ResearchTalk

That’s the question conductor Benjamin Zander asks in this, yet another beautifully powerful and funny session from TED.

We’re not massive classical music fans. But if we had Benjamin Zander teaching us things may have been different. Not content with simply creating classical music fans, Benjamin talks of creating a better world through the power of music.

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.

A leading interpreter of Mahler and Beethoven, Benjamin Zander is known for his charisma and unyielding energy — and for his brilliant pre-concert talks.

Our Spotlight column in the Jun ‘08 edition of ESOMAR’s Research World. Grab your copy here.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are privileged to witness the start of a new movement. A movement that is revving up to do what The Cluetrain Manifesto did for marketing communications. Welcome to VRM.

Well, Mr. Searls is at it again. Not satisfied with inspiring consumers to use the web to redress the balance between marketers and consumers (e.g. via blogs), he wants to move things up a gear. And blogging strategist Adriana Lukas is along for the ride.
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 The biggest challenge is not the technology, but in changing peoples’ habits. (Julia Hailes)

Former BT futurologist Ian Pearson recently joined a futures consultancy with a bang when he put out the provocative report Achieving CO2 reductions in the UK by using technology instead of muddled thinking.

The report suggests, among other things, that the rush to save the world from dwindling energy reserves, global warming etc. is forcing policy makers and other stakeholders to make poor decisions.

Sustainability consultant and author Julia Hailes MBE kindly agreed to put Ian on the spot in this quickfire conversation to discuss Ian’s analysis. As expected, the two don’t agree on much, but there is some common ground.

 STARRING 

• Ian Pearson, Futurizon, personal website and blog
• Julia Hailes MBE, Sustainability consultant, and author, The New Green Consumer Guide

Listen to other podcasts featuring Ian and Julia.

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We recently pointed out this short clip of Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

Here’s a much longer clip, courtesy of Google Talks…

A couple weeks ago we ran a marketing book giveaway.

It seems it was quite popular because we received 17 entries, all of them worthy. But of course there can only be one winner.

Choosing the winner was difficult. Now we’re bound to say that, aren’t we? But it really was because we had to choose between an entry that totally ruled our head, and another that pulled at the old heart strings.

In the end we couldn’t/didn’t want to choose between them, so we convinced the generous folks at publishers OUP to send a free book to both of them.

The ‘head‘ entry (which you can see at the bottom of this post) was from Simon Kendrick, a commercial research consultant with UK commercial broadcaster ITV. Simon blogs and previously came to our attention for his comprehensive updates from the recent Research 2008 conference. We asked him for a short bio…

Upon leaving university, I did the apparently normal thing of looking for a job that had nothing to do with my degree. As I studied philosophy, politics and economics this was three times as difficult, but I have managed to dig out a niche for myself within media research. After several enjoyable years learning the tricks of the trade at the agency side, I have now crossed over to the client side. Stationed in the commercial sector of the business, I use a mixture of industry currency, desk research and commissioned projects to make the case for advertisers and agencies to work closely with us.

The ‘heart‘ entry read thus:

Here in South Africa text books are insanely expensive: the exchange rate, together with high import taxes, make purchasing text books onerous. My students and clients both look forward to anecdotal instances to bring the theory to life. I am sure that this would help.

It was from Michele Sohn…

Michele started Grey Matter, one of South Africa’s first new media companies, which she successfully sold to i-africa.com. She now heads up Confluence
Digital Research and holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand and an MBA from Wits Business School. She lectures at Wits Plus and the IMM.

We hope this gift will, in some small way, do some good.

So well done to both of you – your books are on the way (one of which has been signed by the authors because we only expected one winner!). We look forward to Simon’s blog review of the book which we’ll link to once it’s done.

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 True leaders tend to be successful at pretty much whatever’s given to them. (Philip Barnard)

In this edition of The Leadership Show, Simon Chadwick chats with four leaders who have spent the past five decades successfully building substantial entities. Folks such as Jay Wilson who built Roper Starch (sold to NOP World), Bill Pegram who co-founded and built Pegram Walters (sold to Synovate), Philip Barnard who built Research International from its founding days as a division of Unilever (sold to WPP), and Tim Bowles who built IRI Europe. This is one of the most fun podcasts to listen to thanks to Simon and his guests.

BTW, Simon wrote and presented an excellent paper at ESOMAR ‘07 for free download entitled “Leadership – The Men and Women Who Shape Our Industry”.

Listen to other podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• Bill Pegram, Bill Pegram & Co, and gravitas
• Jay Wilson, Wilson Connexions and partner, Cambiar
• Philip Barnard, former chairman and CEO, Kantar Group
• Tim Bowles, former head, IRI Europe and former CEO, West Europe, Synovate
• Simon Chadwick, partner, Cambiar and gravitas (Host)

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UPDATE: This giveaway has finished
Through the fine folks at Oxford University Press, we’re giving away a free copy of their new, 800+ page tome simply called Marketing, authored by Paul Baines, Chris Fill and Kelly Page.

Aimed at marketing and business students, we think it has a much broader utility as a reference tool for agencies, e.g. when putting together those clever sounding pitches!

Having studied from marketing texts many moons ago, it seems very practical, being chock full of ‘marketing’ insights that showcase contemporary brands, scenarios and memes.

You can learn more through the excellent microsite, which includes sample chapters and video chats between the authors explaining how they developed the book.

Here’s the Amazon page so you can see how valuable this is: US, UK.

Right, now for the giveaway. This is open to every member of the ResearchTalk/ MarketingTalk/ AdTalk community (OUP confirm they’ll snail mail to anywhere in the world).

All you need to do is leave a comment in this blog post, or email us at letmetalk@gmail.com, saying why you’d benefit most from receiving the book. We’re open to giving it away to absolutely anyone in our community – agencies, students, or other – simply convince us that you’d benefit most from it, so be creative and sincere.

Other rules
• deadline for entries is midnight (US PST), Fri Jun 6th 2008, so don’t hang around
• OUP is giving away one copy of the book
• you must supply your accurate full name and email address with your entry (this is the way we’ll get in touch if you win)
• maximum one entry per person
• judges decision is final
• we reserve the right to cancel the giveaway at any stage, or to extend it
• E&OE

We’re new to this giveaway thing so if we’re missing any important rules then do tell

Series:AdTalk
Series:MarketingTalk

That’s what Dan Roam says. And the result is that visual stimuli are far more persuasive in business than cold verbage or text. Another good reason to up the visualization quotient.

Dan writes the visualization blog Back of the Napkin. And in this clip, he uses visualization to help explain the Icahn/Yahoo! intervention on Fox Business.

Via Stephen Phillips, someone’s just unearthed the earliest use of a focus group – from the Stone Age

“The Wheel”

“Fire”

Building on their open and friendly approach, smoothie brand Innocent has just published its first annual report. It’s not a legal or regulatory requirement, it’s done purely to engage more with its passionate users and other interested folks.

It’s a fun and informative read. Plus it balances a discussion of their successes in 2007 by giving equal prominence to, well, ‘things they learned from’ (including being called out by BBC’s Watchdog for their exploding packaging, and that polarising deal with McDonald’s).

It’s embedded below but if you want to read it and don’t have bionic eyes then you can download your very own copy here.

Coinciding with its publication, Innocent also ran the first AGM…

‘…a day when we open the doors of Fruit Towers, ask our drinkers to come and hear what we’ve been up to and let them tell us face to face what we could be doing better.”

Here’s one of the videos from the event – we can’t imagine too many AGMs being this much fun

Series:AdTalk
Series:MarketingTalk