Our article in the Jun ‘09 edition of ESOMAR’s Research World. Grab your copy here.

Professor Robert Shaw is Honorary Professor of Marketing Metrics at Cass Business School and the author of ten books including Marketing Payback, We talk to him about the current state of marketing effectiveness and his new initiative designed to improve it.

In the current recession, marketing is under extreme pressure, as cost cutting sweeps business. Luckily marketers have plenty of opportunity to improve their effectiveness, since in the boom years they had become very inefficient, and money was routinely wasted on marketing activities that did not deliver, and mistakes were ignored and often repeated.
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We present another entrepreneur’s tale.

Specialist Latin America panel company Livra was sold a year ago to Ipsos after nine years of profitable growth.

It was started by Argentinian students Diego Meller and Martín Añazco at the height of the dotcom boom when they were only 19- and 20-years old respectively.

Diego is now London-based so we managed the above 8-minute chat with him to find out how the company got started, how they turned it round to generate healthy revenues, and why they sold when they did and why to Ipsos among a number of interested buyers.

Enjoy!

Our article in the Apr ‘09 edition of ESOMAR’s Research World. Grab your copy here.

Memes aren’t merely some abstract academic idea. They are real. And they’re becoming big business.

In a market dominated by firms that aren’t from the mainstream research community, Vittal anoints Nielsen BuzzMetrics and TNS Cymfony as the leaders in “a pack of strong performers.”
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Our article in the Feb ‘09 edition of ESOMAR’s Research World. Grab your copy here.

How a passionate focus on value along with other basic approaches are helping retailers to survive and thrive during the downturn.

In this Darwinian environment, retailers need to adapt or face the real prospect of death.
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Our article in the Jan ‘09 edition of ESOMAR’s Research World. Grab your copy here.

Martin Lindstrom’s new book and company, Buyology, hope to kick start the next wave of neuromarketing. Will they deliver?

So, just what is Buyology all about?
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Our article in the Dec ‘08 edition of ESOMAR’s Research World. Grab your copy here.

Brand health monitoring is an important tool, particularly during tough economic times when managing RoI becomes critical for CMOs. But what are some of the tools, and are they fit for purpose?

And voltage? That, says Walshe, reflects how effectively consumers move up the bonding levels. Strong brands tend to have high conversation ratios between the levels.
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And the winner of the Buyology giveaway is…Elizabeth Luke.

Elizabeth is a senior at the University of Southern California spending her final semester abroad at the University of Amsterdam. She is a communication major with an interest in persuasion and consumer behavior. She will be graduating magna cum laude in December 2008, and shortly after, she will begin her career as a research analyst for emerging consumer products at Nielsen BASES.

Elizabeth’s book is on the way, thanks again to Martin Lindstrom and publishers Random House.

Here are Martin’s responses to some of the questions you sent in (thanks for all the entries):
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There’s quite a bit involved in designing and running good research communities, so we decided to create this podcast where we speak with a couple of folks who have been actively developing communities for a number of years.

First up there’s Tom Ewing, yes theTom Ewing who created quite a stir at this year’s Research ‘08 conference. Back in 2000, Tom created the ILX (I love music) message board as a personal endeavour and it grew viraly. At the time of recording Tom was in a marketing role at Research International. But soon after, parent Kantar had the sense to make him a social media adviser.

Next there’s Matt Rhodes of FreshNetworks, the online community-building part of the award-winning FreshMinds. Matt’s an active blogger and recently revealed that FreshNetworks had won a £5m ($7.5m) interest-free loan as part of an entrepreneur competition – quite a nice prize in the (economic) circumstances.

Hoping, as always, you find this useful.

 STARRING 

• Matt Rhodes, Head of Client Services, FreshNetworks
• Tom Ewing, Social Media expert, Kantar Operations

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Our article in the Nov ‘08 edition of ESOMAR’s Research World. Grab your copy here.

In an age where innovation is de rigeur, we look into how well qualitative is keeping up with the times.

But far from being a Luddite, Forrest is innovating, it just takes him a while to acknowledge this. And that’s not dissimilar from the initial reaction we get from others we spoke to.
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