What are you doing on Wednesday?

Earlier this year Wanadoo ditched its logo and was rebranded under the Orange livery as part of a ‘simplified brand architecture’.

The name change came a little over a year after France Telecom decided to ditch the name Freeserve, its ISP in the UK, and replace it with Wanadoo. This means that the mobile phone outfit have become the umbrella brand for all mobile, broadband and other converged telecoms services.

So, is this rebranding creating consumer confusion or is it a fantastic deal for UK consumers?

Well actually I think we got a pretty good deal out of this, and I believe that Orange now offers the best value for money: if you get a mobile phone tariff @ £35 per month, you also get free Orange broadband + 2 cinema tickets for the price of 1 every Wednesday with Orange Wednesdays – check out the cool leaflet I recently received from Orange broadband – not cheap…

Orange has certainly raised the bar and other mobile phone providers will have to change their offer if they want to retain their customers.

 Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic…

A study commissioned by Carphone Warehouse in July 2006 reports the finding that more than 90% of UK mobile users can’t get through the day without using their phone. ‘My whole life is in there’ - incidentally this is a line used by Nokia in the US, one of the few markets where people are less enamoured with mobiles.

Despite Americans’ techno-friendliness and ease with technology the US (and to an extent Canada) were latecomers to ‘cell phones’ and today seem to be the only developed countries in the world which haven’t developed a deep, multi-dimensional relationship with them. Yes, to some extent ‘cells’ are techno-hubs there too, but in a much diminished way.

In the US, a cellphone is a tool. In Europe, a mobile phone is a lifestyle.

I remember having a conversation about mobile phones and mobile phone suppliers with Chris Brown who was on business in London a couple of weeks ago. Chris told me that in the US, consumers pay more attention to the provider than the actual brand of mobile phone. I would say it’d the opposite in the UK – correct me if I am wrong.

Both mobile phones manufacturers and mobile phone suppliers advertise heavily in the UK. Take a look at the Orange ad broadcast in cinemas to promote Orange Wednesdays featuring Patrick Swayze – pretty cool, huh?  

French Presidential Elections 2007 - candidates go viral

There is now less than a month until the first round of the French presidential election on April 22nd.  This post is not about French politics or my political views but about how the French candidates are marketing themselves online. Online politics can be rather dangerous – think John McCain whose myspace page was recently hacked.

I have to admit that I haven’t really looked into what the different candidates have to say but a welcome reminder reached my inbox yesterday.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from François Bayrou about his political plans for French expats; I do not live in France anymore and I am somewhat disconnected with what’s going on in the homeland. By sending this email, François Bayrou reached the expat community virally. Moreover, not being in France the easiest way to keep up to date with the elections is the www.  

If you are interested in reading François Bayrou’s email (in French) drop me a line.

Following this viral coup, I decided to investigate how the 4 main candidates were marketing themselves online:  

• Ségolène Royal (socialist/left-wing candidate): A colourful website with unfortunately too much information on the homepage. Ségolène has set up both a blog and a forum.

• François Bayrou (centre candidate): François Bayrou’s website is well designed and easy to navigate. I was pleasantly surprised to see youtube videos on his homepage. Check out The Bayrou webkit especially if you fancy a Bayrou banner for your myspace page!

• Nicolas Sarkozy (centre-right candidate): A very well-designed and modern looking site yet a little too self-centred with the photo-gallery and gift shop (??!!) – a few videos here and there.

• Jean-Marie Le Pen (far right candidate): Jean-Marie has set-up a ‘journal de bord’  to be translated as video-blog. You didn’t expect Mr Le Pen to use an English word such as blog, did you? I also noticed that unlike Mrs Royal, Mr Le Pen does not allow comments on his ‘journal de bord’. Mr Le Pen clearly needs to be taught the meaning of ‘freedom of speech’.

 More political coverage in English here and here.

UPDATE: Sarkozy also sent an email to all French expats registered to vote abroad. Email available on request

Walkers go green

Crisps giant Walkers has become the first major food brand to display a carbon footprint and reduction logo on its packaging. Each bag of the crisps creates 75 grams of carbon dioxide, according to Walkers and the carbon trust.

• 44% of the emissions come from the farming phase of the process
• Making the crisps at the factory releases another 30% of the emissions
• Packaging is responsible of 15% of the emissions
• Transportation to shops creates 9%
• Disposal generates the final 2%

Better late than never… My advice is to keep packaging simple:

• Less packaging is more
• Primary colours are easier to print and therefore create less carbon emissions
• Try to use recyclable materials
• Use less plastic

Supermarkets in labels war

If you care about what kind of food you buy, there is suddenly a lot more to digest.

