrir la « ville des ponts » depuis un point de vue privilégié, et, mardi soir, la soirée gala qui recréera le Saskatoon des années 20, à l’époque de la Prohibition, quand tout Saskatoon se rencontrait « en secret » au Speakeasy. Au menu de ce gala : des récompenses, de la comédie, de la danse, des coquetels originaux et des plats inoubliables.

Bienvenue donc à la Conférence nationale 2014 de l’ARIM, à Saskatoon et en Saskatchewan. Que votre séjour chez nous soit aussi enrichissant qu’inoubliable.

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THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS

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CONFERENCE SPEAKERS

KEYNOTES Dr. Darrell Bricker – Chief Executive Officer – Ipsos Global Public Affairs Jeffrey Hayzlett – Bestselling Author & Global Business Celebrity, The Hayzlett Group Jim Hopson – CEO and President of the Saskatchewan Roughriders Football Club

PANELLISTS AND SESSION PRESENTERS Margot Acton – TNS Canada Melody Adhami – Plastic Mobile Brian Baumal – Thinklounge Research Tricia Benn – Northstar Research Partners Inc. Rob Berger – Vision Critical France Bragado – Ipsos Reid Briana Brownell – Insightrix Research Inc. Jared Cechanowicz – University of Saskatchewan Simon Chadwick – Cambiar Chuck Chakrapani – Leger Analytics Amy Charles – Ipsos Loyalty Joseph Chen – The Hershey Company Tony Coulson – Environics Melanie Courtright – Americas Rob Daniel – BMO Financial Group Amy Davies – Wrigley Nick Drew – Yahoo Canada Michael Ennamorato – TNS Canada Carla Flamer – Ipsos Reid Caroline Fletcher – The Sound Research Tema Frank – Frank Online Marketing & Web Mystery Shoppers Inc. Adam Froman – Delvinia & AskingCanadians Gilles Gauthier – iTracks Donya Germain – ACCE International Katrina German – OneStory Kristian Gravelle – AstraZeneca Canada Andrew Grenville – Vision Critical Carl Gutwin – University of Saskatchewan Accruate at time of printing: April 24, 2014

Lesley Haibach – Ipsos Loyalty Perry Hassen – Nielsen Caren Healy-Jones – Ipsos Reid Susan Ince – Epic Consulting Anne Kossatz – RBC Isabelle Landreville – Sylvestre Marketing Diana Lucaci – Neuromarketing Science and Business Association Raj Manocha – AskingCanadians Tim McCutcheon – Ipsos Loyalty John McGarr – Fresh Squeezed Ideas Steve Mossop – Insights West Lenny Murphy – GreenBook Media Steve Olsen – Unilever Canada Annie Pettit – Peanut Labs Doug Poad – JWT Toronto Ray Poynter – Vision Critical Greg Rogers – Procter & Gamble Frank Scarpitti – City of Markham Sean Simpson – Ipsos Reid Public Affairs Shane Skillen – Hotspex Scott Switzer – Vision Critical Jara Ulbrych – The Coca Cola Company Joel Weinberger – Implicit Strategies Susan Williams – Cadillac Fairview Corporation Antoni Wisniowski – Municipal Property Assessment Corporation Mark Wood – TNS Canada Peter Zoutis – Northstar Research Partners Inc.

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TRADESHOW BOOTHS AND EXHIBITORS

AIP Corporation......................Booth # 12

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CLS Lexi-tech Ltd...................Booth # 14

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Studiocode Business Group ...............TBD

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THANK YOU TO OUR CONFERENCE VOLUNTEERS, SUPPLIERS AND STAFF

CONFERENCE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE 2014 National Conference Chair Corrin Harper corrin.harper@insightrix.com Program and Speaker Co-Chair Tracy Bowman tracy.bowman@protegra.com Sponsorship Co-Chair Carolyn O’Keefe carolyn@mqoresearch.com Sponsorship Co-Chair Anu Bhalla abhalla@advanis.net Tradeshow Co-Chair Anastasia Arabia anastasia@trendresearch.ca

Gala and Awards Evening Co-Chair Lesley Haibach lesley.haibach@ipsos.com Conference Communications & Event Logistics Anne Marie Gabriel Tel: (416) 642-9793 ext. 8723 Toll-Free: 1-888-602-6742 ext. 8723 amgabriel@mria-arim.ca Member Support and Event Coordination Erica Klie Tel: (416) 642-9793 ext. 8727 Toll-Free: 1-888-602-6742 ext. 8727 eklie@mria-arim.ca Web Design And Graphics

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Marketing Communication, Program

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Is CHRIS COMMINS

Still Alive? ins

Chris Comm

I think I am.

But one thing I know for sure ... I always enjoy reading vue!

See our next Issue for the results of our Pre/Post Awareness Tracking Study, before and after single ad in vue.

“Is Chris Commins still alive?”

Yes he is

PRE %

No he isn’t

Who cares?

REACH KEY RESEARCH DECISION MAKERS WITH ADVERTISING IN

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POST %

Two researchers share their opinions of how wearable technology could influence consumer habits and marketing research today, and in the future.

GOOGLE GLASS: PRACTICAL OR PRACTICALLY USELESS?

Timothy Lynch I talk to qualitative researchers every day.

Those that know me best understand I’m a gadget geek, a lead user of tech products; a regular technophile. So they bring me their worries about new qual: their struggles to keep up with new methodologies; their fear that they don’t understand how to use new technologies; and their concern that they might fall behind by not adopting something new.

So let me share with you what I share with them about one particular shiny new toy: there’s not yet a place for Google Glass in qualitative research. Take the pressure to try that particular technology off your plate. It’s like the old adage: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Just because the technology exists, doesn’t mean that it is appropriate for your qualitative research projects.

Google Glass is Really, Really Cool Google Glasses allows the user to capture images and high quality video with the push of a button or via simple voice commands. Then, using a data connection supplied by the Glass owner’s smartphone (Android or iPhone), those images and videos can be shared via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube.

Glass appears to be an ethnographer’s dream device. Taking advantage of that visual power and inherent usability, I experimented with in-store research. I snapped photos and shot videos at the grocery store, inside coffee shops, at car dealerships and in my home. Google Glass is cool. Very, very cool.

Glass gets People to “Talk Tech” Glass is so cool that just wearing it gets people’s attention. I’ve had random strangers walk up to me and ask me questions. In the glasses, I’m a beacon for conversation about technology.

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s

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Google Glass is not (yet) Ready for Qualitative Researchers

Wearable Devices – Who Cares?

Melanie Courtright Over the weekend I dropped my phone three times. Once as I was trying to carry everything from my car into the house, my phone met the garage floor. Once when trying to grab it off the counter while cooking and my daughter called me, it met the kitchen tile. And once just walking through the house and being clumsy, it landed (a bit more safely) on the rug at my feet. With every drop, my heart raced and I was filled with dread. Not only that I may have repair costs, but losing phone functionality for even a few hours would be really inconvenient. How I wish I had a way to tether my phone to my body. Or maybe even…wear my phone.

I’m not alone in these thoughts. There is a consumer need to reduce the emotional roller coaster associated with device separation and breakage. Whenever the desire for a solution that addresses both a physical and an emotional need emerges, someone will deliver. This makes the development and adoption of wearable devices a certainty. With the recent introduction of Google Glass, it seems inevitable that more wearable devices will hit the market, coming from various companies, and in various forms, and some of them will be sticky.

