The latest highlights in our monthly editor's newsletter of new content on warc.com include shopper insights, multicultural marketing, qualitative research trends and updates on our Warc and Admap prizes.

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Shopper insights

The rise of shopper marketing has seen brands looking to engage recession-struck, web-connected consumers throughout the purchase journey. And, based on our recent attendance of the Shopper Insights conference in Prague, it seems that gaining a deeper knowledge of shopper motivations is becoming ever more important to brand owners.

How Tesco built a real-time insights programme (open access) describes how the king of quantitative customer data is seeking more human insights through its in-depth Tesco Families study.

Equally, Retail strategy and shopper insights highlights new approaches from the likes of McDonald's, Wrigley and adidas towards understanding how their consumers tick.

Finally, Convenience and the future of retail marketing looks beyond the short-term impact of the recession to argue that convenience and quality will eventually overtake price as consumers' key priority.

Multicultural marketing

Demographic shifts in the United States led the ANA's CEO Bob Liodice to announce recently that multicultural is the new general marketing (open access). And brands seem to be getting the message, despite the fact that just 7% of the USA's $117bn annual marketing spend is currently devoted to ethnically-specific campaigns.

For example, Walmart is taking its multicultural programs and budgets out of a siloed department, while PepsiCo is now referring to its own multicultural activities as simply cultural branding.

And Procter & Gamble's multicultural initiatives for brands including Crest, Gillette, Gain and Pampers underline the new commitment that America's major marketers are showing to producing culturally-specific communications.

The new qualitative

Evidence from ESOMAR's recent qualitative research conference suggests that the industry's traditional quant/qual divide might be breaking down.

Bridging the gap argues that wholly integrating (rather than just combining) qual and quant techniques increases exponentially the researcher's chances of generating the most valuable kinds of insights: discovery, predictive, explanatory and transformational.

Blurring the boundaries picks up this thread and shows how the "qualitization" of quant research has enabled PC manufacturer Acer to validate new product propositions in the fast-moving consumer technology sector.

Warc and Admap prizes

The Warc Prize for Innovation is now open for entries demonstrating innovation in communications. It is your chance to showcase your work to a global audience (and win $10,000).

For an inside track, check out Innovation and the 70/20/10 rule (open access) in which Prize chairman Jonathan Mildenhall describes his own approach to comms innovation at The Coca-Cola Company.

Meanwhile, The Admap Prize is looking for bold thinkers on the theme of the future of planning in brand communications. The top three entries will be published in Admap, with the best of these winning a lifetime subscription to the magazine.

Need some inspiration? Then read The future of planning roundtable (open access), a landmark debate from last year.

Finally, December's Admap is all about the influence of mobile on shopping. Read it online at warc.com/admap.