Entries Written By Alistair Vince
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
The100: Nicey-nicey ads, real strategy, and nessecarily [sic]
No such thing as ‘strategic planning’ Roger Martin, Professor Emeritus at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, shares more valuable ideas on strategy & planning in a 10 minute video than I thought possible, including: A strategy is an integrative set of choices that positions you on a playing field of your choice in …
The100: The psychology of habit, positive pitching and my spirit animal
“They don’t say what they think” For those of you that missed Nudgestock, it’s worth catching up on Paolo Mercado’s 10m talk about why marketers should be relying less on survey questions and much more on observation to discover hidden growth opportunities. We of course like Paolo 😉 Paolo talks about Nestea which was losing …