As a professional whose job is to stay close to consumers and be able to ask them questions, I am watching this emerging segment closely. If the key interaction changes, as it did from inperson to phone, phone to online, online to mobile, it changes everything. Here are some of the questions I have about future wearable devices: • How small will the screen be?

• Will it have a virtual, larger screen?

• Will it be touch or voice enabled?

• Will it track behaviour?

• What part of my day or routine will it interrupt?

s

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FAC E OF F

Millennials, teens and tweens, clearly passionate about technology, have been eager to discuss their digital habits, app and game usage, and photo and video sharing. Their natural curiosity allowed me to quickly establish rapport, then gain a wealth of information about technology in their lives.

To better understand wearable technology, I tried Google Glass with a group of savvy young people. Here are our reactions:

Why the Wow Factor Proves Problematic One time when I was wearing Glass in the store, I was approached by two shoppers, three kids and one employee (that ended up calling over three others). They all wanted to talk about Glass and try them on. The kids wanted to take selfies wearing them.

While indulging them in that non-research scenario, I sensed an inherent danger: the job of the researcher is not to talk tech and teach. Quickly establishing rapport is an advantage, but while wearing Glass, researchers won’t be able to get to deeper insights without their tried-and-true tools and techniques, including a well-written guide with traditional and projective exercises and activities.

What didn’t: The lack of support once you received the product. A few videos online and you are on your own.

Glass has Other Limitations • P rivacy concerns have not quite been sorted out. There’s no indication when a photo is being taken or a video being recorded.

• The system is designed to store media online in social media, not for private research use.

• The battery life is very limited – you only get about three hours of use.

• The camera is good but not superior to the cameras in the smartphones that are required to use Glass and far inferior to professional equipment.

• It is in beta testing and only available to Google developers at this time. It’s not yet available to most researchers.

• Google Glass comes at a price tag of $1,500. If you have prescription glasses, it’s more (and you won’t be able to share).

There are Better Tools Just as a good builder knows when he needs a simple hammer on the jobsite, the most innovative researcher knows when simple moderating skills are enough to elicit consumer perceptions and opinions. But right now, in qualitative research, using Google Glass as a tool will take the focus away from quality work and put a value on bells and whistles.

The timeless skill of a qualified researcher will always have the most impact on consumer research and ultimately deliver the best results.

Timothy Lynch, director of global marketing for FocusVision Worldwide, has been a Glass explorer for the past six months and is a member of the Google Development Program, he’s actively involved as a member in the AMA, EphMRA, ESOMAR, IxDA, MRA, UXPA and QRCA. You can find him on Twitter @ timclynch.

The Launch What worked: The beta launch method. It built interest, curiosity and envy!

What’s next: I think Google has learned from its successes and failures and will adjust accordingly in new products.

The Product What worked: People wanted to see it, experience it and play with it.

What didn’t: Unfortunately, a lot of people didn’t want to wear it. It was clumsy, especially if you already wear glasses. While it harder to drop than a phone, it’s still pretty easy to set down somewhere and leave it behind (in part because you want to take it off ).

What’s next: The Google smartwatch, which was already announced, and improvements to Glass.

The Functionality What worked: Google’s marketing plan generated interest and envy for outsiders – beta testers felt like part of an elite club.

The device is durable and wearable, and key functionality.

What didn’t: You have to set Glass up and manage it though an app on a connected mobile device, so it isn’t standalone. The battery life isn’t good and the user experience isn’t intuitive – most people, particularly iOS users, couldn’t figure out how to make the Adroid-based device do what they wanted.

What’s next: With the Google watch should come a more intuitive user experience.

The Overall Solution What worked: Just the concept, really.

What didn’t: The overall solution.

What’s next: Try, try again. And solve the real problem, which is tethering existing mobile devices to consumers in functional ways without losing usability.

Don’t be dissuaded from the wearable concept based on Glass.

People want something that they can keep closer to them physically because of how close they’ve gotten to mobile devices mentally and emotionally. It may take trial and error, but when it hits, adoption will occur. And we need to already be considering how to adjust.

Melanie serves as vice-president of research services at Research Now. She has nearly two decades of experience designing, executing and interpreting research for agencies and corporations, and is sought out for her thought leadership in the next generation of data collection.

Melanie can be reached at mcourtright@researchnow.com and she tweets at @MelCourtright. vue | MAY 2014

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INDUSTRY N EW S

THIS MONTH’S ISSUE: INNOVATION IN MARKET RESEARCH CAN ONLY COME FROM SMALL COMPANIES. AGREE OR DISAGREE, AND WHY?

Gail Cowling, Manager, Market Insights at Sun Life Financial Having worked at both large and small firms... Yes and no. Large firms have the capital to invest in innovation... but often the bureaucracy and the quarterly earnings imperatives (especially if they are publicly held) get in the way of investing in bleeding edge stuff.

Some small firms have the will but are sometimes afraid to deviate from the tried and true. Others throw all their eggs in the innovation basket. It takes a visionary person with a lot of push (in a large firm) and pull (in a small firm) to innovate. So my answer is both and neither.

Siim Teller, Marketing Manager at On Device Research I’ve gone through a startup > large + publicly traded cycle once with Skype and it was very much the case.

Innovation slowed, then stopped altogether as quarterly goals started driving all activities. Small innovation continued to happen on the fringes because of specific team leads or engineers but they never got the backing of the company and stayed hobby projects or were killed off.

Doug Anderson, SVP at Harris/Decima I must admit to being a little stunned by this question. Perhaps there more to this discussion than I am understanding, but to me the short answer is a resounding DISAGREE. (Do we have “strongly

disagree” on this scale? ;-) I can see an argument that some kinds of innovation may be more easily introduced by small firms, but there are plenty of examples of major innovations that we have been able to exploit because organizations with deep pockets (generally, “large companies”) have made investments and brought innovative processes and (proven) methods to market. The bulk of investment in “research-on-research” must be coming from large firms – and that produces valuable innovation at least some of the time.

Eva Tolkunow In my experience, large companies often have the resources to invest in and implement innovative research, but often don’t because of the pressure of the bottom line or internal politics. Small companies often have the flexibility and courage to try something new and innovative to win new business.

However, often innovation will not happen if the paying client isn’t willing to try something new. It’s the client that has to have the courage to commit to an innovative research project.

does not want to commit to innovative research, the smaller company may not be able or willing to dedicate resources on their own. A happy marriage between a big client willing to take a risk, and a small company who can move faster and with more freedom, may indeed be the best bet to bring innovative solutions to life.

Bethan Turner, Senior Research Executive at Mustard Absolutely disagree. I don’t think you can ever say that innovation simply can’t come from larger companies. I think it is about the people who drive the innovation rather than where they work – yes, where they work obviously has an impact on how far that innovation spreads, but it has to start with that individual or team of individuals who could work in a company of any size. You also have to look at the latest Greenbook list of 50 innovative companies in Market research – a lot of these are big companies! http://www. greenbookblog.org/2014/01/31/the-50most-innovative-companies-in-marketresearch/

Scott Garrison, Manager at SKIM Oftentimes, smaller companies have more flexibility and freedom than larger companies to focus on innovations. This also allows them to move faster and bring innovations to life at a quicker pace.

