Now, in the midst of a recession that’s eaten away at people’s purchasing power for 4 years, there are inklings of small tremors in the relationship between energy utilities and their consumers.

Without doing too much desk research, it seems that the energy utilities have not reduced prices in a sustained way even though prices are falling across the economies of the developed world. Money is priced at zero, and is likely to stay that way for a couple of years at least. But all the energy companies have to do is point to a bad winter, or perennial instability in the Middle East or in Russia, and prices go up again. If there’s perennial instability, then how is this not factored into pricing models? On the face of it, the energy companies seem to have been peddling a deal that means their profits never shrink, even in this defining recession.

The UK consumer group Which? has partnered with the grassroots democracy movement 38 Degrees to launch The Big Switch: making use of Chartist tactics: sign a pledge, band together, and lobby for a better deal (on the collective energy bill). Consumer power when expressed by the complaint of any one individual is a nanoproblem for companies: but if consumers band together to force a better deal, then companies will label them as Robin Hoods, damaging market capitalism. The classical Greek-rooted term for mob rule is ochlocracy. We might be about to see more customer sedition in this recession.

The company’s main competitors for the Wii, and soon to be launched Wii U, are the fellow ‘seventh-generation’ game consoles the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. However, as motion sensing technology is becoming a feature of competitor products with the launch of the ‘Xbox Kinect’ and the ‘Playstation Move’, Nintendo is coming under serious pressure to maintain its competitive edge.

New marketing challenges have emerged as there has been a huge decrease in Wii sales compared to previous years, which suggests that their product is at the end of its life-cycle. The recently launched Nintendo 3DS portable console has faced serious problems as innovative technology greatly affected the price and consequently the sales of the product. This helps illustrate that what were once core to the Wii’s success have now become credible challenges for the Wii U. The console’s new technology is expected to increase price significantly, while questions over the accessibility of the new console make it clear that new challenges face Nintendo ahead of the launch of their new console.

The major strategic challenges Nintendo Wii must address in order to keep up with competition is to generate solutions to retain its market share while trying to turn customers away from its chief competitors. Innovation must also be taken into account as the games are thought to have a lack of design feature by more mature audiences.

Nintendo must avoid the mistakes made with the Nintendo 3DS as in order for the Wii U to be a success it needs to have a good price plan, a solid launch schedule and a major marketing plan if it is to keep up with Playstation and Xbox.

Posted by Stephanie.

We’re finalising some stuff in the office, but before we dispatch our last bits of client work for the year, here are some of our thoughts about what we think is in the air for 2012. Here’s our mix of global and Irish predictions.

1. Facebook and Google will fine-tune their user analytics for advertisers.

Only a dolt would underestimate how pivotal this change will be. The six global agencies combined are smaller in every sense (other than employees) than any one of the biz tech innovation quartet of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. What any one of the quartet can offer is pico-level detail, tons of data, and remarkably clever people who do algorithms for fun. And all that geek stuff leads to better forecasting, tighter evaluations and more efficent campaigns. That firepower isn’t present in the ad industry, or market research. It just isn’t. In Ireland, Facebook in particular have done a good job in attracting some quality advertising alumni. They’ve done this to learn what ad agencies here know and do. They’ve bought the Irish ad industry’s playbook with these hires.   The Heineken initiative is just the beginning. Global brands will increasingly turn to Facebook and Google and ask them to be their media agency.  An outside bet would be for Facebook or Google to buy up a global agency from cash reserves alone: put a few quid on this happening by 2016.

2. There will be fewer ad agencies.

More and more buyouts/takeovers are going to happen. Not because bigger players are speculating to accumulate: rather because there’s not enough business to keep the number of ad shops open. It’s arguably the case that ad people still haven’t got their head round just how bad this recession is going to get, and how much the economy has been battered. In terms of unemployment, we’re dealing with a once-in-a-generation level of abject awfulness. And by generation, we don’t mean quarter-on-quarter slices. Things have not been so bad economically  for 30 years across the developed world. It’s as simple and as gruesome as that.

