Target groups: Opinion leaders, mavens

 

Most of us would accept that word-of-mouth communication has huge potential, but the challenge for brand and media planners is to harness its growing power and influence in such a way that it delivers ...

What will society look like in 2015 and what can a product and service provider do now to prepare for such an unknown place? This paper seeks to address these challenges, in order to develop a view of ...

Has the monopoly of traditional population segmentation criteria and sampling methods come to an end? Can demographics (employment, age, sex, ethnicity, etc) or behavioural consumption and cultural ha ...

This article summarises the book 'Join the Conversation: how to engage marketing-weary consumers with the power of community, dialogue, and partnership', by Joseph Jaffe (Wiley, 2007). The key premise ...

This article summarises the book 'Herd: how to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature', by Mark Earls (Wiley, 2007). The key premise of the book is that 'We are a we-species who do indivi ...

Word of mouth (WOM) is attracting increased attention as a vital source of influence on purchase decision- making. The rapid uptake of online social networking and other types of Web 2.0 applications ...

This article argues for the importance of influencers (or advocates) in shaping the future growth of a brand, and introduces FutureView, a TNS research tool for identifying the 'future shapers' for sp ...

Using a wealth of examples - from the Diet Coke/Mentos experiments to Dove, Red Bull and Oxfam - Brian Dargan and Matthew Hunt, from DraftFCB, explain the challenge of 'digital extremists'. These are ...

Consumers should be at the heart of client innovation initiatives. This paper provides brand owners with a fresh perspective when thinking about how to involve consumers in processes linked to innovat ...

Claire Spencer, chief executive at i-to-i research, describes research undertaken in January 2005 to better understand the 'rogue' 30% of the British public who did not support London's bid to host th ...

Trendsetters' habits and behavior form the mass culture and help forecast the overall tendencies of market development. This paper reviews the methods of revealing and studying trendsetters, analyzing ...

Cosmocrats are an elite of luxury consumers estimated to number 20m worldwide, which could double in size between 2000 and 2010. Luxury advertisers find it difficult to reach this highly attractive gr ...

Marketers can fast-track new products or marketing campaigns by targeting early adopters and opinion formers. Building on earlier research and work by Procter & Gamble, this paper tries to identify ty ...

Explores the role of children as innovators or adopters of new products. A research study (2003) is reported amongst children and young people aged five to 18, with different questionnaires for the th ...

Argues that turning quantitative data into `insight’ is no longer enough: market researchers, especially in new product development, need `foresight’, the ability to predict future trends. A key compo ...

This paper explores how changes in our social and cultural perception of brands, advertising and marketing, in addition to lifestyle shifts, have lead to the growing power and value of word of mouth i ...

Preparing a media plan aimed at opinion leaders requires accurately identifying and describing the attributes of this target as well as measuring its affinities with different media. Our research find ...

The Tipping Point (Gladwell 2000) is the influential bestseller on how hits happen. It is also a book about market research, revealing the three key research initiatives that can unlock the viral pote ...

The way a company chooses to disclose information about itself greatly impacts its reputation. The Internet is often overlooked as a channel that can be strategically used to relay corporate messages ...

In a marketplace where consumers are deluged daily by 10,000 to 30,000 commercial messages and 200 or so personalized messages, key influencers increasingly help shape how products and services are bo ...

The idea of ‘buzz’ in marketing is hardly new, although it hasn’t always been called that. But in the last few years years, a buzz ‘industry’ has grown up, arising partly out of the mid-1990s’ practic ...

Examines the meaning of the term `cool’, and argues that it describes how cultures change, interact and coalesce, and that marketers need to understand it.

This article reviews the MORI's annual Captains of Industry survey which consists of face-to-face interviews with senior board directors of major companies. The authors touch on the status of PR, adve ...

Martin Oxley and Clive Nancarrow describe a research project which they believe could contribute to new products being successfully introduced to the market. The paper discusses the importance of attr ...

This paper demonstrates how intelligent analyses of existing single source databases can help identify key groups of “early adopters”; not just in terms of demographics, but in terms of lifestyle and ...

This paper describes a research project born of a business need at Procter & Gamble. Management had the vision that adoption of our new innovations could be accelerated if we could identify those cons ...

One of the significant issues facing brand owners is the successful introduction of new products and/or services to market. The importance of facilitating new product diffusion is increasingly importa ...

A media plan that uses magazines for advertising and targets opinion leaders can make use of two levers which involve interpersonal communication: the first is quantitative because opinion leaders are ...

Consumers must continue to adopt new technologies in order for the promise of 'convergence' to be realized and to continue driving the engines of the world's major economies. This paper uses the 'Diff ...

This article describes a study commissioned to explore the Youth Trendsetter market, in order to create an in-depth profile of forward thinking opinion leaders and early adopters.