However, smaller companies by nature have fewer resources and can sometimes be at the mercy of clients. If a client

Your Vue is a collection of opinions gathered from selected MRIA LinkedIn discussions. Share your opinions and you could be featured here in our next issue! Comments are edited for length and clarity.

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IND U STRY NEWS

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH REGISTRY In accordance with federal privacy laws,

MRIA’s Qualitative Research Registry (QRR), or Registre de la recherche qualitative (RRQ) in French, was created to provide an ongoing, userfriendly vehicle for tracking those who do not want to be contacted or should not be contacted for qualitative research studies.

QRR is a comprehensive do not call list of those who have recently participated in qualitative research studies, those who have asked not to be contacted further, and those felt by recruiters and moderators to be best served by not being contacted. These respondents are marked as “do not call” in accordance with established MRIA Standards.

However, the ability of the system to function effectively is directly related to the co-operation received from firms who provide recruitment services.

If you are a full service research firm or field supplier that is currently participating in the Qualitative Research Registry program – thank you very much and keep up the good work!

All field and full-service companies are encouraged to submit a list of their qualitative respondents for entry into the QRR system each month, including those who do not wish to be contacted.

If you are not currently participating, please get involved! If you are interested in submitting to QRR, please visit the MRIA website at http://mriaarim.ca/about-mria/qualitative-research-division/qualitative-research-registry for further explanation and guidance on how to submit qualitative research participants’ names, along with the required electronic forms.

Participating firms will receive monthly updates of respondents to be screened from qualitative recruitment samples. QRR works effectively to increase the quality and integrity of the qualitative research process, by serving as a control to ensure respondents are not contacted more frequently than is necessary.

THE FOLLOWING COMPANIES HAVE SUBMITTED NAMES TO QUALITATIVE RESEARCH REGISTRY

OCTOBER 2013 TO April 8 2014

ONTARIO

WEST

QUEBEC

Barbara C Campbell Recruiting Inc (BCCR INC) Consumer Vision CRC Research DSFMS Head Count I & S Recruiting Ideaspace Research Ipsos Reid Nexus Market Research Inc. Opinion Search Quality Response Research House The Logit Group Inc.

Barbara C Campbell Recruiting Inc (BCCR INC) CRC Research Head Count Ideaspace Research Ipsos Reid Opinon Search Research House The Logit Group Inc. Trend Research Inc

CRC Research Ideaspace Research Ipsos Reid MBA Recherche Opinion Search The Logit Group Inc.

ATLANTIC Barbara C Campbell Recruiting Inc (BCCR INC) CRC Research Head Count Ipsos Reid Opinon Search The Logit Group Inc.

If you have any questions about or wish to submit to the QRR please send an e-mail to: qrr@mria-arim.ca Information regarding the QRR can be found at http://mria-arim.ca/about-mria/qualitative-research-division/qualitative-research-registry Rules of Conduct and Good Practice for Members of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (2007), Section C Rules Specific to the Conduct of Qualitative Research: 20. R ecruiters should provide accurate data to the Qualitative Research Registry, where such exists, on a consistent basis and check all respondents against the Registry.

21. M oderators buying recruiting services should give primary consideration to recruiting agencies which submit to the Qualitative Research Registry, where such a service exists, on a regular and ongoing basis.

vue | MAY 2014

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INDUSTRY N EW S Engaging Audiences Across the Board: Highlights of the 2014 CMA/MRIA Customer Experience Nadia Nyahoho

Identify, understand and connect with your consumers; those were the key elements expressed by industry leaders at the 2014 CMA/MRIA Customer Experience conference. More than five hundred researchers and marketers assembled at Toronto’s conference center to hear 16 experts speak about some of the most important trending topics today, including inspiring passion, new interest, brand loyalty, and marketing in the digital age.

“The customer experience,” as well explained by Annie Pettit of Peanut Labs, “is an ongoing relationship and we must seek to capture and translate customer feedback.”

Pettit, among other conference speakers, set the tone by deconstructing how building loyalty means engaging in conversations with customers so they are willing to favor one brand over all others. Seeking to have a deeper connection with the customer is the ultimate goal.

This was effectively shown as Dr. A.K. Pradeep, Chairman Nielsen NeuroFocus, reminded audiences that the retail store is the worst environment for the human brain, and how online is no different. Consumers are over-saturated with so many choices and messages are thrown at them all at the same time.

Pradeep’s solution fundamentally touched on the customer experience with simple yet key advice: keep it basic, make it entertaining, stay interactive, keep the consumer informed, and make them feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves.

If there is one central event that illustrates how success – or by extension, sales – are fueled by passion, it’s the Olympics.

The Mondelez Marketing team crafted a power play on

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“pride and joy” as one of the official sponsors for this year’s Sochi Olympics. Collaborating with CBC and creative team The Hive, they successfully manifested passion and nostalgia by launching four limited editions across their top snacking brands: Oreo, Ritz, Chips Ahoy and Maple Leaf. Customized TV ads and mobile apps drove sales even further and created memorable celebratory moments grounded in the Olympic spirit.

Jackie Huba, author of Monster Loyalty, also explored brand loyalty amongst existing customers, illustrating how it’s five times cheaper to manage the consumers you already have on board. Over the past six years, she has been analyzing Lady Gaga in effort to explain how the songstress’ strategies are applicable to marketers. Huba described her fundamental loyalists as one-percenters: the people who are most engaged and who are self-motivated to market your brand. While it is rewarding to capture new consumers, nurturing the relationship with current hard-core buyers generates organic growth – true loyalty.

Consumers may have an abundance of choice, but there’s always room for more. In the realm of new product offerings, companies discussed building brand image and loyalty from the ground-up. Patak’s, for one, deployed a grassroots marketing strategy that tore down misconceptions about ethnic foods. By generating in-store excitement and clever marketing slogans such as “Singh out loud,” Patak’s brought the brand to fruition surpassing category sales.

Overall, and beyond marketing new products and building brand loyalty the old-fashioned way, much of the industry

IND U STRY NEWS conversation was fueled by how social media and the mobile industry are quickly changing the way consumers connect with brands. A reality check by B. Bonin Bough, VP of Global Media and Consumer Engagement of Mondelez International, brought it home: “there are 7 billion people on earth, 5.1 billion own a mobile phone, 4.2 billion own a toothbrush.”

In the present economic and technological environment, marketers today are forced to rethink the approach to the impulse purchase as mobile devices start to own the path to a relationship with our brands.

vue Be Heard • Be Seen • Be Vue’d

Month June July/August September October November December

Whether the challenge is launching a new brand, relaunching an existing brand or developing an emotional connection with consumers, the medium, it appears, will almost always be as important as the message.

Nadia Nyahoho is a Category and Shopper Insights Manager at Unilever Canada working with global brands like Dove, Vaseline, and Lipton. She is an advocate for bringing insights to action in the Canadian retail landscape and is an active member of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association. She can be reached at nadia.nyahoho@unilever.com

2014 EDITORIAL

CALENDAR

Thank you for the support you have shown for Vue magazine over the years and we look forward to counting you among our print and digital advertisers in 2014. We welcome inquiries from advertisers, authors, students and the business community.