3. Ad people will have to start learning more about anti-consumerism.

People on low to average incomes are becoming the working poor: they’re on their uppers.  The middle class has been stripped of huge amounts of disposable income, and are freighted with negative equity; they’re running to stand still.  This scenario leads to a frozen economy: things just don’t work they way we’d hoped and assumed they would anymore. Selling them more stuff is not viable. So what are brands and ad agencies going to do to make them spend money they don’t have? Thoughtful types will look to anti-consumerism, and see how this can be exploited for navigable routes through this broken economy.

Posted by Ken.

Well, here’s a new one for the list: three Facebook users die every minute.

Facebook or Twitter is often the first thing people think about upon waking, updating their status before they’ve even gotten out of bed. But how much thought have you given to your online life after death? People construct online identities for themselves. These may or may not mimic the lives they lead IRL. Hypothetically, someone might have formed an entire existence online through the people they interact and form bonds with, documenting their thoughts and opinions, and replicating themselves (or a version of themselves) on the internet.

Whether you’ve given much thought to it or not, the Australian company Life Insurance Finder sure has. Recognising the need for it, they have established some guidelines to consider before the Grim Reaper comes a-knocking. For one, they suggest appointing a trustworthy ‘digital undertaker’ who will guard passwords and understand how you want your online accounts handled (outlined in your digital will of course) upon your death.

It might seem like a pointless exercise and an opportunistic move by insurance providers but it’s worth thinking about the implications of leaving behind (or not) an unmanned Facebook or Twitter account. I can hear the geeky words falling out of Ross Gellar’s mouth now: “By the year 2030 there’ll be computers that can carry out the same amount of functions as an actual human brain so, theoretically, you could download your thoughts and memories into this computer and… and live forever, as a machine”. It’s not that farfetched considering prolific Tweeters document their likes, dislikes, political affiliations, hopes, dreams, fears. One site, That Can Be My Next Tweet  generates new tweets based on things you have already posted (try it and let us know if they generate something you could see yourself saying!) and so it is possible that, after your death your Twitter, and therefore you, could live on forever.

Do you fancy living forever online? My first reaction was no. I’ve even considered mentioning to friends how I’d like them to handle my Facebook account should I meet my, hopefully untimely, end. My instinct has always been to shut it down but it’s an intriguing notion that a hundred years from now descendants of mine could get a really real sense of me. In one sense it’s not so different than coming across your great great great granny’s diary and photos but, although digital, feels more tangible than that. Deleting your profiles after your death is profoundly sad in a way. You’ve departed the physical world and to be distinguished from the digital one forever is very final. More final than death? I’m not sure but I’m also not sure I’d want mine, or a loved one’s, Facebook page to become some kind of morbid shrine.

This great infographic from the Australian insurance company in question outlines a convincing argument for considering a digital will. Nearly every implication is covered as well as procedures you may want to put in place. It’s well worth a read and extremely thought provoking, if not a tad on the creepy side. Let us know what you think below – but remember, it’ll remain there forever…

- Catherine Clifford

Too often, market researchers have just two shots in their research locker: the survey and the focus group. Both have the potential to work well, but you need to understand what they’re best suited for and where they should not be used at all, or need to be supplemented with other qual methods, such as Delphi groups, consumer juries, or one-on-one interviews.  I’m struck by how often companies (and lazy market researchers) don’t instantaneously grasp that focus groups should not mimic the job of surveys. I’ve been working on a couple of client projects on focus group design and several issues crop up that are arguably emblematic of focus group difficulties in general. What follows is my understanding of what companies need to get right before they run focus groups.

