99 Design Brief

Hey designers, here's the photos of me I was talking about in the brief. Also here is the banner of Colmar Brunton and it's associated colours.

Cheers,

Aussie Researcher

daily clutter buster

i am finding that it is easier to get responses from senior people or people you see infrequently by using linkedIn vs traditional email (i think it is a facinating fact that we can now refer to email as traditional). why is this so?

Maybe its the spam filter updates!

Could it be that LinkedIn is relatively new for many or are people concerned about getting a poor reputation on LinkedIn or maybe worse, a recommendation rejection? I think many people including me are struggling to keep up with the daily email deluge, holding emails in drafts for later when you have time to think. i deal with 150+ emails a day and probably only 2-3 issues to deal with in linked in.

I am becoming a big fan of linked in, although starting to find the LinkedIn groups contact too frequent. What do you think ?

Check out my April article in Research News, the brilliant monthly magazine of the AMSRS. The article is entitled "The C word that is here to stay"

http://www.amsrs.com.au/index.cfm?a=detail&id=3181&eid=160

C of course is for collaboration. I think that when times are tough, collaboration becomes more important than ever. Do you agree?

Will business ever be the same again?

I presented at a AMI breakfast seminar this week, talking about Australian consumer sentiment and its impact on the recession. The key metric in all of this is to track how confident people are in keeping their job. When there is a growing number of people that are most concerned with losing their job, they are more conservative in their spending.

Link

When things level out, which brands will be the ones that win?

What role do you want to play?

See my article in the March 09 Research News.

Link

We all have a job to do right now to talk about the important of investment in market and social research. So what are you doing about it?

linkedIn i like it

I have not been sure about LinkedIn for a while now. People ask to connect to me and I always accept, i have been asked to answer short suveys using linked in and it is interesting that you can be linked to people from all around the world. Last month, i contacted on of my contacts and set up a meeting in Sydney. I felt brave but it worked a treat. I was able to schedule a coffee with a really useful contact at reasonably short notice and i am confident it will result in us both receiving business. Barack Obama is the only name i recognise in the top50 linkedIn people - so its not about celebrity or how famous you are. Linked, connection, will it make business easier or less personal?

Reshaping the game in 2009

check out my presidents report for February in Research News.

Link

Let me know if you agree or have a different view

Where is the middle ground?

There is so much media and opinion on what 2009 will bring to the business world and unemployment and consumer confidence prove to be key indicators. Inflation in Australia is now down to 3.7%.

The financial media is full of job losses, profit downturns and requests for Boards to be transparent with results. I find it interesting that the marketing and advertising media are talking positive and suggesting that gloom and doom talk in the media creates the downward spiral in confidence. The marketing and advertising media and business/financial media are poles apart right now. Where is the middle ground?

What will 2012 look like for research?

I had the opportunity to participate in a workshop last month in Montreal discussing the future of market and social research. It was expertly facilitated by a team of young researchers but i am not sure it went far enough. The key future trends that I took out included:

1. more passive monitoring of behaviour
2. multiple data sources being brought together to develop the story
3. the importance of India and China
4. more time on analysis less time on data gathering
5. media, research and advertising working more closely together
6. Consumers to become more demanding and choose when and how they want to talk to us
7. random sampling under enormous pressure
8. client databases will be at the centre of everything
9. blurrred qual and quant
10. Greater demand for ROI and accountability, leading to more effective designs

I am not sure we are pushing it far enough with the above. I think i can safely say that the single methodology is almost gone, but what big shifts are others seeing and predicting for 2012?

Good leaders understand people

There are lots of management and leadership books you can read but this week I saw a great example of good leadership and vision with my own eyes. I visited Port Sunlight in the UK, which is on the Wirrell not far from Liverpool. It is a whole village built by William Lever of Unilever fame to house his staff close to his Soap Factory. Sunlight Soap was one of his brands, hence Port Sunlight.

His view was happy and healthy staff make better employees.Lever wanted his workers to be in decent housing and to have plenty of room. He wanted each house to have a garden and he also wanted to look after their welfare, so medical facilities, insurance, social clubs, churches and other facilities were built. He wanted what was called a ‘garden suburb’ that also had other buildings such as a post office, a bank and a village hall.

This was all good thinking but the really interesting thing was that he suspected his staff liked being inviduals and his master stroke was that he did not build hundreds of homes that all looked the same, he employed teams of architects to design 268 different cottages and homes. How is that for really understanding human behaviour and your staff. It would have been so easy to build a big block of flats but without having to ask, William Lever knew.

This staff obviously loved it, and even though the factory at Port Sunlight now produces detergent instead of soap, Port Sunlight still stands there today as private housing but many Unilever employees still live here. Incredible leadership and vision