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Archive for the ‘Caroline Harrison’ Category« Previous EntriesIn The Drive-In SeatThursday, May 12th, 2011  A unique ‘new’ concept to hit the UK inspires Caroline Harrison this week to think about branding opportunities. Having watched the movie Grease a gazillion times, I’m more than familiar with John Travolta belting out “Stranded at the drive-in”, having just tried to woo Olivia Newton-John and having had his over-enthusiastic advances rebuffed in a rather painful way. Sadly, I myself have never had the chance to go to a drive-in movie. There doesn’t seem to be much of a market for it in the UK. Maybe that has something to do with our dismal weather. Or maybe it’s simply because I didn’t grow up in the 1950s… Either way, for me, there’s something eternally ‘romantic’, ‘cool’, ‘American’ or just plain ‘novel’ about the idea of a drive-in movie. All of which is leading up to my telling you about something that recently caught my imagination. Apparently, a new drive-in movie concept has hit Britain’s capital. The Starlite Urban Drive-In, in East London, lets cinema-goers watch films while seated comfortably in one of a range of shiny new Volvos.  In a city where many people rely on public transport to get around, the good news is that the 25 Volvos are all permanently pre-parked, so (a) you don’t need to drive to the venue and (b) you don’t even need a drivers’ license. A maximum of two people are allowed in each car (how romantic!) and, for £25 per ticket, you get a drink and some popcorn as well as a seat. Meanwhile, the film’s soundtrack is broadcast through the car’s radio and waitresses on roller skates wheel around taking and delivering food and drink orders (how cool!). The only downside is that tickets seem to be the hottest thing in town – two initial screenings of Grease and Dirty Dancing sold out online in 30 seconds – so my chances of going any time soon are fairly slim. As the sole provider of the vehicles, Volvo sees the partnership as a good fit for the brand. It also provides a unique and novel opportunity to reach a younger audience that may not have been exposed to the Volvo brand before. So successful has this new concept been that several major film studios have apparently approached Starlite asking them to show their movie premieres, and a number of other companies are keen to get involved with future sponsorship. When it comes to any kind of promotional, sponsorship or branding opportunity, companies do have to consider their options carefully. Obviously price and anticipated return-on-investment play a large part in the decision, but the arrangement must be relevant to the business, the brand or the company ethos. What’s more, it is also vital that the opportunity puts them in contact with, or firmly places them in the mindset of, their potential target market. But, beyond that, it’s also a great idea to associate your brand with something that’s unique, will have impact and is likely to create a real buzz. As far as I am concerned, that’s just what Volvo has done here. And, who knows, next time I’m on the lookout for a new car, the fun and funky brand that Volvo would appear to be might just now enter my consideration set. Indeed, it might even prove to be “the one that I want.” (Sorry!) An Age Old ProblemThursday, February 10th, 2011 Japan’s disappearing citizens only serve to show Caroline Harrison the importance of keeping your information up to date in this week’s Thursday Night Insight. Six months ago, a story doing the rounds in the international press caught my attention: Tokyo’s oldest person goes missing! Japan launches nationwide search for centenarians! Almost 200 of Japan’s centenarians missing! How bizarre, I thought. How can you misplace so many elderly people? Of course, when you delve deeper into the story, you begin to understand – sort of – what has happened: In early August last year, the 113-year-old woman who was listed as Tokyo’s oldest person was found to be missing; whereabouts unknown even to her own family. In fact, officials discovered she had not lived at the address where she was registered for some 20 years! Embarrassing, right? But what made the story particularly toe-curling was that it came to light just days after the city’s oldest man, who would have been 111, was found dead and mummified. He had actually passed away some 32 years earlier! Now, according to Japan’s latest audit of those aged over 100, nearly 200 centenarians are ‘missing’. Twenty-one of these would be older than the nation’s current official oldest person of 113 years of age – and one is a 125-year-old woman whose registered address was turned into a park back in 1981… Much as these revelations amused me at the time, I admit it’s a slightly macabre topic which isn’t actually all that funny. What’s more, there is another important point to make which, for market researchers, may be just as distressing. It’s all very well for Japan to lay claim to many of the world’s oldest citizens, but if they’ve been dead for 30 years then, in my humble opinion, it doesn’t really count! Of course, as with anything, any figures you have at your fingertips today, will already be going out of date by tomorrow. In exactly the same way, there’s absolutely no point in thinking you understand how, when, what and why your customers buy from you if the information is four years old. Chances are these customers will have moved on – or at the very least altered their buying patterns or changed their requirements. Equally, what’s the use of having information on a market’s size, structure and potential if you then wait for 18 months before deciding to enter this market? Things can have changed enormously in that time and what once looked like a fantastic opportunity could well have turned into a much more challenging – if not completely impossible – prospect. So my message today is simple but critical: the data you rely on to make important decisions MUST be up to date. And, for all of you who argue that this Thursday Night Insight would have had far more relevance and impact when these stories first broke back in the summer of last year…well, my point exactly! Called