1. Why are you running focus groups?

The client needs to have a clear rationale for what they want to achieve. Many companies seem to fall into the trap of running a focus group just because when they were at a similar point of activity in the past, focus groups had been used: they just do them out of habit. A good reason to use focus groups is to garner insight from customers  that your own team is unlikely to generate. That’s it. And your own team should have done lots of spadework in advance (through understanding previous research, through interrogating what the large-n surveys show) before they say ‘we need to run a focus group’.

2. How many should you run?

I haven’t seen any industry standard for this question, which is disappointing, and a cop-out. Many clients want to run a certain amount of focus groups to capture some generalisability.  In most cases, this approach is mistaken and doomed to failure. The right answer is to run enough focus groups until you hit saturation point: that is, you get no fresh insights (this is a negotiable process, of course). Market researchers are wary of this as they think they’re committing to an open-ended mission; that there’ll be a long queue of groups to run. If they do interim analysis (also very rare in market research), then the market researcher should be able to give an accurate estimate to the client of how many more groups are required. Cost and time constraints should of course be factors, but let the market researcher work for their money by requiring them to give a robust reason for the number of focus groups, rather than an unquestioned industry standard.

3. Is the sample adequate?

Lots of market researchers draw on contacts who bring friends or relatives to the focus group. This is lazy and can amount to price-gouging, as the research agency is being paid a hefty fee to source a fresh, untainted sample. If a ‘pure’ sample is not required (and there are reasons why it might not be) then this is not a problem. Again, ask the market researcher to give you a different cost structure for finding ‘connected’ samples, where some or all members of the group are known to each other. A colleague of mine was running focus groups on a  health issue; when he paid the money to a well-known agency, he was assured that the sample was ‘fresh’, that participants did not know each other. On arriving and conducting the focus groups, my colleague thought everything was going well, until he was leaving the building and saw 3 of the participants get in the same car. He asked if they knew each other and was told they did, but the agency person had said they had to say they didn’t know each other. This is simply sharp practice. That agency won’t be used again by my colleague.

4. How are the focus groups analysed?

It’s fair to say that the analysis stage with many market researchers is as follows: sit round with a couple of colleagues with the printed transcripts; highlight some ‘interesting’ bits; rejig some bits to make them match the initial research questions, and illustrate the interesting bits with juicy quotes. This could arguably be done by any bright person, with no research training. There are good ways to analyses focus groups: social scientists use them all the time. Ask your market researcher to outline their method of analysis, and if it sounds half-baked and unconvincing, then think twice before you hand over money for a task that a bright person in your company could do as well (or as badly!) with a minimal bit of handholding. Proper analysis is theoretically informed, takes time, and requires several drafts. If you hire the right person or agency, it does not have to cost any more than the fee charged by a typical research company.

5. What should you do with the focus group data ?

You can do three things with focus group data:  1: The data should feed into the design of your survey; 2:  the data should be given as feedback to your product development team, and 3: the data can also be used to refine initial brainstorms. There are other reasons, but your market researcher should be able to bang out the reasons above without a moment’s thought.

Before a company talks to a  market researcher (in-house or an agency); they should know the answer to question 1, and should expect quick and convincing answers to questions 2-4  from the market researcher. If not, then find people who can. Otherwise, you’re paying money for a suboptimal service.

Posted by Ken.

TV3′s documentary on the current sorry state of Fianna Fáil last night touched off the question of the party’s brand. Senior figures from the pantheon of FF greats (OK, I’m joking) commented on the worth, heritage, and connotations of the name Fianna Fáil.

Party political brands are deemed by the commentariat to be of much significance to voters, even though there’s no real evidence that this is the case. What’s in a name? Fianna Fáil, meaning warriors of Ireland or warriors of destiny (depending on which authorities you cite) would sound now like the proposed name of  a rugby team franchise, or a thrash metal band from near Mullingar. But that misses the point: parties as brands are ancient by contemporary standards, and new parties stand little chance of passing the test of time and successive elections.

