Guest Speaker: James Armstrong

“practical market research tools to discover what customers really want”

On the very first day of semester two, I am pleased to announce we have a guest speaker, James Armstrong. He is the Professional Market Intelligence Manager at Philips, and former Associate Director of Client research at top global marketing research firm, Taylor Nelson Sofres, is going to tell us about market research in practice.

Based in Amsterdam, James has been doing research from the client side for a number of years. In this session, he will be sharing his experiences and perspectives about market research, addressing particularly its pitfall in the attitude-behavior gap: that people don’t do what they say they will do!

This is particularly pertinent to the practice of communications research since advertisers are always desperate to find out what consumers think and what they will do in future. In practice, marketing research is a subtle “crystal-ball” art that follows no hard and fast rules and requires, believe it or not, as much creativity and quick thinking as it does rigor. Client market research has always had a bad rep among advertising agencies - James is going to offer a voice from the other side of the fence. Should be interesting!

Visual Research Workshop: Visual Diaries

Students have been keeping visual diaries - collecting images that are related to their research project or simply for inspiration. Using the traditional ol’ collage-style visual diary was to get everyone to engage with their ideas in a visceral way whilst playing the role of data-collector meant they have to pay more attention to images around them.  

For today’s workshop, we got our visual diaries out in the MA Common Room and blew up some colour spreads. Here’s a sneak peak:

Photographs of visual diaries will also be up soon.

Alex Zamora: “Let technology inform your ideas”

This sentiment neatly sums up a thought-provoking talk by Alex Zamora yesterday, who very kindly took time out to come down to WSA to tell our MA students how (not) to use social media. He showed how his commercial work (Poke London) and creative passions (Feverzine) are very much complimentary forces in his career - both helping him carve out networks to generate both sales and influence.

The Internet hates advertising, Alex warns that you can’t simply ‘facebookize’, ‘social mediarize’ or ‘iphone-appize’ a traditional communications campaign and call that a social media strategy.

“You can’t just use Youtube to promote TVCs…that’s an act of dilution rather than strategy. Don’t create crap using digital. Use digital to create something amazing”.

For him, a few of the ways brands and organizations with web presence can do this is:

1) Make sure it’s vetted – Alex advises that as manager of your brand’s community, you can’t let spam invade your social media. Weed out the spam/fake followers “to have a clear idea of who is paying attention”;

2) Be reactive to your community – You can’t over-plan social media. You get at most 1-2 weeks of planning but most of the time you have to generate relevant content within 24hrs.

3) Divide or unify? – Organizations must strike a balance between bringing their community together under a coherent strategy but must also allow for being involved at a localized level.

4) Experiment, know what NOT to do – these days everyone has a personal FB page but it is not the same as how a brand uses FB. “Pay attention to how brands use social media, and know works and what not to do”.

5) Collaborate – Alex’s final message to our students was to work together. Create personal projects you love to do for the sake of it. Agencies who comb through perfect CVs and portfolios are also looking for evidence of ‘creative spark’ and that shows through your personal work.

Alex Zamora is now a Digital Strategist / Community Manager at Poke London. When he’s not doing that, he’s working on Feverzine and working with universities around the UK, including Nottingham Trent and WSA.