Into QuestionFriday, October 1st, 2010 In this week’s Thursday Night Insight, Caroline Harrison questions how useful the questions on our national censuses really are. I was reading, not that long ago, about how Canada’s Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA) had written to the government to oppose its plans to drop the mandatory long-form census in favour of a voluntary questionnaire. According to the MRIA, the proposed new voluntary National Household Survey will likely have “a substantially lower” response rate, the resulting data “will be less robust”, and “skewed” and “biased” data will end up being used to formulate public policy. Not long after, sensationalist headlines appeared in British newspapers declaring that next year’s UK census, which has been carried out every 10 years since 1801 (with the exception of 1941, thanks to World War II), could be the last! Surely not?! In fact, when you delve deeper, you discover that it’s not quite as the headlines would have you believe; it’s not so much that the government is thinking of completely scrapping the idea, rather that a better, more useful and less expensive format is being proposed. Of course, the point of a census is to give the government information on exactly who is living where, so public funds can be better allocated. Yet, I can’t be the only person who thinks the census provides a fascinating snapshot of society, not to mention being an excellent aid to tracing our family trees! In fact, as I took part in my first US census earlier this year, I was strangely excited. I couldn’t help but think that one day, when my great-great-great-grandchildren are tracing their family tree, they will puzzle over why, after appearing on three UK censuses, I suddenly turned up on the other side of the Atlantic! It’s nearly 10 years since I filled in a UK census form so I can’t honestly remember what information I was asked to provide. However, I have to say I was surprised at how brief the US census form was – basically, just the number of people in the household, then the name, sex, date of birth and ethnicity of each individual. Following completion of the form, discussion broke out in our New York office as to the questions that were asked. Were there really enough questions to give the government all the information it needs to decide how much funding to put into new roads, hospitals, policing, etc? Were the ethnicity and race questions that were asked really all that relevant or politically correct? Take, for example, Q8 on the census:
Then Q9, asking about race, gave the options of:
One colleague gave the example of a friend who, although living for many years in New York, was originally Puerto Rican, but with one Jewish and one Cuban parent. How should she classify herself? Taking this one step further, how does she define her daughter, whose father is white? Which box or boxes should she tick? How well are the various options labelled? How necessary are these questions in the first place? I don’t know if the US census got it exactly right. It would appear that the current UK census might not be working to its full potential. Canada seems keen to improve its census but may not be going the right way about it. What this is all bringing me to say, in a very roundabout way, is that devising the perfect questionnaire, which asks all the right questions, gives all the right options for answers, and is exactly the right length so as to gather all the required information without putting people off completing it, is a hugely skillful task. As with most things, different people will have their own opinions as to the best approach – and many of them will have valid points to make. But only through knowledge of devising questionnaires, a great deal of experience in the field, and more than a dash of common sense, will you have a real chance of getting it just right. And that, appearing today on the blog of a leading b2b market research specialist, is all I want to say on the matter! Click here to read our free e-book – Questionnaire Design Journey Into the Not-So-UnknownFriday, April 23rd, 2010
In today’s Thursday Night Insight, Caroline Harrison comes across a great example of why market research pays dividends. A recent convert to Wikipedia, I was checking out this popular encyclopedia website just the other day. Probably the thing I love most about a half-hour surf on this site is the weird and wonderful voyage of discovery you will experience, as you quickly lose interest in the topic you had originally gone to read up on and spot a far more intriguing word or phrase to click on, thus jumping to a completely different subject. You might go on there to learn more about the life and times of Winston Churchill (actually, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940-45 and then again from 1951-55), but two clicks of the mouse later you can be learning about the origins of the kiwi fruit (not originally from New Zealand, as the name might suggest); a couple of clicks after that you’ll be fascinated to learn about the performance of Spain at the Olympic Games (115 medals in all since first participating in the 1900 Games), and a few minutes after you can lose yourself in the riveting topic of pop music in Ukraine (the 1990s saw an explosion in the Ukrainian Pop music world – apparently). Indeed, such a bizarre ‘Wiki-journey’ the other day led me to a list of the world’s largest shopping malls. And it was here that something caught my eye and amused me greatly. Let me enlighten you. The world’s largest shopping mall, with a gross leasable area of 600,000m2 (or 6.46 million sq ft), is said to be the New South China Mall in Dongyuan, China, a city of more than 10 million inhabitants. The mall contains sufficient space for as many as 2,350 stores. It also boasts seven zones modelled on international cities, nations and regions, and features include an 85-foot (25 m) replica of the Arc de Triomphe, a replica of Venice’s St Mark’s bell tower, a 1.3 mile (2.1 km) canal with gondolas, and a 553-metre indoor-outdoor roller coaster. It opened in 2005. It has been 99.2% unoccupied since that time. 99.2% unoccupied??? So, we have here the world’s biggest