Famed planner John Grant is now well known as a sustainability consultant. But not only in the environmental sense - he holds strong views on the sustainability of brands in an era of greater transparency and accountability. An era in which brands are being compelled to stand for something relevant in peoples lives.

John is one of the keynotes at the upcoming trends conference Consumer Alchemy ‘08. Hosted by Gfk Roper, here’s a short teaser we prepared earlier.

And below you’ll find the actual podcast chat (c. 20mins) with two other keynotes as they talk through trends they are seeing and what brands are doing, and can do, to capitalise on these trends (as usual, there’s a full list of talking points after the fold).

 STARRING 

• John Grant, independent brand strategy consultant (blog)
• Nick Chiarelli, global trends expert, GfK Roper Consulting
• Pamela Hamilton, head of creative development, ITV Imagine

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Pic: smaku/flickr

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Amazon should give away barcode readers (29 August)
Get a Whiff of This! The Amazing Power of Scent Marketing (28 August)
Publicis’ Tobaccowala: Mass Media Is Far From Dead (But It’s Not Growing Either) (26 August)
Is Google More Expensive Than TV? (26 August)
Is Paul Feldwick God? (26 August)
P&G Taps Bloggers, Moms for Unconventional Product Launch (23 August)
Lending to the poor has rich rewards (23 August)
Grabbing Lightning (21 August)
ESOMAR ‘08 keynotes on keeping pace with change (21 August)
Free Baby Free (20 August)
Profanity works (20 August)
Innovation and the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons (20 August)
Bus Stop Swing Set: A Public Transportation Playground [Bus Stop Playground] (20 August)
The Economist visits with three digital nomads (19 August)
Ofcom Communications Market Report 2008 (17 August)
Li Ning stays one step ahead of rivals in Olympic brand race (15 August)
Gartner Hype Cycle 2008 (11 August)
Planning's very own Clover Machines (7 August)

Series:AdTalk
Series:MarketingTalk

 I think all the research industry should adopt a CFO, because what the CFO wants to know is not whether that ad. tested better than that ad., but does the whole program move us ahead in making brands more valuable in peoples’ lives and therefore dropping to the bottom line. (Alan C. Middleton)

ESOMAR’s 2008 Congress is nearly upon us and in this exclusive preCast, BrainJuicer Chief Juicer John Kearon chats with three of the keynotes about how cultural and technological changes are impacting peoples’ lives, and how the disciplines of marketing, branding and research need to adapt to keep pace with such change.

John is joined by former senior JWT executive Alan C. Middleton, popular anthropologist Grant McCracken, and design entrepreneur Richard Eisermann.

Listen to the podcast here

 STARRING 

• Alan C. Middleton, Assistant Prof. of Marketing and Executive Director, Executive Education Centre, Schulich School of Business, York University
• Grant McCracken, Anthropologist, Research Affiliate, MIT
• Richard Eisermann, Co-founder, Prospect
• John Kearon, Chief Juicer, BrainJuicer (host)

Listen to other podcasts in this series

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Image credit: smaku/flickr

Every day we scan hundreds of blogs and mainstream media for choice content that we think you should read/imbibe.

We’re picky and deliberately avoid articles that make it to the mainstream because this just adds to the echo chamber. The result is a manageable set of hopefully useful links that you may not have ordinarily come across.

To get these in real time, subscribe to the special Trends & Insights RSS feed or the daily email.

If you haven’t already subscribed then here’s what you’ve missed over the last couple of weeks:

Is Unilever running out of ideas? (31 July)
Thinking about design research? (31 July)
How big is the free economy? (31 July)
Portugal signs up for 500,000 Intel Classmate laptops (31 July)
Segment Watch: the businessthlete (31 July)
On broadband and oil (30 July)
P&G goes for design thinking (29 July)
Insight (27 July)
The World is Flat, for free (24 July)
The magic of marketing (24 July)
Ted Mininni: newly minted expressions? (22 July)
NEC technology identifies person’s age and sex, delivers targeted ads (22 July)
30 somethings & Age: a generation of denial (21 July)
John Steel "Planning at 40" (21 July)
The accountability of research (21 July)
Emily Bell: If Google should falter, how many others will follow? (21 July)
New face recognition system helps stores to identify VIP customers (18 July)
Nudge (18 July)
Georgie in Campaign (18 July)
Is user-friendliness a sure marketing bet? (13 July)

Series:AdTalk
Series:MarketingTalk

The beauty of the internet for those keen to understand consumer needs and desires is that people naturally express these in social networks and other social media.

iWant is a simple, experimental tool we’ve built to mine this info from the twitter stream. Give it a spin if you dare

Series:AdTalk
Series:MarketingTalk

The trend towards free, as postulated by The Long Tail’s Chris Andersen

Surely economics has something to say about [the free model]?

It does. The word is externalities, a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we’ve always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly. The “attention economy” and “reputation economy” are too fuzzy to merit an academic department, but there’s something real at the heart of both. Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads). Anything you can consistently convert to cash is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.

There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

Over 99% of the interesting stuff we come across during our sessions traversing the newsosphere (blogs etc.) don’t make it to this blog because we deliberately decided to focus on posting mainly podcasts and the odd article so as not to crowd things too much.

If you’re not reading this on the website then take a few moments to pop there. Because we’ve added a new box, top right, where we’re sharing interesting links from our cyber travels. As usual the coverage is broad, reflecting the diversity we try to cover on ResearchTalk, so this may not suit everyone.

But for those who are interested, come visit us often (list updated multiple times daily). Alternatively, given our RSS-enabled world, you can choose to subscribe to the link-blog feed here. And do let us have your feedback, good or bad.

Merci.

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We have an exclusive video of Oliver James, the well known psychologist, author and broadcaster, talking at the recent AQR Trends ‘07 about his fascinating new book Affluenza. The chat is both thought-provoking and funny, and there’s an audience q&a session at the end.

But to see it you’ll need to join our Facebook group. So if you haven’t already done so, join now (300 already have). It’s free, easy, and you’ll find more exclusive content there, including discussions between you guys.

Series:Events Series:AQR Series:Trends07

10mins | Produced @ AQR Trends ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• William Higham, Next Big Thing
• Alison Fydler, Joint MD and co-founder, Firefish

Of all the trends discussed during the AQR Trends ‘07 conference, the one William talks about here could be one of the most significant, in our humble opinion. He suggests that age-based targeting is becoming significantly less relevant across many categories. For example, grey folks exhibit teen-like behaviour (eg. still into hedonism and rock ‘n roll) and vice versa (teens exhibiting social responsibility and an interest in politics).

Listen to William as he chats with Alison from the award-winning Firefish, about the wider implications of William’s theories. Interesting tidbit about Alison and William: we randomly paired them up for this chat but little did we know that the two already knew each other from years ago as they were growing up!

BTW, references to ‘Oliver’ are to Oliver James who spoke before this chat took place, and he spoke about his new book, ‘Affluenza’.

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