Thinkin’ about…
A cheat-sheet way to stay on top of the world of market research.
✋ Warning: The100 newsletter is not for those of a fixed opinion. Or ostriches.
Here’s your latest kicked sandcastles:
- The100: Personas, Netflix thumbnails and Kuchisabishii
Can you handle the truth? At our event in May on avoiding lies in Market Research, I’ll be talking about how to get closer to the truth. As a little amuse-bouche: There’s been a lot of conversation about survey design, with one polster using the word ‘illegal’ when asking voters about immigration. Most people support … - The100: Strategic BOGOFs, predictive optimisation and Angostura Bitters
An event on Pork Pies? Got your ticket for our event on May 4th yet? We’ve got some superb speakers lined up, from Behavioural Scientists, to Strategists to House of Common(ists). Want to come, but can’t get the budget? Email me. Here’s Mark Earls doing his thing at our last event, 2020: “The ultimate strategic …
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The100: Group cohesion scores, gatekeepers and MM/DD/YY formats
Fancy a day of truth hacking? I’m running an in-person event in London on May the 4th (yes, may the force be with you too). It’s all about liars, lying and uncovering truths. Some may even posit that that’s quite important in our line of work 🙂 Plus it’s incredibly good value, working out at …
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The100: Presentation structure, innovation constraints and arm swinging
Recidivism in a Recession As the whiff of recession continues to float through economies, Mark Ritson’s 9 steps marketers should take to avoid the dark times ahead are, in modern parlance, pretty flipping useful. “The companies that maintained ad spend, or even increased it, during a recession saw little advantage during the hard months of …
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The100: Cynicism, Value and Häagen-Daz
Tips from Uncle Les This 30 min talk from Les Binet about how to tweak your marketing plans in these uncertain times is a must watch. Not only does it provide a magnificent summary of where we find ourselves today, it also examines multiple factors that everyone should be aware of: The stoical cynic Martin …
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The100: Trends, lists & the Namib Desert
Welcome back! Anyone else relate to this? Anyway… An AI experiment from the Bali tourist board Whilst machines like ChatGPT are learning to be human, Ian Leslie argues that the problem is humans are becoming like machines. It’s a marvellous piece, stuffed full of examples. He says: “We should refuse, in whatever game we’re playing, …
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The100: The Best of 2022
Well, well, well, that’s another trip around the sun completed. Which also means our annual Watch Me Think tradition to mark the occasion: The top 10 most clicked articles from The100 this year. Strap in – keep your arms, legs, feet and antlers inside the vehicle, and enjoy the ride. In 10th McDonald’s Famous Orders …
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The100: Critical ignoring, subject lines and supportive penguins
The best of the best Jeremy Bullmore is the mother, father and extended family of all advertising legends. And, luckily for us, he’s released his archive. In amongst the tanzanite is a speech Bullmore gave whilst President of the Market Research Society: Research, of one kind or another, provides the basis for most of the …
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The100: Performance plateaus, the demise of nudges and horses ruling the world
Horses run the world Ever wondered why the distance between US train rails is 4 feet, 8.5 inches? In short – because that’s how they were built in England, because that was the width of tramways, because that was the width of wagons, because that was the width of Roman roads, because that was the …
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The100: Taglines gone wrong, forgotten P’s and common misconceptions
Product Gets Me Every Time A reminder from Mark Ritson to ensure that product isn’t the forgotten P of marketing. He makes his case using Heinz’s Pasta Sauces and Shania Twain (obviously): Its crap launch won’t do it any favours […] But the fact that it was in Tesco. That it was only two quid. …
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The100: Attention debunked, L-cuts and dancing goats
State of the (research) nation Rhea Fox, Paperchase’s chief digital officer, spoke a metric tonne of sense at the Festival of Marketing earlier this month. Rhea discussed the state of market research and how the speed at which insight is now expected is a real challenge: There has been a proliferation of different methodologies, which …
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The100: Customer perspective, the Peter Principle & impatient optimism
Colin Firth has an effect on me too, Mark In his latest serving of sense, Mark Ritson has written how the response by brands to the Queen Elizabeth’s death shows how out of touch they are. Ritson suggests: Escape the befuddled, indoctrinated world of dumb marketers who think the market thinks like them. Think instead …
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The100: Rediscovering strategy, Tony’s Chocolonely & the exocentric verb-noun compound agent noun
Strategy? Discuss. For us insight folk, the route to the mahogany table is via research that is strategic and explains how we’ll make change as a result of the study. But what the heck actually is strategy? Martin Weigel has sieved through the alphabet soup and built upon the Gray (2018) division of strategy into …
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The100: IKEA effects, the voice of reason and pozzy-wallahs
Marriages taken in part-exchange The IKEA Effect is an interesting bias whereby we value things that require more effort because we’ve committed something of ourselves to them. In a 2 minute video at the bottom of that same page, Rory Sutherland explains how it can also destigmatize low prices: It’s rather like if you have …
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The100: Disruption nonsense, better briefing and the history of avocados
Be brief, be better A study last year by BetterBriefs caused a core reactor meltdown after finding 80% of marketers consider themselves good at writing ad agency briefs, while just 10% of those agencies agreed. They also found that a third of marketing budgets could be wasted because of bad briefs. Most interesting for me …