When people like Eamon O’Cuiv say that they have a fierce loyalty to the name and the brand Fianna Fáil, it’s only to be expected, as the name is a teddy bear from their childhood, one they grew up with and turned to when distressed. It’s debatable whether political ‘sophisticates’, including party hacks, actually believe in a political brand name, as distinct from being attached to party colleagues, the pursuit of power, and habit.

This psychographic investment (as called by political scientists) may well mean that party members would hate to change their brands, but only an idiot would imagine that name change actually connotes philosophical change. In this case, party political brands are fictions, unchanging despite overhauls in economics and society -  just a nominal habit to garner goodwill among the party faithful. An imagined community, to invoke Benedict Anderson, rather than a living set of values and merged identities, which party elites hope will absorb voters once every election.

Posted by Ken.

It’s worthwhile  to compare the 2011 campaigns of Nike, Adidas, and Puma. Nike’s “The Chosen” focuses primarily on surfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding and tries to include these extreme sports into the wide realm of sports that Nike caters to. The Adidas All In  features huge stars, such as David Beckham and Katy Perry while promoting a wide range of sports as well. However, Puma’s campaign is very different than Nike and Adidas. Puma’s “After-Hours Athlete” Campaign focuses on the non-athlete, or the average person. It depicts a group of young people out at the pub, having a beer and playing darts while wearing Puma brand clothing.

Nike, Adidas, and Puma all usually cater to a very similar audience – the sports enthusiast. Puma’s 2011 campaign, however, caters to a different niche of the market and shows that a person does not have to be a typical athlete in order to wear the Puma brand. The company must have decided that they could have more success in a different niche, something other than the sports enthusiast niche. In fact, one gets a sense from the After-Hours Athlete campaign that Puma is moving more towards being a social clothing brand. In the adverts, we see “real” people – no celebrities, no football players, no one extremely athletic. It focuses on the social aspect of a young person’s life and tries to relate to the everyday realities that they experience. The ad also showcases the brands versatility. A young athlete can go from wearing his Puma shoes on the field to wearing his puma shoes in the club.

So does the consumer want a brand that makes them feel like an athlete without really having to be an athlete at all? Will the After-Hours Athlete rise to the occasion and bring Puma from a strictly sportswear company to a more social clothing brand? As the year progresses, it will be interesting to see how Puma sales compare to those of Nike and Adidas and how the new advertising techniques will affect how Puma is perceived.

Posted By Elise.

The blogosphere is abuzz at the moment with discussion of the Guardian’s newly announced “digital first” strategy. Journalism and advertising have long been intertwined. The recession has seen brands slash their advertising expenditure but, more importantly, the digital revolution has instigated a paradigmatic shift in how news is reported, distributed and shared: whereas it used to be concrete and periodic, it is now both malleable and constant. The way we process the ensuing abundance of information is undergoing parallel changes.

There is a growing body of work contending that how we communicate in the digital world is actually akin to communications prior to the Gutenberg revolution. This thesis, titled the ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’, holds that the age of ‘textuality’ instigated by the printing press was a mere interruption in what is the more natural and common mode of human interaction, that of ‘orality’: namely ‘conversation, gossip, the ephemeral.’ A similar argument is propounded by Clay Shirky with his concept of ‘cognitive surplus.’ Shirky argues that the dominant mode of engagement with the media has been passive consumption with people functioning as couch potatoes. However, the digital age has created media tools that enable people to do more than merely consume, we can create. This newfound ability is, according to Shirky, a return to primordial human motivations. Social media has enabled ordinary citizens, in a Habermasian sense, to step back into the public sphere, the Arab Spring being a case in point.

So, how exactly do journalists fit into this environment whereby ordinary citizens have the ability to assume those roles traditionally held by reporters? Where should news media position themselves in this new paradigm? (See Storyful) And how should they adapt their relationship with advertisers? As well as having to adapt to the new, interactive nature of the web, news media must solve the difficulty of how to be financially profitable. How do they transition to the digital world where their competitors are offering the same service, but for free? Given that advertisers now have more ways to reach their target markets, why should they use news websites?

