The Brainzooming Group

I got to hang out at The Market Research Event (TMRE) with a couple of my “research kids.” It was great to see how they’ve continued to advance in their careers.

This week, make a short list of your “business kids” – the people you’ve worked with and helped shape that have moved on to other places. If it’s been awhile, give them a call, see how they’re doing, and find out if they’re headed to any conferences in the near future. If they are, and you can see your way clear to do it, join them, do some learning, and get a Brainzoom from seeing how they’ve grown since leaving home.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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There were two great keynotes at “The Market Research Event” on Thursday, the final day of the conference at Disneyland.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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It’s wrap-up day for The Market Research Event (TMRE). Here are a few highlights from a various sessions this week:

• Interesting quote on changing business dynamics from Doug Cottings, Executive Director Marketing Research & Analysis at UBS – “Financial markets are changing over the weekend, which never happened before.”
• We’ve talked about businesses going after your market share not always looking like your company. Karen Gryson, Director of Global Knowledge & Insight at The Coca-Cola Company provided a great confirmation of this when covering its extensive work on needs-based segmentation. She highlighted that Coca-Cola competes with candy, snack chips, and even cigarettes on a sensory needs basis.
• In our Monday session, a participant from a major CPG marketer asked what’s next in ideation and strategic thinking. I mentioned the IBM Jams approach that lets widely distributed groups exchange ideas. Technology is in place that enables theme analysis and prioritization within these broad discussions. On Tuesday, James Newswanger from IBM talked about IBM Jamming in a session on Corporate Reputation measurement. He identified two epiphanies from these experiences: the Internet can transform relationships between employees and the company, and the size of these online events breaks down intra-company silos.
• Kelley Styring, head of Insight Farm and author of “In Your Car: Road Trip through the American Automobile” did a great overview of the work for this upcoming book. Her approach is a very cool merging of qualitative research (and ethnography specifically), quantitative analysis, and ideation to identify enhancements that would make cars much more functional for how people use them. How else to generate ideas ranging from a food warmer (for cooking items in a sun-drenched car during the day) to a separate temperature protection module (to keep all the HBA and medical solutions we keep in cars cool and protected from spoilage).

These are just a few of the insights and idea starters. We’ll cover more in the future, along with an update to the ongoing series on what poor presenters should stop doing.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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The standout presentation Tuesday at The Market Research Event was from W5, a market research company based in Durham, NC. The session was on “Design Driven Deliverables,” defined as “any method of communicating research findings that goes beyond the standard research report.”

This topic has been of great interest to me; it’s unfortunately often met with blank stares. As Steve Kulp and Lisa Broome from W5 discussed expanding the range of media used to communicate research results, my thought was, “Maybe I’m not as crazy as I thought, or at least they’re crazy in the same way I am!”

W5 considers four types of design driven deliverables:

• Graphic – Results depicted visually in posters, booklets, stickers, note cards, etc.
• Sensory – Stimuli that engage the senses in various ways, including textures, audio, video, and smells.
• Experiential – An interactive presentation of results in ideation sessions, dramatization, experiential tours, immersion rooms.
• Installation – Physical environments that convey understanding, including displays, large scale murals, shadow boxes, and artifact installations.

They showed examples that demonstrated meaningful, story-based depictions of research data going beyond simply reporting statistical differences. Check out more information through W5 white papers on this and other topics at company’s website.

Follow-up note - here’s a recap video shot right after Monday’s strategic thinking session. It’s posted on YouTube!

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Monday’s IIR Market Research Event agenda included pre-conference sessions. I did a strategic thinking seminar along with Lori Schade in the morning. Thanks to all the attendees who asked questions and offered comments throughout the very interactive session.

I attended Holly O’Neill’s seminar on turbo charging new product ideation in the afternoon. She is president of Talking Business, a California-based marketing firm. Her session included 9 exercises intended to help participants grow in facilitating ideation sessions. Her comments were a reminder about ideation session fundamentals that are easy to overlook. Among these:

• Create an ideation platform upfront – a clear documentation of the session’s objectives and topic breadth
• Use an initial mind dump to let people share ideas already on their minds
• Get people standing up and moving around often to keep energy levels high
• Consider an inspiration table – a collection of objects designed to spur creativity on the topic being considered
• Structure exercises that allow people to build off of one another’s ideas
• Have participants sketch out ideas to help bring them to life

As time permits, I’ll provide additional updates throughout the week on relevant topics.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Creative Instigation

As someone described it to me last night, the much hyped “Creative Instigation” session for the Kansas City PRSA took place Tuesday afternoon.

Thanks to Tracy Richardson from Barkley and PRSA for hosting “Creative Instigation” yesterday. Several people were instrumental in helping the presentation and workbook come together, including regular readers Leslie Adams and Cory Christensen. Thanks to both of them as well!

We haven’t had a chance to go back through the comments forms to identify questions and points to clarify, but as we do, they’ll get covered here and on Jan’s “Creative Instigation” blog.

“Ain’t It Time We Said Goodbye”

I talked previously about the feedback approach we tend to use in meetings where the junior most person starts with the first comment, and we sequence through by seniority and title. In that way each person conveys their point of view free of undue influence from a boss or senior team members.

It’s been a great benefit for most of the past 8 ½ years that I’ve been able to respond after Angie Davids. Doing so has always prompted new insights that I wouldn’t have gotten to on my own without her perspective and expertise. Angie is one of the smartest strategic thinkers I’ve worked with in my career.

She’s moving to a new position at the end of this week and will be missed tremendously. And beyond being a great strategic thinker, she also has a wonderful sense of humor. So if I start sounding dumber or not as funny, you’ll know what has happened! Best wishes Angie!

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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I presented on creating strategic insights from market research at the Frost & Sullivan Marketing World conference with assistance from Jennifer Nelson (Johnson & Johnson), Bill Lenihan (Philips), and Barb Murphy.

The interactive Frost & Sullivan conference format called for presenting several strategic case studies. While I don’t usually speak on corporate case studies in presentations, this opportunity along with a pitch Barb was doing recently caused us to discuss – from an audience’s perspective – what a beneficial case study should incorporate:

• A few pieces of general information about the company or market under study – The audience doesn’t need to know everything about the situation; share just enough so we can judge how closely our own situations are to yours.
• A brief problem or opportunity statement – What general strategic situation did the company face? Possible salient points might include the business / market condition (growth, retraction, cost cutting), product lifecycle stage, internal or external audiences, types of customers, business expectations, type of strategy employed, objectives, etc. Again, these needn’t be shared in excruciating detail when all we need is a point of reference to our situations and a sense of the signals that suggested the strategic problem or opportunity was present.
• Three to five generalized lessons learned that it would have been great to know beforehand – Remember this about the audience – we’re “you” before you learned what you learned in this situation. The real benefit for us is to discover what you now know so we can get to the same successes faster or avoid what didn’t work for you. The key question for you to answer: “How would I be able to replicate the steps that took me from the initial strategic situation to success?” That’s what we’re interested in hearing.
• A few critical success factors – The elements essential to repeating a comparable success with our strategy.
• A general indication of results – We don’t need something overly detailed. It’s more important to have a sense of what we can expect, i.e. single or double digit improvements, how soon benefits can be realized, how long they’d last, etc. And avoid all these things – skip “in depth” discussion on your company statistics, videos that don’t move the topic forward, solutions only possible by using you or your vendor, and wasted time extolling your company’s incomparable virtues (i.e., a sales pitch).

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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