Editorial Unique Populations C anadiana – Canadian authors, Canadian case studies, Canadian statistics, Canadian MR icons Education Ethics and Privacy Qualitative Innovation

Submisson Deadline May 1 June 2 August 1 September 2 October 1 November 3 vue | MAY 2014

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n To read more news online, or to submit your “People and Companies in the News,” s imply fill out our online form at http://mria-arim.ca/news/people-and-company-news.

n The Vue editorial team reserves the right to select and edit your submission for appearance in Vue. n MRIA is neither responsible for the accuracy of this information nor liable for any false information.

Kantar Media Moves Into Programmatic Media Buying In the US, WPP’s Kantar Media has launched an initiative which uses its subscription-only media planning platform, SRDS.com, to help advertisers find and buy suitable digital media slots for their campaigns. Initial partners are Rubicon Project, PubMatic, OpenX, iSocket, Adslot, BuySellAds and Shiny Ads – publishers working with any of these can now showcase their inventory in SRDS, which provides key data on more than 125,000 media brands, including digital, paper publications, out-of-home, TV and radio. Website: www.kantarmedia.us European Court Ruling Threatens Telecoms Data Users In a decision which could have far-reaching consequences for new areas of research and marketing, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) last week issued a judgment removing the legal foundation for telecoms providers’ retention of individual customer traffic and location data. The latest judgment, no doubt reflecting the prevailing mood in the EU following the recent NSA scandal, concluded that the Directive ‘disproportionably interferes with the fundamental rights of European citizens to private life and protection of personal data’, according to www.mondaq.com .

AskingCanadians Starts AskingAmericans Online data collection agency AskingCanadians has expanded its business into the US with the launch of AskingAmericans, offering access to more than ten million consumers. Established in 2005 in Toronto, AskingCanadians’ data collection division owns and manages an online research community of 600,000 Canadians, and also provides a range of data products and services to the marketing and research communities. The new US service promises US market researchers a data collection solution for North America.

Websites: www.corporate.askingcanadians.com and www.askingamericans.com .

MB Extends Link to Measure Brand Impact of Apps Millward Brown has launched Link for Apps, an extension of its long-established ad evaluation tool Link, available initially in the US and Canada and promising to help marketers understand the impact of mobile apps on brands. Services include diagnosis of an app’s strengths and weaknesses specific to brand building; and analysis of whether the intended brand message is getting across to consumers. Link has been around for 25 years, but the agency has been adding to its capabilities. Part of Kantar, within WPP, the global agency is online at www.millwardbrown.com .

Toluna Adds BrainJuicer’s FaceTrace Online community and survey technology provider Toluna is integrating BrainJuicer’s proprietary emotion measure FaceTrace into its global survey platform. The upgrade will allow clients to gauge emotional reactions to stimuli such as products, web sites, packaging and ads. The FaceTrace solution is based on the work of psychologist Paul Ekman, and uses the ‘seven basic human emotions’ to predict respondents’ behaviour from their initial emotional responses to products and communications.

Website: www.toluna-group.com and www.brainjuicer.com Twitter Buys Social Media Data Provider Gnip In the US, Twitter has acquired social media data provider and long-term partner Gnip for an undisclosed sum. Founded in 2008

by Jud Valeski and Eric Marcoullier – who previously sold his firm MyBlogLog to Yahoo! for an estimated $10m – Boulder, CO-based Gnip provides real-time social media data from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other sources, to social media monitoring companies.

In 2010, the firm raised $2m in new financing, as it became the first authorized reseller of Twitter’s ‘Firehose’ data stream. Websites: www.twitter.com and www.gnip.com

Visit us at Booth #11 at the National Conference in Saskatoon!

People and Companies in the News generously sponsored in 2014 by:

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IND U STRY NEWS Humber College Team wins ASC’s Student PSA Creative Competition Advertising Standards Canada (ASC) is pleased to announce the winners of ASC’s 2014 Student PSA Creative Competition: Truth in Advertising Matters. ASC congratulates the Humber College Team of Daniel Berard, William Fornuff, Hameeda Hashim and Danish Ehsan as the first prize scholarship award winner. Their concept was rated highest by a panel that included some of Canada’s top advertising experts. Teams from Red River College, Université du Québec à Montréal, York University (Schulich School) and a second from Humber College were also in the top five. The competition creative can be found at www.truthinadmatters.ca Young Researcher of the Year Award DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 16 MAY 2014 Each year ESOMAR offers young researchers the opportunity to develop innovative research solutions to tackle challenging global issues. An international jury of specialists will select 3 finalists from the worldwide submissions. These finalists will be given the chance to present their findings to an international audience at the ESOMAR Congress in Nice, France (7-10 September). The competition is open at all researchers under the age of 30, and carries an ESOMARsponsored prize of €2,500! http://www.esomar.org/ After keeping his Mom waiting for 12 extra days, Benjamin Timothy Fahey was born on April 6, 2014 at 9:58 pm at the Health Sciences Centre in St. John’s, NL weighing close to 9 pounds! His proud parents Carolyn O’Keefe and Tim Fahey are extremely excited to welcome their bundle of joy. A future market researcher or chartered accountant....we shall see....

EVENTS

In the news…

On April 9, 2014, Claire Durand discussed the performance of several marketing research firms in the recent Quebec election. Her blog shares some good news.

En conclusion, La performance des sondages a été bonne en moyenne. Cela souligne l’intérêt qu’il y ait plusieurs sondages en même temps, utilisant des méthodologies différentes et que l’on analyse leurs estimations conjointement. Ainsi les biais des uns compensent ceux des autres et on obtient des estimations moyennes respectables. À titre d’illustration, alors que le dernier Léger donnait 12 points d’avance au PLQ, Forum lui en donnait 20. Les résultats – 16 points de différence – se situent presque à la moyenne entre les deux. Enfin, cette campagne a été marquée par l’absence de sondages pendant 10 jours à la mi-campagne, entre les deux débats, au moment où il est possible que les intentions de vote étaient en train de changer. C’est une situation à éviter si on veut donner aux électeurs une image fidèle de ce qui se passe.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

May 9 MRIA Member General Meeting 94 Cumberland St. #601 Toronto May 15 MRIA CSRC Social Connect Toronto TBD MRIA Executive Training Location: TBD May 15–18 AAPOR Annual Conference Anaheim, CA June 1 TTRA Conference Paper Submission Deadline June 4–6 MRA Insights Chicago, IL

June 8–10 MRIA National Conference 2014 – Dig Deeper & Discover Saskatoon, SK June 10 MRIA Gala Awards Dinner Saskatoon, SK September 7–10 ESOMAR Congress Nice, France September 28–October 2 CASRO Annual Conference Four Seasons Denver, Denver, Colorado IIR USA September 29–October 1 The North American Consumer Insights Event Toronto October 20–October 22 The Market Research Event Boca Raton, FL MRIA members enjoy 20% off

In conclusion, performance of the surveys was, on average, good. This is interesting because there were several surveys running at the same time, while using different methodologies and their estimates were analyzed together.

Thus, the bias of one offset the other and respectable estimates were obtained on average. To illustrate, while the Léger survey predicted a 12-point lead for the PQ, Forum predicted a 20-point lead. With a 16-point difference, reality was somewhere in the middle of the two. Finally, this campaign was marked by the absence of surveys midcampaign, for 10 days, and between the two debates; a period where it was possible for voter sentiment to change.

