Entries Written By Alistair Vince
Student (FMCG) Packaging Designer of the Year
I’m extremely proud to today launch Watch Me Think’s (first) Student Packaging Designer of the Year competition, where students in the UK can submit redesigns of FMCG products across 5 different categories (getting older, one-handed, sustainability, waste, the future).
Payment terms – why we’re bucking the trend
This weekend saw more headlines about payment terms given by the big fmcg companies, all of whom happen to be our clients.
Whether it be Premier Foods and their alleged ‘cash for contracts’ demands, 2 Sisters Food Group with their alleged 3% discount requirements for paying within 90 days or Heinz allegedly telling their suppliers that their payment terms have moved from 45 days to up to 97 (none of which, it’s worth noting, we’ve experienced).
The stories don’t mention the majority who pay promptly within 30 or 45 days.
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 …