Advertising best practice, evidence and insights

The Power of Pledging: Helping Cancer Research unlock the potential of legacies

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, Jeremy Bullmore Award for Creative Development Research, 2019

Cancer Research UK, a charity, researched the complex and sensitive topic of wills and put supporters' voices at the core of CRUK's Legacy communication strategy.

Business banking switch - business unusual for RBS

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Winner, MRS Award for Financial Services Research, 2019

RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland), a banking brand, launched real-time customer communication research in the UK to understand how it could get consumers to switch banks.

GSK: Targeting persistent pain sufferers

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for New Consumer Insights, 2019

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a pharmaceutical company, used deep ethnographic research to uncover what it is like to live with persistent pain, increasing empathy among clinical and market research professionals in the UK and Germany.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF): From ‘villain’ to ‘vulnerable’: re-writing the story of South Africa’s men and HIV

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Winner, MRS Award for Healthcare Research, 2019

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an American private foundation, helped cast a fresh light on young men in South Africa, demonstrating they are complex, vulnerable individuals in harsh circumstances.

Public Health England’s Be Clear on Cancer Campaign

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Winner, MRS Award for Public Policy/Social Research, 2019

Public Health England (PHE), the government agency, was able to uncover fresh insights in the UK that can be applied to any cancer charity or organisation.

Bayer: The Patient Empathy Workshop

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for Healthcare Research, 2019

Bayer, a pharmaceutical company, increased understanding of chronic pain sufferers in the UK by launching a Virtual Reality study and a Patient Empathy Workshop.

The role of empathy and efficacy in public service announcements: Using narratives to induce bystander intervention in domestic violence

Research Paper • Eunjin (Anna) Kim and Sidharth Muralidharan, Journal of Advertising Research, Digital First, November 2019

This research explores the understudied relationship between two crucial variables—empathy elicited by narratives and the degree of efficacy possessed by bystanders—by using narratives in public service announcements.

Evolving Public Health England's approach to behaviour change: Uncovering social and cultural barriers to presentation for cancer treatment

Research Paper • Emma Munroe-Faure and Lucas Galan, ESOMAR, Fusion, 2019

Public Health England, a UK government agency, promoted the benefits of an early cancer diagnosis by using linguistic modelling and semiotic analysis to explore “public” and “personal” discourses of cancer.

I don’t know if I am allowed to say this but…': Accessing genuine feelings and opinions in the age of political correctness

Research Paper • Peter Totman, ESOMAR, Fusion, 2019

This paper explores the degree to which political correctness may affect the authenticity of responses in qualitative research, in particular among a working-class audience who voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum in the UK.

Rapid impact: Creating a market leader in a year through machine-learning, ethnography and psychology

Research Paper • Genevieve Hall, Vivek Banerji, Alessandro D’Angelo, Dan Atkins and Daniel Rayner, ESOMAR, Congress, 2019

Papilocare, a brand of HPV prevention cream, became the market leader in Italy in just one year thanks to a strategy which was underpinned by hidden and differentiating insights.

Social insights for making sensitive connections: How Macmillan is helping people who’ve just been told they have cancer

Research Paper • Peter Gerry and Jeremy Hollow, ESOMAR, Congress, 2019

Macmillan, the British cancer charity, and Listen and Learn, a multinational company that specialises in small group language courses, used social data to learn how to help people who have been told they have cancer.

A comparison of scale attributes between interval-valued and semantic differential scales

Research Paper • Christos Themistocleous , Anastasios Pagiaslis, Andrew Smith and Christian Wagner, International Journal of Market Research, Vol. 61, No. 4, 2019, pp. 394-407

This article presents the results of an exploratory study comparing interval-valued scales (IVSs) and semantic differential scales (SDSs).

VIVO Cannabis: How do you research a market that doesn’t exist?

Article • Sam Peña-Taylor, Event Reports, MRS Impact, March 2019

VIVO Cannabis, formerly ABcann, needed to transition its marketing out of a medical-prescription market and into a legal over-the-counter, wellness, and recreational offer – it needed to understand the Canadian cannabis market and launch brands to compete in it before it became legal.

Viewpoint: Making market research work in Saudi Arabia

Article • Thomas Aichner and Abdel Monim Shaltoni, International Journal of Market Research, Vol. 61, No. 1, 2019, pp. 10-11

Market research in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is becoming increasingly important for mainly two reasons.

The secret financial lives of Americans – and the future of financial services

Article • Gunny Scarfo and Ben Zeidler, WARC Webinars, December 2018

Gunny Scarfo and Ben Zeidler, co-founders of Nonfiction Research, go behind the scenes of Nonfiction's unusual research approach, which included interviews with bank robbers, bank executives, Wall Street analysts, and shopping addicts.

Network Rail: A new approach to understanding suicide prevention on the Great Britain’s railways

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Winner, Virginia Valentine Award for Cultural Insights, 2018

Network Rail, the owner of most of the railway network in Great Britain, used anthropological and ethnographic research methods to explore railway suicide.

Reckitt Benckiser: Durex Global Sex Survey - Supporting Sexual Health & Wellbeing Across the World

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, MRS Award for International Research, 2018

Reckitt Benckiser, a British multinational consumer goods company, needed to launch the Global Sex Survey for its condom brand Durex by using research to make it sensitive and accessible to all genders, sexualities and regions.

Cancer ads enter the pharma mainstream

Article • Marylyn Donahue, Event Reports, DTC National conference, April 2018

Direct-to-consumer campaigns are being used to promote cancer treatment drugs.

Rethinking qual for Gen Z

News • 14 June 2018

GLOBAL: Marketers need to rethink how to research young people since traditional qualitative research methods no longer work for Gen Z, according to an industry figure.

How rethinking qualitative research can help brands understand Generation Z

Article • Emily Goldhill, WARC Best Practice, June 2018

Livity, a youth marketing agency, distils what it has learned from over 17 years’ experience about how to effectively research and understand young people.

Unilever Argentina: The Thermometer - Understanding people to inspire and provoke, transforming a crisis into an opportunity

Research Paper • Agustina Suner and Daniela Gail, ESOMAR, Latin America, 2018

Unilever Argentina, a consumer goods company, created The Thermometer to understand people and their consumption behaviours during turbulent times.

Brexit: Lived experience and the problems of polling

Article • Sam Peña-Taylor, Event Reports, MRS Impact, March 2018

The political and diplomatic storm that is the UK’s exit from the European Union has rocked an insight industry whose political arm failed to foresee the decision.

Breaking out of the Man Box with Axe and Topman

Article • Brian Carruthers, Event Reports, Advertising Week Europe, March 2018

The way brands speak to young men is changing to incorporate a more realistic, more sensitive idea of what it is to be a man, at a time when suicide among young men is at an all-time high.

The Home Office: Indecent images of children education and prevention campaign development

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Highly Commended, Applications of Research, 2017

The Home Office's Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) conducted research into the development and refinement of a successful behaviour change campaign in relation to Indecent Images of Children in the UK.

Cancer Research UK: Establishing the link between cancer and obesity

Research Paper • MRS Awards, Finalist, Healthcare Research, 2017

Cancer Research UK increased awareness of the correlation between cancer and obesity by using a multi stage qualitative research process.

Research management