This presents a situation to avoid, if you want to give voters a true picture of what is happening.

Claire Durand is professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Montreal. She is secretary-treasurer of WAPOR (World Association of Public Opinion Research) and Vice-President of the International Association of sociological methodology (ISA - RC33).

Read her entire post here: http://ahlessondages.blogspot.ca/2014/04/lendemain-deveille-vive-la-moyenne-des.html vue | MAY 2014

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ALBERTA CHAPTER

QUEBEC CHAPTER Les médias sociaux et le service à la clientèle En février, le chapitre québécois de l’ARIM conviait ses membres et amis à venir entendre Mme Isabelle Trottier, Directrice Communications et service à la clientèle à la Société de transport de Montréal (STM).

The Alberta Chapter ended its 2013-2014 speaker series in April with a fascinating event featuring Sharon McIntyre of Chaordix Inc., held in both Calgary and Edmonton.

At our AGM this month, Chapter President Carolyn Kildare moves into the past-president role after three years at the helm. The Alberta Chapter Board would like to extend our sincerest thanks to Carolyn for her dedicated efforts over the past few years. After our AGM, our new Board will welcome some new members and hold a planning session for our next cycle. The Alberta Chapter expects to announce an exciting program for Alberta members in early fall.

ATLANTIC CHAPTER The Atlantic Chapter continued its student outreach activities and spoke to a market research class at Université de Moncton in midMarch. Elizabeth MacRae, Spencer Wood, and Christina Waddy all shared their experiences in the industry, and gave students a few hints as to how to undertake their final class project.

Isabelle Trottier

Les clients de la STM sont de plus en plus branchés, connectés et exigeants. La notion de temps réel devient omniprésente et l’éventail d’outils de communication ne cesse de s’élargir. Mme Trottier est venue expliquer comment la STM a su se positionner par rapport à ce phénomène et développer des stratégies via différentes plateformes numériques pour répondre efficacement à cette réalité.

Social media and Customer service In February, the Quebec chapter of the MRIA invited its members and friends to come and hear Mrs. Isabelle Trottier, Director of Communications and Customer service at the Société de transport de Montréal (STM).

STM customers are increasingly connected electronically and becoming more and more demanding. The notion of “real time” is almost ubiquitous and the range of communication tools continues to expand.

Mrs. Trottier explained how the STM had succeeded in positioning itself with regards to this phenomenon and had developed strategies via various digital platforms to effectively respond to this reality.

A team of MBIR Students surveyed more than 1,200 students at Algonquin College, and analyzed the influences on the selection process of direct applicants (out of high school) versus indirect applicants (coming from university or the work force). They presented their results to Peter Mackie, Director of Sales and Student Recruitment, and other college administrators. Picture, from left to right: Kayla Evans, Cailey Marosi, Stephanie Zeppetelli, Peter Mackie, Professor Richard LeighBennett, Jessica Kandaru and Alex Theus.

Georgian College Research Analyst Program Winter/Summer students present the findings of their Qualitative Research class project on Homelessness in the Georgian Triangle, working with Ideaspace on behalf of the Housing Resource Centre.

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OTTAWA CHAPTER The Ottawa Chapter is holding a speaker event on May 29 titled “Open government and e-Democracy: Harnessing the power of digital technologies to engage citizens in public policy. Delvinia CEO Adam Froman will talk about his firm’s ongoing work in this area, including the development of the Voice of e-Democracy. Register on the Portal.

Call for Expressions of Interest in Offering an MRIA Ottawa Boot Camp The MRIA Ottawa Chapter is looking for individuals interested in teaching a training session, also known as an MRIA Ottawa Boot Camp, during the 2014-2015 program year.

Each boot camp will: • Focus on a topic related to marketing research, business intelligence or analytics • Be three hours in length • Be offered in central Ottawa at a facility provided by the Ottawa Chapter • Be delivered during the working day.

Instructors will be required to develop material for a three-hour session for approval by the Ottawa Chapter 30 days in advance of the session. Instructors will receive a $500 honorarium per session. MRIA Ottawa reserves the right to cancel sessions where there is insufficient registration. Minimum class size is five.

Please contact the Ottawa Chapter to advise us of (1) your interest (2) the subject matter of the session (also known as an MRIA Ottawa Boot Camp) and (3) your qualifications to teach this session.

MRIA Ottawa will promote the sessions and take care of registration. In addition, MRIA Ottawa will reproduce session materials for use by the participants.

Please contact Nat Stone, Education Chair, by May 30, 2014 at nat.stone@tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca or at 613-8183133.

Members and guests are welcome at all MRIA events: Check our online calendar at http://mria-arim.ca/events-awards/calendar for more information on all events and how to register.

Members receive emails directly with event updates, so please check your inboxes for instructions on how to register for all upcoming events! MRIA Portal: https://www.mriaportal-arimportail.ca

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INDUSTRY N EW S RESEARCH REGISTRATION SYSTEM Since 1994, the RRS has allowed respondents to verify the legitimacy of a research project; helped legislators and regulators differentiate between legitimate survey researchers and unscrupulous telemarketers, phishers and scammers; and protected the industry from unnecessary and unwanted regulation.

MRIA’s Research Registration System (RRS) has long been a cornerstone self-regulatory mechanism for the marketing, survey and public opinion research and market intelligence industry in Canada.

Combined with other self-regulatory initiatives such as our Code of Conduct and Good Practice and our Charter of Respondent Rights, the RRS has paid huge dividends in protecting the industry’s positive reputation and good name with Canadians.

All Gold Seal and Basic Corporate Research Agency members of the Association are obligated to register all of their research projects with the RRS, and Client-Side Corporate members are encouraged to require their agency suppliers to do so.

MRIA’s Research Agency Council provides strategic, policy-level oversight of the Research Registration System, and receives aggregate data-only on the System’s performance.

Questions about the Research Registration System should be addressed to Erica Klie, Manager, Member Support Services, at 1-888-602-6742 or (416) 642-9793, ext. 8727 or eklie@mria-arim.ca.

The following companies have registered research projects with the Research Registration System during October 2013 – April 8 2014: GOLD SEAL CORPORATE RESEARCH AGENCIES Academica Group Advanis Inc. Advitek Inc. BBM Analytics BBM Canada Campaign Research Canadian Viewpoint Inc. Cido Research Consumer Vision Ltd. EKOS Research Associates Inc. Elemental Data Collection Inc. Forum Research Inc. GfK Canada Greenwich Associates

Hay Research International Head Count Hotspex Inc. Ipsos Reid Maritz Research Canada Market Probe Canada Market Pulse Inc. MBA Recherche MD Analytics Inc. MQO Research Nanos Research Nielsen Consumer Insights NRG Research Group Opinion Search Inc.

BASIC CORPORATE RESEARCH AGENCIES Barbara C. Campbell Recruiting Inc. (BCCR Inc.) Dialogue Research Inc. Goss Gilroy Inc. Ideaspace Research Nexus Market Research Inc. Quality Response Inc. Trampoline Marketing

R.A. Malatest & Associates Ltd. Research Dimensions Research House Inc. Research Now SmartPoint Research Inc. Tele-Surveys Plus / Télé-Sondages Plus The Logit Group Inc. TNS Canada (Canadian Facts) Trend Research Inc. Vision Critical GOLD SEAL CORPORATE RESEARCH AGENCIES PENDING Illumina Research Partners

INDIVIDUAL MEMBER ORGANIZATION Burak Jacobson Research Partners Inc. Blue Ocean Contact Centers

Rules of Conduct and Good Practice For Members of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (2007): Section A (5) Members must uphold the MRIA Charter of Respondent Rights.

