The Rise of Storytelling: TMRE 2015 Day 1

More than 1,300 market researchers who are masters of data and scientific approaches to understanding what drives consumer choices, heard a repeated refrain yesterday at day one of TMRE 2015.

You need to be better at storytelling.

From keynote speakers sharing case studies or delivering motivational and inspirational messages to break-out sessions that focused on big data and eye-tracking, The Market Research Event’s first day highlighted a need for market researchers to communicate their work more effectively.

The day began with Dr. Duane Varan, CEO of Media Science Lab and Chief Research Officer at the ESPN Lab (formerly the Disney Media & Advertising Lab), shared his organization’s insights into best ways to reach viewers through ads in his Keynote presentation “Cultivating Ad Receptivity: Strategies for Countering Ad Avoidance.”

Varan discussed Media Science Lab’s viewer distraction matrix in which device controls, viewer disposition, viewing state, and social influences are all considered in gauging a viewer’s receptivity to a video advertisement. Among Varan’s fascinating presentation that shared real-world data and case studies, four ideas stuck out.

1. Of the four states Media Science Lab/ESPN Lab has identified for television viewing (reluctant, relaxed, excited, and favorable), excited viewing results in the greatest ad receptivity.
2. Video ads perform equally across devices from mobile to tablet to television regardless of screen size because of people’s propensity to hold devices at an angle and distance that reproduces the same relative viewing angle we experience on a television or movie screen.
3. The integration of a brand into original programming through product placement coupled with showing ads at breaks in the program is the best way to improve ad receptivity, according to Varan’s research.
4. Providing viewers some measure of choice of ad categories improves ad receptivity because, Varan explained, “once you make a decision, you want to be right. You search for clues to reinforce why you made that decision.”

Varan stressed the importance of generating excitement through quality content and engaging storytelling in order to increase an ad’s chance of being well-received.

David Krajicek, CEO of consumer experience North America for GFK, next shared several insights into how market researchers can work more effectively with clients to provide value when clients are most interested in speed while researchers want to produce innovative work.

“There is a struggle to balance a need for innovative methodologies with the desire to generate insights faster,” Krajicek said.

He provided several steps market researchers can take to bridge this gap:

1. Focus on purposeful innovation because clients are increasingly looking to replace traditional market research with new approaches but they do not know what to turn to.
2. Develop talent for tomorrow, today. MRX pros should dentify the right talent while keeping pace with consumers to fill thought leaders’ shoes in years to come.
3. Embrace the changing currency of insights. Krajicek said that by 2017, passive data will be as important a source of insights as direct questioning.
4. Use powerful and impactful stories as 30% of research buyers believe storytelling is the biggest gap in the industry.

“It’s about appreciating that storytelling isn’t a skill,” Krajicek said. “It’s a way to reach an end.”

In another morning keynote, Dr. Jonah Berger, professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On,” shared  his ideas on the science behind what makes certain ideas “tastier” than others and how market researchers can embrace these tenets to tell better stories that resonate.

“There’s a science behind why people share,” Berger said, referencing his work to review more than 7,000 New York Times articles and tens of thousands of brands and millions of purchases across the United States. Berger said the key to making an idea contagious is to find its “inner remark-ability.” It was a recurrent theme on day one of TMRE 2015 as several speakers urged market researchers to become better story tellers by considering their audience and what makes people embrace ideas.

“We need to communicate in a way that people understand,” Berger said, adding later, “How can we craft our ideas in a way that makes sure good research gets out there?”

Berger shared six principles (or STEPPS, as an acronym) he identified that help ideas catch on, get shared by others, and spread:

1. Social currency – When people feel like you’re sharing valuable information with them that they can then share with their social network, you create a drive toward natural word-of-mouth.
2. Triggers – A proven psychological tactic of associating one image or experience with another experience, brand or idea. Classic example? Peanut butter and …
3. Emotion – People share ideas they care about, or that they have an emotional connection to.
4. Public – Make it easy to share by removing friction and people will share an idea. Wrist bands that promote a cause are a good example.
5. Practical value – Does this idea make people’s lives better or easier? If an idea can have a real-life impact, people are more likely to share it.
6. Stories – “You don’t tell your kids bedtime facts,” Berger said. Stories are the vessel of good ideas.

Berger also pointed to research that showed social media may not be the engine of word-of-mouth marketing many assume it to be. He said just 7% of all word of mouth happens online.

In one example of using triggers in marketing, Berger pointed to a grocery store that played French or German music and saw increases in sales of French or German wines and other products on days when that music played in the store. Another example was KitKat’s campaign to link the candy with coffee breaks.

