TRC

There's a lot of discussion today about the researcher as story-teller. Most of it has to do with the choices we make as analysts - what to focus on and what to discard; all important stuff.

Ultimately, however, we have to step up and tell those stories and good visual display is critical to that effort. Too often we fall short of effective in this area, and that's a problem. Market Researchers are fighting everyday for respect, but we'll never get it if we can't communicate the good (or bad) news we have to tell about brands and products and customers. To quote "Information Is Beautiful" author David McCandless from a recent interview in "Research:"

...everything you create now design-wise is competing with everything else that everyone ever looks at. So market research stuff is looking worse and worse as time goes by, because the web and good design are becoming more and more of a daily experience for people.

Tags: Creativity, Advertising, visualization

You remember the MasterCard "Priceless" ad campaign, don't you? It first ran during the 1997 World Series.

"Two tickets: $28. Two hot dogs, two popcorns, two sodas: $18. One autographed baseball: $45. Real conversation with 11 year old son: Priceless."

It was an ad campaign that was so successful that it helped MasterCard move from a distant second to near parity with Visa. The question is, why? What was it about that ad that was so powerful, asked researchers Jeffrey Loewenstein, Raj Raghunathan and Chip Heath  (who is incidentally a co-author of the best seller Made to Stick ). What they found holds lessons for companies looking to create successful ads.

Tags: Advertising

They look beautiful on screen or on a page. Almost like watching a short, artsy film. But it is an ad and though you know who it is for, it doesn’t say anything about the positive attributes of the product. American Express is particularly good at this. Are such ads useful or a waste of money? Two of our friends at Yale, Dina Mayzlin and Jiwoong Shin investigated this phenomenon and came to some very interesting conclusions.

 

Tags: Advertising

When you leaf through a magazine what of advertisements make you stop? It is not an easy question to answer as so many variables are usually involved. To tackle this question a group of researchers used unique eye tracking data and innovative measures of visual complexity and were able to develop recommendations for making ads that are more attention-getting.

Tags: Advertising