Charter of Respondent Rights, Article 2 You can verify that the research you have been invited to participate in is legitimate in one of two ways. You can either obtain a registration number and the MRIA’s toll-free telephone number for any research registered in the MRIA’s Research Registration System or you can obtain the contact information of the research director who is conducting the study.

http://mria-arim.ca/about-mria/research-registration/research-registration-overview

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IPD MRIA INSTITUTE OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Marketing Research and Intelligence Association l’Association de la recherche et de l’intelligence marketing

What’s *new* for Spring? Lots of fresh ideas and new materials. Looks like the CMRP is really in vogue, everyone wants it. MRIA is introducing three new pathways to get you there – including a tailored executive training retreat. Look for pathway updates soon in your inbox, on the MRIA website and in a future issues of eVue! Need answers fast? Contact gwoo@mria-arim.ca So, what’s coming up in Courses?

Looking BEYOND basic knowledge requirements? MRIA offers the following specialized or advanced areas of marketing research courses taught in-class.

Semiotics, Introduction: How Symbols, Packaging & Advertising Communicate (see the website for upcoming date!)

Create Winning Research Presentations and Reports that Deeply Connect with your Audience (May 13) http://mria-arim.ca/education/in-class-learning/professional-development-courses

Registration closes approximately 1 week prior to course start.

Les cours disponibles en français sont au http://mria-arim.ca/fr/formation

Courses covering the core knowledge requirements of the Certified Marketing Research Professional (CMRP) are as follows: Course

Next in-class session

101-Introduction to Marketing Research 102-Ethical Issues and Privacy in Marketing Research 201-Marketing Research Design: An Applied Course 202-Questionnaire Design 203-Marketing Research Statistics & Data Analysis* 204-Qualitative Marketing Research 301-Competitive Intelligence, Mystery Shopping, and Benchmarking 302-Market Intelligence

November 4 Fall 2014 September 30 Fall 2014 - Spring 2015 Fall 2014 - Spring 2015 Fall 2014 - Spring 2015 April 29 June 19

303-Marketing Management for Researchers 401-Online Research, Best Practices and Innovations 402-Advanced Analysis Techniques 403-Advanced Qualitative Marketing Research

Fall 2014 - Spring 2015 Fall 2014 - Spring 2015 Fall 2014 - Spring 2015 May 6

11 of these 12 core courses are available anytime online

http://mria-arim.ca/education/online-learning/online-learning-faq

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COLUMNIST S 38

It’s a Qual World

Off the Deep End

Susan Abbott, CMRP Abbott Research & Consulting

Brian Singh, CMRP zinc tank

The world of co-creation is an exciting place these days. If you’re up for an addicting new activity, you should check out Quirky.com, a company that builds and markets products invented in the Quirky community, then shares the profits with contributors. Quirky’s professional designers and industrialsized 3D printers shepherd ideas from concept to reality through structured phases. Companies like GE and Home Depot are partnering with Quirky to create products specifically for them.

If profit sharing of this type feels too radical, you could try the open innovation approach, where you pose specific challenges to a community of creative problem solvers and pay for the best solution. InnoCentive solvers can help you create a new viral marketing campaign, or fight a new virus. For design or marketing ideas, you might choose eYeka or jovoto. If it’s software related, you might try ChallengePost.

As a researcher, you can embrace cocreation much closer to home, starting with your next project. You might have to break a few of “the rules.” For instance, instead of keeping your actual purpose a secret, you can selectively share your goals and seek help from the end users. You might have to let the client team out of the back room to interact directly with the participants, turning the moderator into a facilitator.

Co-creation methods don’t fit every project. They require considerable planning, generally more than conventional approaches. You need to structure your challenge carefully to get useful co-creation. The payoff is the huge gains in learning that can occur quite rapidly. Another significant payoff is really engaging, energizing and mobilizing the internal project team.

Your consumers want you to be better – co-creation is a way to let them help you be better.

Are we paying attention to Kickstarter?

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I love Kickstarter. The creativity and array of new ideas is astounding. Are we, as an industry, paying attention? And at five years, do we understand what is it doing to the marketing research business?

almost-finished product. However, the prototype is now the “proof of concept”, and is usually the best way for a project to explain and sell their product or creation, and to convey their narrative of the project and its creative process.

Sound familiar?

Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform for innovative ideas, products and productions. The company’s stated mission is to help bring creative projects to life – may it be tech products, film, comics to food-related projects. Its service is now available in Canada.

According to Kickstarter data (2012), only 50% of crowdfunding projects on Kickstarter were successful. Interestingly, of the money actually pledged on Kickstarter, 92% of it went to successful campaigns, and only 7.9% were pledged to campaigns that ultimately failed.

When Kickstarter describes itself the first thing on the list is this: “Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative projects.”

It is new... mostly. It’s a disruptive, democratizing platform to allow anyone the chance to literally kick start their project, or perhaps to take it to the next level. However, a lot of what makes Kickstarter work are the strategies and tools of the previous generation of marketing and development.

This shows that the users and crowdfunding backers of Kickstarter’s user base operate along these lines of confidence. A lack of confidence in and/ or poorly framed project will result in an overall lack of any funding. Conversely, target attainment is market validation.

However, there are also many projects that intentionally fail for the reason of research.

In the past, most products (creative or otherwise) usually went through a period of testing and research before anything would be released to consumers.

Kickstarter’s model gives creators the option to validate market potential and develop their product as quickly as possible, and present a niche audience as something nearly fully formed, needing only their assistance to come into life.

This contravenes the traditional staged research model: you are receiving your target market response to the semi-final product, instead of speculation and testing beforehand.

Kickstarter makes quick prototyping a necessity; you need to present either the actual creation you want to make, or enough infrastructure and design to make it clear that the actual creation of the thing with a clear path to completion. Because of this, Kickstarter is typically not suited to all of the pre-work, the brainstorming and problem solving that leads up to an

How has Kickstarter cut into our industry? It turned the traditional risk aversion research model on its head.

Through simple disruption, Kickstarter delivers remix of the older tools, reappropriating and utilizing those pieces that are still useful in marketing and communications, but with the support, insight, and engagement provided by crowdsourcing, meta-data and social media platforms. I urge all to spend some time on the platform and then on its complementary site Kickspy.

Interestingly, later on in Kickstarter’s self-description, they state: “Creative works were funded this way for centuries.” They continue to outline this model, stating how creatives from earlier centuries would rely on smaller patrons, subscribers, who would often get an early version, a first look, or a special edition of the content. Nothing new, right? But this time around, success or failure is validated by the data.

Ruth Corbin, CMRP CorbinPartners Inc. Dear Dr. Ruth My small firm has been hired to test customer service for a well-known pizza chain. Instead of interviewing customers, I plan to be the customer myself, and rate different franchise outlets for this pizza chain on a list of criteria important to the chain’s management. This approach would allow me to enjoy a lot of pizza and charge it back to my client. I assume there is no ethical problem there. If the results are positive, the company would then promote its high customer ratings, as evidence that it’s Canada’s favourite pizza chain. Since it’s not really a survey, am I bound by MRIA Standards for this kind of project?

