One of the most important paradigms governing today’s marketing world is the constant drive to better segment a brand’s customer and prospect base. Conventional wisdom says that the better we segment consumers, the better we can market to them. Consumer segmentation is viewed as a “best-in-class” practice across the marketing world. But are we on the right track? (more…)

After issuing dire warnings about the future of consumer surveys, the two biggest advertisers and buyers of market research in the world — Procter & Gamble and Unilever — are linking with the Advertising Research Foundation for an industry effort to embrace online chatter and other naturally occurring feedback like never before. To tackle the issue, the ARF will hold two industry summits in the coming six weeks to support new ways of listening to consumers that don’t involve the traditional question-and-answer format. “Our consumers have been sending us messages for years that they’re not interested in the traditional survey process,” said Kim Dedeker, VP-external capability leadership, global consumer and market knowledge at P&G. (more…)

The 2008 World Values Survey has come back with some surprising news. Reported happiness had actually risen in 40 countries and decreased in just 12. Political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who has been involved in this research for 20 years, says the results defied conventional wisdom on the subject of happiness, which has held that levels remain more or less static. “We knew it couldn’t happen,” he says. “I said to myself, ‘Do I dare report this?” The survey found that freedom of choice, gender equality, and increased tolerance are responsible for a considerable rise in overall world happiness. The results shatter the more simplistic and traditionally accepted notion that wealth is the determining factor, says Inglehart. The list of happiest countries is top heavy with European nations (Denmark is number one) but even with all of its’ recent woes, the US still comes in at 16 — hope springs eternal. (more…)

Thin is still in for advertising, new research suggests, unless you’re trying to sell cookies or self-esteem. A study by business professors at Villanova University and the College of New Jersey, inspired by Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” shows that ads featuring thin models made women feel worse about themselves but better about the brands featured. ”The really interesting result we’re seeing across multiple studies is that these thin models make women feel bad, but they like it,” Mr. Kees said. “They have higher evaluation of the brands. With the more regular-size models, they don’t feel bad. Their body image doesn’t change. But in terms of evaluations of the brands, those are actually lower.” (more…)

BzzAgent, a network of regular-Joe brand advocates, is making a big bet that word-of-mouth marketing will outperform any other discipline when it comes to ringing registers and driving advocacy for brands. With its “WOM Impact Guarantee” program, which launched today and will run throughout the rest of 2008, BzzAgent is inviting any brand marketer and its agency partners to take part in a challenge in which BzzAgent and the agency partner will run competing campaigns. If BzzAgent does not top the competing agency by 20% across four metrics — brand awareness, consumer opinion, purchase intent and actual sales — the agency will refund the marketer the cost of its word-of-mouth campaign and measurement costs. Hard to cover your ears and not listen to this offer — especially if you interested in a technologically connected target. (more..)

Dr. Val Curtis, the director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, had spent years trying to persuade people in the developing world to wash their hands habitually with soap. Diseases caused by dirty hands kill a child somewhere in the world about every 15 seconds. “There are fundamental public health problems, like hand washing with soap, that remain killers only because we can’t figure out how to change people’s habits,” Dr. Curtis said. “We wanted to learn from private industry how to create new behaviors that happen automatically.” To overcome this hurdle, Dr. Curtis called on three top consumer goods companies to find out how to sell hand-washing the same way they sell Speed Stick deodorant and Pringles potato chips. The companies that Dr. Curtis turned to — Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever — had invested hundreds of millions of dollars finding the subtle cues in consumers’ lives that corporations could use to introduce new routines. Through experiments and observation, social scientists like Dr. Carol Berning (recently retired from P&G) have learned that there is power in tying certain behaviors to habitual cues through relentless advertising. “Creating positive habits is a huge part of improving our consumers’ lives, and it’s essential to making new products commercially viable” said Dr. Berning. (more…)

People who are bicultural and speak two languages may unconsciously change their personality when they switch languages, according to a new U.S. study. Researchers studied groups of Hispanic women, all of whom were bilingual, but with varying degrees of cultural identification. They found significant changes in self perception or “frame-shifting” in bicultural participants — women who participate in both Latino and Anglo culture.  The researchers said the women classified themselves and the women they observed in advertising as more assertive when they spoke Spanish than when they spoke English. While frame-shifting has been studied before, they said this research found that people who are bicultural switched frames more quickly and easily than people who are bilingual but living in one culture. (more…)

“Conocimiento habla pero sabiduría escucha” – Jimi Hendrix