Entries Written By Alistair Vince
Online: off kilter
The mainstream UK grocers have been tripping themselves up all year and everyone has been laying into them while they’re down.
Yet online grocery is marked out as the rare success story, but we’ve been at this for a while, so set it in its context: why haven’t those out-of-town sheds gone the same way as the bookstores? Why are people still shopping there when you consider the traffic, parking, weather, other people, limitations on what you can fit in the car, and everything else you’d rather be doing? Something must be wrong somewhere. Why don’t I do my grocery shopping online? I must be target group 1. But they’ve never asked me why I don’t.
Own Label vs. Branded: the closing quality gap
We launched our UK People Behind the Headlines series this month – and the first title we chose was ‘Own Label vs. Brands’. We got so much content back from our thinkers that we ended up making 6 films on this subject. What the consumer thinks they know about Own Label When brand doesn’t matter, so …
What’s Natural?
Well here we are then. 2013. We had a lovely 2012. Way above all our expectations and we’re extremely lucky to be working with some of the biggest fmcg companies in the world. It’s been fantastic and they’ve really helped us every month shape and develop our offering to them. Thanks to them, we’re completely …
The Ageing consumer
Our latest consumer film is on the ageing consumer and we had videos (made on smartphones by our thinkers) from people between the ages of 60 and 98 which shows the difficulty of understanding this sector. However, lots of themes came through including; they feel an ignored group (from a marketing perspective) they have more …
Survivalist strategies, Emotive Impulses
Last month we invited our thinkers to respond to the question, ‘how are you making the money go further?’ using the video function on their smartphones. They showed us into their homes, how they are budgeting better, how their shopping habits have changed, how they are changing their meal occasions, and how they perceive value …
Don’t just listen… watch
What consumer should your company target to get ideas from? Is it via a co-creation website and the consumers that participate in those – idea hungry consumers who know they have good ideas that should be heard? Or is it via observing consumers thinking aloud in their own environment, consumers that aren’t targeted by the …
Better competitor intelligence…
“Competitor knowledge is crucial” “Understanding our competitors is a KPI for many of us” “We have a whole department dedicated to CI” These phrases (and more) we hear daily within whatever business we work for. It’s a natural instinct to want to know more and more about ‘the competition’. Better CI gives you a chance …
Old product development
OPD focuses on the improvement of products that are already in circulation. Incremental changes that *hopefully* make the product better. Many big brands are now using Watch Me Think to see how their current portfolio of products are being used in home. They’re doing this because they want to see what problems customers are running …
Immerse yourself. Others are already
Many companies are trying to get closer to their consumers, customers, shoppers, fans, whatever they want to call them – people that interact with their product or service. Whilst their intentions are good, often their actions aren’t. In this case words are speaking louder than actions. It’s not that they don’t realise the value of …
Like focus groups but without the numpties
As we’re doing more and more appointments, both in UK and Aus, we’re starting to receive tremendous feedback from our clients that we’re working with so thought we’d share a few of these so you can see the reaction we’re getting. ‘Like focus groups but without the numpties’ (we like that one) ‘Consumers are completely …