The Guardian, The Times and The New York Times have each adopted a different stance to the erection of paywalls. The Times of London have erected an impermeable paywall; it is necessary to subscribe in order to access articles. As of December 2010 The Times lost an estimated 90% of its online readership. The New York Times have adopted a metered approach whereby users have access to a limited number of articles a month before having to subscribe.  It is too soon to tell how effective such a strategy will be. The Guardian, conversely, is adopting an open approach. They are shifting their efforts to prioritise their digital offering and are reconfiguring their newspaper to fit in with their “digital first” strategy. According to The Guardian, many of their print readers read the paper in the evening and prefer to read breaking news on digital devices in the morning. They are therefore changing their print offering to an evening edition focusing more on analysis and commentary rather than news per se. They are planning to further increase their online readership in the US thereby encouraging US advertising.

People surfing the web primarily flitter from site to site without fully engaging with content let alone advertisements. However, if people have paid subscriptions they are arguably more engaged and will perhaps engage more with advertisements. Furthermore, via the subscription process more details are known of the users enabling advertisements to be tailored specifically to a given reader. However, one can easily counter that people who pay for subscriptions do not want to be distracted by such advertisements. It is impossible to predict how these different strategies will unfold. How can media planners make themselves relevant? Are they in a better position to predict than other MarComms people? Or are sociologists or cognitive scientists better able to look ahead than those operating within the media industry?

- Posted by Ruth

Although he also has over 1.1 million Twitter followers, Green’s largest promotional tool has been his Youtube channel, Vlogbrothers, which evolved from an experiment with his brother Hank in 2007. In their Brotherhood 2.0 project, they attempted to communicate with one another for one year using only videoblogging on Youtube. Offerings from the pair grew from discussions of their everyday lives to more elaborate content, including the “gameshow” Truth or Fail and book-club style discussions of famous works like J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Green began to build momentum around his latest novel, “The Fault in Our Stars”, on Tuesday 28th June when he announced the title on Youtube, Twitter and Tumblr. Later that day, he spent over an hour streaming live on Youtube, reading an extract from the book and answering questions from fans in real time as they commented on the stream. He suggested that his fans create mock-ups of possible covers for the still unpublished book, and received dozens of entries within a few days. He also promised to personally sign all pre-orders of the book. By 10pm that night, the novel was number one on barnesandnoble.com,  having won the same spot on amazon.com only an hour before.

The relationships Green had developed with his fans through social media allowed him to bypass traditional advertising mediums to effectively (and cheaply) achieve what many fail to do in a crowded book market. Moreover, the buzz created around The Fault in Our Stars is sure to grow exponentially and permeate market segments beyond those who had watched and enjoyed his Youtube vlogs. The true engagement and two-way communication with consumers that he demonstrated should act as a bar to which other writers (and, indeed, other marketers) should strive to rise.

Posted by Caroline.

Established companies in pharma, healthcare and bancassurance often don’t have a lot going for them when it comes to their social media presence (please fill in the exception that comes to your mind now), but an additional hindrance for impactful social media is how we work now. We are told by Clay Shirky and Scott Beslky  and James Gleick that the nature of work has altered due to the ‘wired revolution’ and we’re never going back: that’s true for some companies, desirable for others, and just not at all true for pharma, healthcare, or bancassurance (in the cases I’ve read about or seen at first hand). All too often, the paperless office is a misnomer: much worise is the massive underutilisation of collaborative working tools such as good project mgmt software, or things like Dropbox. If your company’s not making use of  good software for collaborative working, how the hell are you going to be able to master Twitter and Facebook to connect to your customers? Do you think that leaving your social media strategy to the funky young guy and girl at the hot desk will cut it? Less trend chasing and more uptake of contemporary ways of working are required, by all staff, across divisions and management layers.

Posted by Ken.