Pepperoni Pattie Dear Ms. Pattie: As a member of MRIA, you are bound by its rules of professional conduct for any public data collection project.

Your project comes under the category of “Mystery Shopping.” Please see ESOMAR’s guidelines for mystery shopping studies at https://www. esomar.org/uploads/public/knowledgeand-standards/codes-and-guidelines/ ESOMAR_Codes-and-Guidelines_ MysteryShopping.pdf. Until MRIA

publishes any explicit customization for Canada, ESOMAR guidelines on mystery shopping are the reference point for MRIA. (Would readers do your columnist a favour, and check to see if you would wish for any modification to ESOMAR Mystery Shopping guidelines, for MRIA’s next Standards update? Then write and let me know.)

Some of your pizza-lover ideas present a problem. If you are the only mystery-shopping customer, your results are subject to a bias akin to singleinterviewer-bias in personal interview studies. You should control for possible biasing effects by having more than one mystery-pizza-shopper.

There is no ethical problem in having your client pay for your pizza indulgences, as long as appropriate disclosure is made. If the project costs are itemized in your research proposal, you should show the disbursement for

pizza. If you and your client agree on an all-in price for a well-defined deliverable, we assume the client would not object to how you allocate your budget.

Your second-last sentence is a big deal. You say the client may want to rely on your results for an advertising claim. Now the standards for “truth in advertising” kick in. The research has to be demonstrably statistically reliable and geographically representative; the service components must be validly measured.

If the claim is about being Canada’s “favourite pizza chain”, then consider whether people will infer that the ad refers to how the pizza actually tastes.

If that is the case, then just measuring “service” won’t provide evidence to support the claim. And if the claim is based only on ratings of your client’s own franchise outlets, you can count on receiving complaints by all those competitive pizza companies who may feel unfairly maligned.

My Pepperoni friend, please consider again all the ingredients that need to be assembled for a successful project. Who pays for the pizza is the least of your concerns. d.r.

COLUMNIST S

Ask Dr. Ruth

Questions for this column may be addressed to rcorbin@corbinpartners.com

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BOOK

REVIEWS A Review of

Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies

By Dan Zarrella, Published by Wiley, 2013 Reviewed by Sandra Beckwith Dan Zarrella, the social media scientist who authored The Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies, wants you to toss out much of what you’ve heard about social media marketing and focus on what his research tells you instead.

In his introduction (which is a must-read), he refers disdainfully to this oft-repeated social media advice: • “Be awesome.”

• “Engage in the conversation.”

• “Have a personality.”

The definition of “awesome,” according to his research, depends on the social network.

Twitter users like and retweet links, while Facebook users favor photos and blog readers like videos.

And do you really need to chat it up? Not on Twitter, according to Zarrella’s data. Before reading this book, I heard time and time again that I should engage with people on Twitter.

We’re told to reply to comments on tweets and thank people for the retweets. It’s the opposite, according to Zarrella’s research, which shows that Twitter accounts with the largest followings have the lowest level of engagement. What they lack in chatter they make up for in links: The highly followed accounts tweet more links than accounts with fewer followers.

If you show a personality – yours or your company’s – make sure it’s a positive one. Across all networks, people like positive perspectives and information more than they like negative commentary. But, interestingly enough, they’ll take negative over neutral. Neutral is boring.

Conclusions, advice come from research

Zarrella’s book is based on data accumulated and analyzed in part through his job as a viral marketing scientist at Hubspot, Inc., a company that sells marketing software to customers using the Web to generate leads. He leads us through 40

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the dos and don’t by focusing our attention on the numbers coming out of research about how people use social media. The book is loaded with graphs showing us how often people click on paid search advertising or the relationship between the time you tweet and the clickthrough rate.

Of particular value to authors is the first chapter on e-books, with its statistics on reader preferences for genre, format, and length. (I’ll share more on this in the February 12, 2014 issue of the Build Book Buzz e-newsletter; subscribe at http://buildbookbuzz.com.)

The Science of Marketing also shares data and advice on SEO (search engine optimization) and devotes chapters to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, blogging, and e-mail marketing.

Data changes my behavior Here are just four of the many things I’ll be doing differently after reading Zarrella’s book: 1. S cheduling blog posts for the morning, not afternoon.

2. A dding more photos to marketing-related status updates on Facebook.

3. L osing the guilt over not having the time to interact more with Twitter connections.

4. A dding “new blog post” to my new blog post tweets.

I found the book extremely useful and recommend it to anyone using social media for marketing purposes, but it does have one flaw: the lack of attention to LinkedIn. Considering it’s the third largest social network and much larger than Pinterest, I would have expected a chapter on that social network.

Fortunately, it’s not a fatal flaw.

Sandra Beckwith, a recovering publicist with more than 25 years of award-winning publicity experience, now teaches authors how to promote their books. She can be reached at sb@buildbookbuzz.com and her website http://buildbookbuzz.com.

BO O K R EVI EWS

A Review of How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know

By Byron Sharp, Published by Oxford University Press, 2010 Reviewed by Susan Abbott

Despite my considerable training in the subject, marketing has often been a mystery to me. Once you get past the five P’s, it’s hard to find much of anything that looks like an accepted body of knowledge supported by hard evidence. Byron Sharp’s book, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know is a refreshing, tall drink of water in this desert.

How Brands Grow sets forth eleven principles – law-like patterns generalized from empirical evidence. Each chapter explains one of the principles and builds a case based on research evidence. This is a book designed for marketing practitioners. The writing is clear and downto-earth, the examples are compelling, and qualitative researchers are likely to recognize many global brands in the research data.

Clearly supported by data, the laws discussed are patterns that occur repeatedly across many years and across many different brand categories.

All have implications for our clients’ strategies, and Sharp makes practical suggestions about marketing implications.

The “Double Jeopardy” law is a good example: “Brands with less market share have far fewer buyers, and these buyers are slightly less loyal (in their buying and attitudes).” Clients that agonize over ways to build higher loyalty on a smaller customer base are unlikely to succeed.

Instead, they need to focus on building the customer base. Cross-selling is another doublejeopardy-effect metric: brands with smaller market share have lower cross-sales, regardless of the effectiveness of their cross-selling programs.

The “Natural Monopoly” law says that larger brands tend to have a monopoly on light buyers: for example, if you buy only one soft drink during the course of a year, it is very likely to be a Coke.

The author is quite passionate about challenging what he sees as current marketing

orthodoxies that are not supported by evidence.

The notion of passionate brand loyalists comes under close scrutiny. Sharp argues that the loyalty that consumers show to brands is much more akin to habit, and nothing at all like the loyalty that sports fans show to their favorite teams.

Sharp suggests that the evidence presented should give us a foundation to shift our thinking about many accepted principles of marketing. Very few brands, he argues, have true differentiation; instead, they compete as “near lookalikes.” Instead of seeking to build differentiation, brands should focus on being distinctive, being memorable and having highly salient communications. Marketing success is more dependent on mental and physical availability. Mental availability has to do with the structure of our memories. A more available product has more memory associations and often more cues in the environment.Building brand salience means increasing “the quantity and quality of memory links to and from a brand.”

