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 …

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 …

“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 …

The 70s are for the newly 70’d When it comes to people, and our assumptions surrounding them, this caught me off-guard a little: If you work with people who are now 70, they were 18 in 1970 not 1940. They listened to The Beatles, The Jackson 5 & Diana Ross. They wore flares and bright …

Nudge, nudge, hoodwink Tim Harford wrote an excellent piece in the FT called ‘What nudge theory got wrong…’.  A collective intake of breath from the behavioural scientists out there: If your problem is basically that fallible individuals are making bad choices, behavioural science is an excellent solution. If, however, the real problem is not individual …

Told you it was dynamite I had the pleasure of chatting with Tom Goodwin for an hour earlier this week. It was for a podcast we’re releasing soon. There’s some dynamite quotes, not least this, on data:   I think what happened when we became immersed into a world where there was lots more technology and …

Context is everything  Adam Ferrier writes about why creativity always loses the battle against indifferent consumers.  If you (or your company) pre-test creative work you need to read this. In fact, you need to read it anyway, especially if you use focus groups.   While we’re strong advocates of research and the commissioning of qualitative and …

Ask-a-Researcher Is there a better combination than when something is both useful and fun? Didn’t think so.  That’s why we asked a few of our researchers (who have walked the hallways of Cadbury, Kraft, Mondelez, Fonterra, PepsiCo, Unilever and Alberto Culver) to discuss some topical research related questions. Kind of like an advice column for …

Ear candy The Right Honourable Lord of Marketing, Russell Davies, was interviewed as part of Google’s excellent Firestarters series. On data, he said (45:00):  “The data gold rush era is declining. We’ve never had more data about our customers and we understand them less and less […] People with intuition and empathy will get disproportionate …

De/Im-parting wisdom Tom Callard (soon to leave advertising agency BBH) wrote about the 50 things he’s learned in ad agencies. The whole list is great, but my highlights are: Trust your gut, but also try to prove it wrong.  Hunt for revelations, not ‘insights’ (thanks Richard Huntington). The consumer might not give you the answer, …