Using Twitter as Your Focus Group?

Recently we ran a series of banner campaigns supporting new products being launched by one of our CPG clients. While the client was launching multiple products, not all of them were being promoted through advertising.

Shortly after launch of the campaign for our client, we began monitoring Twitter for buzz on the products and online campaign. Almost immediately, the tweets started raving about one of the new products that we didn't promote.

Armed with this information, we met with the client and got the green light to run advertising for this new product. The Twitter research worked: The campaign for the new product generated a click-through rate 55% higher than the rest of the campaign. The number of people actually tweeting about the new product was small -- maybe a few hundred. But the number of additional people who followed the new banners was an order of magnitude more.

You can read the full article and comment it @ http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=133509 - Posted by Lee Mikles on 12.29.08

Brain Science, That's Interesting, But What Do we Marketers Do About It

By David Penn

There is a "new" buzzword in marketing and advertising: brain science. Market research has caught the buzz too, with quite a number of good papers and articles published over the last few years. But for many of us, the buzz is a bit of a mystery, and for some an irritant. The problem is, that whilst we've heard a lot about the theory, not too much has been written about the practical consequences. My view is simple: that the issues raised by brain science are simply too big to ignore, and we need to do something about it. Hence I am writing this, to build a bridge between theory and practice. The first part deals with the theory, but the (longer) second part looks at the practical consequences for our industry.

Market research grew up under the influence of mid 20th century cognitive science, and many (particularly quantitative) researchers, feel more at home with the cognitive aspects of behaviour than with the unconscious and emotional. But life (and the human sciences) moves on, and in the last two decades, brain science has challenged our view of the human mind and how works. By reuniting psychology with philosophy and biology, its shifts the scientific focus back onto the mysteries of consciousness and emotion. Increasingly, we've come to understand that unlocking the mystery of consciousness actually depends on figuring out the unconscious functions of the brain. Not Freud's unconscious - a repository for repressed memories – but rather the many things the brain does that are not available to consciousness.

Unconscious processes include most of what the brain does - we can often be aware of what we're doing when these things happen, but much of the time consciousness is informed after the fact through the cognitive unconscious. The area that's generating hottest debate is emotion, and its operation through the so-called emotional unconscious, and it's here that the fusion of biology and psychology is changing the whole way we understand human behaviour.

It is my belief that, as market researchers, we cannot do our job properly unless we understand the unconscious mind, both in its emotional and cognitive aspects. The possibility that so much of what we know about brands is absorbed unconsciously, and that choice between brands is driven by unconscious emotional processes, requires us to challenge our techniques (built mainly on rational choice models and verbal response) and acquire a new skill set to interpret and understand what consumers tell us.

Brain science is interesting, fascinating even, but what are we to do about it?

Keep on reading here.