ESOMAR Qualitative 2011

Summary
This paper describes a multi-client research project into the notion of sustainability. The research explores the meaning of sustainability from the perspective of both consumers and marketing, including their similarities, differences and opportunities of aligning the two. Equally, it offers guidelines for incorporating messages relating to sustainability into communications, based on the psychology of sustainability, including how to overcome consumer cynicism by exploring the signals and aesthetics of sustainability. The multi-client backing of the project allows for new general insights as well as insights for different industries that want to include sustainability in their marketing.

Summary
This paper argues that culture - routinely ignored by "traditional" market research - can be an inspiring and effective source of insights for developing brand strategy and innovation, especially when combined with more consumer-centric methods. It illustrates this with a detailed case study of a research project undertaken by Pfizer to identify new opportunities in the women's health market in Europe. The pharma company used a three-stage process of mapping the category’s cultural and consumer orthodoxies; identifying new opportunities and cultural tactics; and crafting a brand and innovation strategy. The project identified a range of macro changes taking place in women’s health (e.g. women's new achievements and growing confidence, and a shift from health being seen as "binary" to encompassing a wider "wellbeing"). The project enabled Pfizer to message women effectively across Europe, it challenged how it launched new pills globally and led to a restructuring of the company. The paper concludes that market researchers are ideally placed to develop strong frameworks for cultural analysis and integrate these into their work with powerful impact.

Summary
This paper uses a case study of a research project for Nestlé's NESTEA iced tea brand to highlight the importance of effective collaboration between a client's insight function, its market research agency and its advertising agency to bring customer segments to life. Such an approach, it argues, ensures that insights and learnings are deployed throughout an organisation and actually acted upon. The NESTEA project involved two consumer segments ("Youthful and Carefree" and "Individual and Purposeful") and involved the advertising agency conducting in-home research, followed by fuller qualitative research by the research agency (with life collages, filming consumption behaviour, visual diaries and 'Me and my NESTEA' self-scripting). To deploy these learnings throughout the organisation, the agencies ran a series of workshops to immerse marketers in the lifestyles of the segments. These consumer insights were fed into the development of communications by the advertising agency and have also informed the creation of a platform for portfolio management and brand activation.

Summary
This paper argues that market researchers wanting to spread and engage their organisations internally with the findings and implications of their consumer insight research should learn from well-established principles of consumer brand-building and marketing communications. The paper uses creative examples from GAMEplanner (Goal, Action, Measurement, Evaluation), a global insights project done with the mobile phone manufacturer, Nokia. It demonstrates the application of 10 classic marcomms principles to internal communication, including: get attention; be relevant to your audience; be memorable; create a campaign device; avoid corporate cliché; the medium is the message; blend broadcast, narrowcast and social; embrace mavens; give gifts; and take risks. This approach, the paper argues, enables optimal value to be derived from a company's insight department and provides a model that can easily be leveraged for future projects.

Summary
This paper explores a new framework for insight generation, based on four distinctive but overlapping types of insights: discovery insights, predictive insights, explanatory insights and transformational insights. It argues that qualitative and quantitative techniques can generate each type of insight on their own, but the likelihood of generating insights increases exponentially when qualitative and quantitative techniques are thoroughly integrated (as opposed to simply "combined" in a research effort). The paper asserts that the two approaches have complementary strengths and weaknesses, and are subject to different interpretation biases, and that both can learn something from each other about identifying and mitigating these biases.

Summary
This paper describes how the Saudi Arabian-listed Savola Foods used qualitative research to properly position a newly-launched edible oil brand in Sudan, a country with very challenging market dynamics. The paper shows how poor decisions can be made from shallow interpretation of qualitative data and, equally, how putting the analysis in the right context and connecting it with other relevant consumer knowledge it can lead to extracting meaningful insights.

Summary
This paper examines youth trends across Asia's burgeoning middle class, specifically focusing on the generation born this millennium who are experiencing growing affluence, smaller family sizes and a proliferation of media. It explores the implications of these societal changes for marketers by comparing youth values and analysing youth brands across a mix of more developed Asian countries (e.g. Japan, Korea) with those that are undergoing rapid development now (e.g. China, India, Thailand, Indonesia). Its conclusions for global marketers include: tap into universal drivers of human motivation; messaging should include emotional and rational elements (and is more important than creativity, per se); and there's an advantage to size and appearing big.

Summary
The increasing access to high tech 'smart phones' by consumers from the developing world means that qualitative research no longer needs to stay within the rigid confines of twentieth century definitions of in-group homogeneity, focus group interviews, in depth interviews, or even physically present ethnography. This paper, based on a research project into how people collect water in urban India, explores the potential of harnessing mobile technology to present a live, hands-on picture of human behaviour and innovations.

Summary
This paper critically discusses the status quo of consumer research in the sensory industry. Based on a case study in the oral care category, the authors advocate a rethinking of current research paradigms in the industry and suggest an interdisciplinary and multi-perspective angle on 'researching the senses', that ensures sensory factors are included in future projects.

Summary
This paper explores a new way to co-create concepts with consumers, making use of search advertising such as Google adwords. Using an example from the financial services sector, it describes how a variety of different "connectors" (ways to introduce a product or service to consumers) were embedded in search advertising. For example, one search ad featured the copy "What's your number?", referring to the amount people thought they would need to retire comfortably. Consumers' interest in the competing executions was measured by monitoring clickthrough rates. By making specific landing pages, the paper argues that it is possible to involve people in a co-creation process to develop the connectors further.