Collaborative Research

Sometimes, combining forces is the best approach to research. Team work has many advantages for an organization, including better flow of ideas and increased resources.

For instance, partnering with Mindshare and ESPN, Unilever was interested to explore consumer behavior and media interaction in the future. The companies used Scenario Planning, a corporate strategic planning activity (borrowed from military strategy) which attempts to predict what things will be like in the future.

The research project, called Media 2015, used third-party research and primary-sourced interviews with 14 media industry experts to attempt to understand how media in the year 2015 will look. These individuals (listed in the full report) are leaders in their respective fields, including digital marketing, mobility, consumer trend spotting, and media regulation.

The three company team identified trends they believe are certainties for the future of media – such as increased bandwidth, the digital generation getting older, and devices getting fasted – and others trends that are unpredictable – such as the overall shape of social networking, how much people and regulators will care about privacy, and the level of customization expected.

The research identified four possible future scenario's for consumer media. The predict that, “the four scenarios are not exclusive of one another, but together form pieces of a possible future of media, evolving differently for varied sectors, audience groups and geographies.”

In the first, consumer behavior will be highly fragmented – consumers will access information across a wide range of sources. The second, Portal Me, features consumers with narrowed and focused attention. Media will be constant, but customers will receive information that is customized to them based on stated and learned preferences. The third, Media Buffet, features consumers who pick and choose their media content using multiple devices. Brand marketers will need to deliver information through multiple channels. The fourth, Traditional New Media, is the most passive, where consumer attention is limited. The scenario is characterized by entertainment and less by connectivity.

Research projects such as Media 2015 allow companies to make strategic plans and decisions about their efforts to respond to changing business landscapes. Research projects and information projects like this one are invaluable tools for public relations and marketing practitioners.

Letting the Consumer Take the Lead

This past summer, Unilever was honored at the 57th Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival  as the “Advertiser of the Year,” a global forum of communications professionals and companies coming together annually for seminars and debates about the world of communications. It is a seven day event that attracts top professionals in the advertising, media, marketing, production and design industries.

Unilever was given this award for its innovative efforts in marketing. This summer, Unilever announced some shifts it will take in revamping its website and social media presence. The company (currently the second largest advertiser behind Proctor & Gamble) states that it realizes that Unilever.com is very corporate and does not speak to the largest audience visiting the website: consumers. The company has found that 60% of website visitors are consumers and future-employees, and they wish to address that, by making the website more user-friendly and with less corporate speech.

The company is also doubling its digital marketing budget under the leadership of Keith Weed, Unilever’s new Chief Marketing Officer. In an interview, Mr. Weed discussed that in the U.S., 25% of people’s time is spent on digital engagement. Following this, he believes that marketing budgets should be ‘in that order.’ As he puts it, companies are in their infancy in realizing the power in social media, and the need to go “fish where the fishes are.”

What is interesting about these moves on behalf of Unilever is the implications it has both for research and public relations. First of all, through research conducted about consumer habits, Unilever is responding to what resonates with people. Additionally, Unilever is encouraging people to get involved, share their story, and create connections to the brand through digital forums, including Facebook and YouTube (if you haven’t already, be sure to check out Unilever’s latest and most expensive marketing technique, short videos with a Mad Men-esque approach).

It will be interesting to follow this effort to see how successful it will be in encouraging consumer creativity and feedback.

Bring out the Real! Real PR?

It’s time to get your sandwich on! For the first time, Unilever offered a unique experience at this year’s Food Network's New York City Food and Wine Festival. Hellman’s mayonnaise sponsored a contest between some of New York City’s finest sandwich experts, including BaoHaus, Blue Ribbon Restaurants, Blue Smoke Bake Shop, DOB 111,‘ino, No. 7 Sub, Porchetta, Resto, Fort Defiance, The Lobster Place, and Zampa in a competition to crown the Sandwich King. The event was held on October 10.

Along with the contest, participants got the chance to make their own unique mayonnaise at the mixology bar featuring herbs and spices. Guests could also have their photos taken as souvenirs to share with friends and family at the "Spread the Love" photo station. Didn’t get enough? The Hellman's Facebook page was a place to comment and check out the photos from the event for an added interactive feature.

The event was a chance for Hellman’s mayonnaise to reach out to people on a personal level and show them new ways to use the Hellman’s product to bring life to their sandwiches. In addition, it gave Hellman’s a chance to remind guests that their mayonnaise is made from only the purest ingredients; eggs, oil, and vinegar. Hellman’s also feature’s the real food project The Real Food Project, a campaign dedicated to increasing American’s consumption of “real” foods. Real food project shows families recipes and tips on how to eat foods with natural (unprocessed) ingredients.  The Hellman’s Real Food campaign is an effort to help American families find balance in their lives and enjoy healthy living and eating together. Unilever has definitely found a need among American families, and this is a great way to get involved in the relationship building for which public relations strives.

Operationalization: Making a Big Concept Measurable

A big word, but really, all it means is how we express the phenomena we are looking to explore. For instance, if you wanted to study religiosity, you might operationalize this as “attending church services once a week.” There can be many observables to explain a phenomenon under study, this is just one possibility.

With its Self-Esteem Weekend, Dove will be interested in evaluating its success. They may do this, as I discussed in my previous blog  by survey response. While I discussed sampling first, creating the research design would, in practice, have come first.

So Dove might decide that they are interested to study the level of girls self-esteem. There are many ways to capture this data. Today, I will chose to capture the level of self-esteem using an index. There are a few kinds of indexes. In an index, each variable being measured is given equal weight. So, I might ask questions like:

1.       How happy do you feel at school?

Happy  1(very)    2 somewhat)    3(neither)    4(somewhat)    5(very)  Unhappy

2.       Which describes you?

Pretty  1(very)    2 somewhat)    3(neither)    4(somewhat)    5(very)  Ugly

3.       Do you feel comfortable expressing yourself to your friends?

Comfortable  1(very)    2 somewhat)    3(neither)    4(somewhat)    5(very)  Uncomfortable

And so on…

In these few examples, I have operationalized self-esteem as measurements of whether a girl feels happy at school, thinks that she is pretty, and feels comfortable expressing herself to friends. These are a few of many ways to operationalize a very complex concept. On an index, these questions measure responses and weigh the value of responses equally.

So if one girl chose her answers, respectively, as 4, 3, 5 we might say she scored 12 points on the self-esteem index. Another girl whose responses were 2, 2, 1 would score 5 on the self-esteem index. This very clearly showed that first girl scored higher on the self-esteem index. If our operational measurements are valid and reliable, then we can conclude that girl 1 has more self-esteem than girl 2.

(To measure whether girl’s enjoyed the Self-Esteem Weekend, we might do something similar as above, but use questions that measure whether the girl’s felt they “learned a lot,” “had fun,” or “would like to do it again next year.”)

So, today we operationalized a concept (we came up with a way to measure or observe a phenomenon) and learned how to put them on an index.

Along with our topic of Dove research, appropriately, Dove has posted to their Facebook wall today that they conducted their 2010 research on women and self-esteem, and concluded that “women still don’t feel comfortable describing themselves as beautiful.”  Check out the results.