Berger urged the market research crowd to embrace two ideas in order to make their studies more compelling:

1. Find the kernel of remark-ability; and
2. Apply his STEPPS approach by using a free workbook, “Crafting Contagious Guide” from his website.

At the lunch time keynote, best-selling author and marketing inspiration Seth Godin delivered a motivational session urging market researchers to be unique, to embrace their tribes, and to shed fears of failure in order to produce important work that mattered.

“In the industrial economy, we needed you to fit in,” Godin said. “But we’re leaving that behind. We’re entering the connection economy where connection creates value.”

Godin pointed to the Internet as a great equalizer of humanity and the driving force of a connection economy that empowers anyone with a laptop to assert their message, creativity, or innovation on the world in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago, while also creating the behemoth of big data.

He urged market researchers to embrace that power and to wield it responsibly.

“We need your insight to help us figure out how we’re going to get there, an answer, a point of view, a way to move forward,” Godin said.

We were inspired by several sessions in TMRE’s Track 2, Tools, Technology & Methodology on day one, including “Market Research Meets Big Data Analytics for Business Transformation,” from LinkedIn’s Al Nevarez, senior manager, business analytics, and Sally Sodosky, group manager, marketing research. The duo share how they have brought big data internal at LinkedIn to further organize and leverage LinkedIn’s remarkable amount of data from more than 4,000,000 members for business and marketing insight.

While acknowledging working with big data can seem overwhelming, Nevarez preached simplicity.

“There’s nothing high-tech about this,” he said. “It’s just making the effort to democratize the survey research.”

Sentient’s own Dr. Aaron Reid also presented in Track 2 on “The History and Future of Connecting with the Consumer Non-Conscious.”

After informally polling the audience’s familiarity with implicit research, which measures system 1 or automatic, non-conscious processes (about 50% of the group had experience with implicit), Dr. Reid shared a bell curve graph to emphasize that implicit research is an area ripe for adoption by market researchers and is now used primarily by early adopters.

To move implicit research forward, Dr. Reid suggested three steps:

1. Sound science – Clarifying and quantifying the science behind implicit research by understanding exactly what is implicit and what isn’t. Dr. Reid asserted that researchers must employ an approach that gets beyond the “can’t-say/won’t-say” issue.
2. Validation –Implicit case studies need to be published providing evidence of either deeper insight into the drivers of behavior or better predictive accuracy of consumer choices. A best practice for validation is to use your collected data to predict a separate set of behaviors of interest from the market.
3. Awareness of applications – While most market researchers associate implicit research with video ad testing, its uses extend to concept testing, branding, messaging and more.

Much of implicit research measures people’s non-conscious emotional response to stimuli such as advertising. Referencing a Heineken ad that targeted young men 21-35 years-old, Reid pointed to universal human cues of sexual arousal that made that ad successful.

But he also pointed to other emotionally-rich ads such as a recent campaign by Always, that resonated with viewers earning an 11% digital share of voice, by taking viewers on an emotional roller coaster.

“We do a tremendous amount of research on research at Sentient,” Dr. Reid said. “And that research advances and refines our implicit measures to the point that we are able to predict that kind of social contagion.”

In another example of implicit research yielding real business insight, Dr. Reid pointed to a biometric study Sentient performed within the diamond ring market. By measuring implicit response, Sentient was able to show that one diamond 25% larger than another diamond evoked 175% more arousal, putting a meaningful measure of value on the larger diamond from a consumer’s perspective.

“We can quantify the non-conscious associations and incorporate them mathematically into consumer choice models,” Dr. Reid said.

Tying in the historical perspective of marketing, Dr. Reid shared an example of what he suggested might be the earliest known reproduced marketing: the mating song of a cricket from the jurassic period, to illustrate that all marketing is based on evolutionary responses to gene selection and that implicit research can measure the responses today in people to gain better business insight and make sound marketing decisions. Dr. Reid’s slides are available here.

In the awards portion of TMRE’s day 1, Hall & Partners and United Kingdom auto insurer Direct Line Group won the EXPLOR award while runners-up were Orbitz Worldwide and Forrester/Research Now. Hall & Partners also won an NGMR award  for research concept deployment while Carol Cunningham of BET and Betty Amadou of Research through Gaming were honored with individual awards.

Congratulations to all of the winners! It reminds us of a great day with Trigger Point nearly four years ago to the day.

Sentient’s Stephen Springfield, SVP, brand consulting, and Clint Taylor VP and strategic technologist, will present Wednesday in the demo zone on “How to Integrate True Implicit Methods into Your Research Toolbox.”

You can learn more about Sentient Decision Science’s approach to implicit research technology by visiting us at booth 603 today and tomorrow and by following us on Twitter during the event.