shopping centre, but there have been more or less no shops (less than a dozen, I understand) in it for the past five years, and presumably very few shoppers either. Not exactly fit for purpose, is it? In fact, it sounds like it was an unbelievably bad idea in the first place. Now I don’t want to sound like a broken record, once again hammering home the need for market research, but surely a little planning and investigation might have revealed this looked likely to be a white elephant of elephantine proportions? Apparently, some people fault the mall’s location in the suburbs of Dongyuan, where it is only practical to travel by car, as the primary reason the mall is largely unoccupied. Dongyuan itself does not have an airport, and there are no major connecting highways adjacent to the mall’s location. Yes, all of these do sound like potential problems which should have been taken into consideration. But did the mall’s planners not also talk to the local population about whether they would be interested in shopping in a new mall? Did they not think about whether good public transport links would make a difference to visitor numbers? Did they not ask major retailers whether they would want to open another branch of their store in this new shopping centre? There are just so many things that should surely have been researched thoroughly before investing millions and millions of dollars in building what could conceivably be dubbed the world’s worst shopping mall, never mind the world’s biggest. For companies too, there is no point in having huge scale, ambitious plans for seemingly amazing products or out-of-this-world services if they are not practical, affordable, attainable or required. Do your market research! Find out if there is a market for your proposed brainchild – and I mean really find out. The money and time it takes to do this will all be worth it when you are able to go ahead and launch your fantastic vision successfully. And, trust me, it will definitely be worth it when you realise you actually had better not go ahead and spend all that money on developing, packaging, promoting, distributing and launching your idea after all! Different Strokes for Different FolksFriday, January 29th, 2010
In her first Thursday Night Insight of 2010, Caroline Harrison takes the opportunity to go back to basics. I’m sure – at least I hope – he won’t mind my telling you this, but I had something of a hand in my colleague Oliver Truman’s last Thursday Night Insight. Whilst knowing that Oliver had “volunteered” to write (I guess some might say “been coerced into writing”!) an article for the B2B International blog, I was also aware, with just a couple of days to go, that other commitments meant he hadn’t yet got around to it. So, when I happened upon an article in the marketing press about the possible rebranding of Newcastle United’s beloved football ground, St. James’ Park, and knowing Oliver to be something of a sports aficionado, I forwarded him a link to the said article, wondering if it might inspire him. Inspire him it did, and some two days later, Oliver treated us to his latest Thursday Night Insight, which I read with interest. But, while Oliver did use the article I had sent him as the basis for his ‘Insight’, what struck me the most was the specific content of his piece. His blog talked in a broad sense about many of the lucrative tie-ins between a company’s brand and the world of sport – be it shirt sponsorship, providing half-time refreshments or prizes, ‘pure’ advertising at the stadia…and, of course, buying the naming rights to the venues themselves. While I could not disagree with any of the points Oliver raised, these were not the issues that had first jumped into my mind when I read about the possible selling of the naming rights to St James’ Park. I immediately focused on, if you like, the more ‘emotional’ side of things – the likely reaction of the fans to any proposed rebranding of their stadium and the potential risks or rewards for any company brave enough/rich enough/stupid enough/inventive enough to take on such an opportunity. In a nutshell, Oliver and I, when given the same basic trigger, had very different thoughts and approaches to the issue. And so, with this in mind, the message of my Thursday Night Insight today is really very simple. Nevertheless, it is absolutely critical. We can never forget that people are all different. Their various upbringings, culture, language, values, education, interests, priorities, desires and much, much more all combine to affect how they think and how they will react to certain situations and stimuli. For example, as we all know only too well, the product or service you provide is never going to meet the exact needs of everybody out there. That is why segmentation of a target audience is so crucial to deciding which markets you can serve successfully and profitably. Equally, if you show a room full of prospective customers your latest product for launch, I guarantee they will all have differing views on it. You may think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread – but so what? That doesn’t necessarily mean any or many other people will agree! Even with the customers you already serve – you can’t assume everything’s always hunkydory with them, nor that they will stay loyal for life. Their needs may change, their expectations will likely shift. That’s one of the things that makes your job and mine so difficult. But that’s also why we turn to market research. While we can never presume to know what all people are thinking all of the time, the great thing is that we are usually able to ask at least some of them how they are feeling. It’s not that difficult to grasp that people can be unpredictable. Fortunately, nor is it that difficult to use market research to make things more certain. Incidentally – for anyone who is even remotely interested – as of November 2009 until the end of the current season, Newcastle’s stadium is temporarily known as Sportsdirect.com @ St James’ Park Stadium. Personally, I think that’s a bit odd – but that doesn’t mean everyone will agree with me, of course…! « Previous Entries |
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