Reading this book is a bit like “taking the red pill” in the movie The Matrix, opening your mind to fact-based arguments that fly in the face of the ideas still firmly rooted in marketing practice. It is intellectually stimulating and highly relevant to our work.

The loyalty that consumers show to brands is much more akin to habit and nothing at all like the loyalty that sports fans show to their favorite teams.

Susan Abbott is the President of Abbott Research & Consulting in Toronto, Canada. She can be reached at susan@abbottresearch.com. (Originally published in QRCA Views) vue | MAY 2014

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GOLD SEAL–CERTIFIED CORPORATE RESEARCH AGENCIES The Research Agencies listed below have earned the right to display MRIA’s Gold Seal–Certified logomark. MRIA congratulates and salutes them.

GOLD SEAL–CERTIFIED CORPORATE RESEARCH AGENCIES

Gold Seal Certification is a world class mark of distinction. It is earned by Research Agencies through a comprehensive self-assessment, follow-up interview, and sample evidence examination process — conducted by an independent, third party Reviewer from a major Canadian CA firm – which attests to their being consistently in compliance with MRIA’s rigorous professional standards.

For clients, Gold Seal-Certified status means a trusted choice – that they can choose a research supplier with confidence, one that has earned MRIA’s seal of approval and must continually re-earn that distinction by passing a Certification Review once every three years.

GOLD SEAL CORPORATE RESEARCH AGENCIES – CERTIFICATION PENDING The following Corporate Research Agency members are in the process of completing their first Gold Seal Certification Review:

Heads Up Inspiration from Information Inc. Illumina Research Partners Insights West

Academica Group ACCE Inc. Advanis Inc Advitek Inc. Asking Canadians BBM Analytics BBM Canada BrandSpark International Campaign Research Canadian Viewpoint Inc. Cido Research COMPAS Inc. Consumer Vision Ltd. Corbin Partners Inc. Corporate Research Associates CRC Research CROP Inc. EKOS Research Associates Inc. Elemental Data Collection Inc. Environics Research Group Limited Focal Research Consultants Ltd. Forum Research Inc. Fresh Squeezed Ideas GfK Research Dynamics Greenwich Associates Hay Research International Head Count Head Research Inc. Hotspex Inc. Insightrix Research Inc. Insignia Marketing Research Inc. Ipsos Reid Lang Research Inc. Leger, The Research Intelligence Group Maritz Research Market Probe Canada

Market Pulse Inc. MBA Recheche McWhirter & Associates MD Analytics Inc. Millward Brown MQO Research Mustel Research Group Ltd. Nanos Research Nielsen Consumer Insights NRG Research Group Opinion Search Inc. Phoenix Strategic Perspectives Inc. POLLARA PRA Inc. Quorus Consulting Group Inc. R.A. Malatest & Associates Ltd. Radix Market Research Rand Market Research Corporation Research & Incite Research Dimensions Research House Inc. Research Management Group Research Now Research Strategy Group Inc. Resinnova Research Inc. Service Metrics Inc. SmartPoint Research Inc. Tele-Surveys Plus / Télé-Sondages Plus The Logit Group The Verde Group Thinkwell Research TNS Canadian Facts Toluna Trend Research Inc. Vision Critical

The Gold Seal Certification process is open to all MRIA Corporate Research Agency Members that have been in continuous operation in Canada least| two years, 42 for atvue MAY 2014regardless of firm size, structure or number of employees. For more information on MRIA Corporate Memberships or our Certified Marketing Research Professional (CMRP) designation for individual practitioners, visit www.mria-arim.ca.

2014

AWARDS

& RECOGNITION

Awards and Recognition serve critical functions within a professional association. They provide motivation for the many volunteers upon whose efforts the association depends. They provide an opportunity for the self-promotion within the association that puts a positive face on our activities and makes people feel good about belonging to the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA). They also serve to highlight leadership and examples of excellence, in all areas, which are powerful ways of communicating the ideals and direction of the association.

This year’s award winners will be announced and celebrated at the 2014 Excellence Awards Gala Soiree Dinner being held at the Sheraton in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, as part of MRIA’s national conference, on the evening of Tuesday, June 10, 2014.

Previous winners are also posted online at http://mria-arim.ca/events-awards/excellence-in-research-awards/past-winners

BEST IN CLASS

PUBLIC POLICY IMPACT AWARD

MRIA AWARD OF DISTINCTION

Awarded for a research project that serves as a shining example to research practitioners and users.

The MRIA Public Policy Impact Award will be awarded for a research project in the broader public sector that has had a demonstrable public policy impact.

The MRIA Award of Distinction recognizes younger members of the Association who have brought distinction to themselves and to the marketing, survey and public opinion research and market intelligence industry/profession through leadership and achievement in their professional and personal lives.

EXCELLENCE BEHIND THE SCENES Awarded to recognize research practitioners whose efforts, such as data collection, recruiting, data processing and analysis or related areas, while enabling the completion of marketing research projects, are “behind the scenes” and do not have direct client contact.

BEST MULTINATIONAL Awarded to research practitioners who have initiated and taken the lead in designing and implementing a marketing research project, which collects data from respondents in more than one country.

BEST INTEGRATION Awarded in recognition of a research project that demonstrates successful integration of marketing research with other information sources.

THE MURRAY PHILP ALTRUISTIC AWARD Awarded for a marketing research project done on a pro-bono or reduced profit basis, for a not-for-profit organization that has contributed positively to the individuals, groups or communities that form part of our Canadian network, that it was meant to help.

CLIENT-SIDE RESEARCHER IMPACT AND EFFECTIVENESS AWARD MRIA’s Client-Side Researcher Impact and Effectiveness Award recognizes a member, employed as a Client-Side Researcher Corporate member of the Association, for outstanding achievements over the past year which have served to elevate the stature of marketing, survey and public opinion research and market intelligence at senior decision-making levels of his or her own organization.

MRIA AWARD OF OUTSTANDING MERIT The MRIA Award of Outstanding Merit recognizes conspicuous and sustained service to or on behalf of MRIA or the marketing, survey and public opinion research industry/profession.

Such sustained service may have been rendered to MRIA (or one of its predecessor Associations; or some combination thereof); to related industry/ professional groups; or to the community and society generally.

As the Award is intended to honour younger members of the Association, the age of 40 years has been established as the cutoff for eligibility.

GRASSROOTS VOLUNTEER LEADERSHIP AWARD MRIA’s Grassroots Volunteer Leadership Award recognizes sustained service to the Association – or, through the Association, to the industry/profession more broadly – which has not been rendered in an MRIA national volunteer leadership capacity.

Such service must have been delivered over a period of at least two consecutive years.

CHAPTER MERIT AWARD MRIA’s Chapter Merit Award recognizes the MRIA Chapter that has demonstrated the strongest support for one or more elements of MRIA’s current Strategic Plan or its immediately previous Strategic Plan during the past year.

This support may have been demonstrated through a new initiative or a special program launched during the year; a single event or Chapter activity; or refinements to an existing program.

The eminent members of the 2013-14 Judging Panel for the Excellence in Research Awards represent research practitioners from many different areas: Chair: Anastasia Arabia – MRIA President, Trend Research

MAY 2014 43 Judges: Ed Gibson, CMRP – CRC Research • Gail Tibbo, CMRP – Incisive Marketing • Kimberlee Niziol Jonas –vue Instar| Research