The big supermarkets have put new labelling systems with more nutritional information on the front of packs - but what you get depends on where you shop. More consumer confusion ahead…

Sainsbury’s, Asda and Waitrose have all opted for a traffic-light label, where green is good, orange is not so good for you, and red is a warning not to consume too much. This is the system the Food Standards Agency would like the whole industry to adopt.

But Tesco and many of the big food manufacturers have gone for the rival Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) system, where the label tells you what percentage of your guideline daily amounts of sugar, salt, fat and calories each serving contains.

I have been working on a number of packaging projects recently, and I always advise my clients to go for the GDA labelling system rather than the preferred traffic light system. Why? Because I am a consumer and here I am simply using my common sense!

While the colour-coding is easy enough to understand, the grams are meaningless. Taking a look at the above pictures, the Sainsbury’s packaging indicates that this product contains 15g of sugar – fair enough but so what?

While consumers may be aware of calories intake or salt content, they may not necessarily understand some of the percentages on the pack. This labelling system is supposed to help consumers, not confuse them!

Taking a look at the GDA labelling system, the above label shows that each pack contains 8.1g of sugar which equals to 14% of your guideline daily amount. Now that makes sense.

Who wins? You decide!

Président Chirac is watching your plate

 

I am currently  holidaying in France and I was extremely surpised to see health and nutritional warnings at the bottom of food adverts broadcast on TV, the radio and print media.

This campaign launched on February 28th called Manger Bouger (eat and exercise), aims at educating the population, especially children on what to eat and not to eat. The new warnings include:

• For your health, eat at least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables every day
• For your health, exercise regularly
• For your health, avoid foods containing too much fat, too much sugar and too much salt
• For your health, do not snack between meals

Is France also turning into a Big Brother State like the UK?   

Power 150 Top Marketing Blogs

 

Some of you might remember Todd’s amazing blogs’ ranking system, the Power 150.

The Power 150 is a global ranking of the top English-language marketing blogs. Originally launched in January 2007 as a USA-based ranking, the Power 150 expanded worldwide to include all English-language blogs after TechBrew provided the list’s automation in March 2007. To calculate each blog’s final ranking in the Power 150, a very simple, multimetric algorithm was used. Final ranking is based on the sum of four unique and mostly objective sources:

• Google PageRank
• Bloglines Subscribers
• Technorati Ranking
• Todd And Points

Todd kindly sent me an email a couple of days ago to let me know that I am in! Thanks Todd!

Qualitative Research 2.0

 

Z-listers have been meeting up on this side of the pond! I recently hooked up with Reshma Anand of the Qualitative Research blog, and we shared our ideas on the future of Qualitative Research.

1) Scary Technology

Qualitative Research is an exciting discipline that hasn’t reached its full potential yet. A lot of researchers see themselves as data suppliers while they should act as marketing strategists. No wonder why, research as a whole is seen so negatively when we are failing to embrace new technologies.

 

•  Proposals: Proposals are our sales tool, and as researchers, it is our job to win a project by understanding the client’s business objectives, offering the best methodology at the best price. I recently got involved on a pitch for a major music downloads supplier and we came up with a very creative proposal. When I had a look at the suggested methodology, I was disappointed to see that the research would only be conducted offline when part of this project could have been done online. It is impossible to recreate a group’s interaction online but I felt it would have been nice to get closer to the client’s business i.e. the Internet, by including an online element.

 

•  Moderation: Moderation is a crucial and difficult skill part of qualitative research. Needless to say, moderating is a lot more complicated than a simple chit-chat over coffee.  Viewing facilities only started offering DVD recording a couple of years ago and in terms of audio-recording, the only format currently available is old-fashioned audio-tapes. Sometimes I wonder if we really are in 2007!

 

•  Presentation of findings: A good presentation should be easy to read, provide insightful, actionable recommendations and should be aesthetically pleasing. I worked on a presentation for Schering-Plough last year and we included video-clips of the group throughout the presentation. Our client loved it!

 2) Online Research

The main two online research tools currently offered are quantitative web-surveys and qualitative bulletin boards (and its variants). While quantitative web-surveys are booming, I haven’t had the chance yet to get involved in bulleting boards. But what about blogs? Are they not a fantastic research tool in their own right?

 

I stumbled across an article published in the July 2006 edition of Research entitled ‘Is anyone out there listening?’

 ‘Thinktank [a market research company based in London]  conducted a Qualitative Research Study, speaking to 50 white collars workers in Central London aged between 18 and 55 about their use and attitudes towards blogging in a series of mini-depths interviews. The vast majority of our respondents just didn’t seem interested in listening in on what bloggers have to say. A minority thought they might have stumbled across blogs in the course of their Internet browsing but could not think of any names and would not ever consciously think to refer to them.’  

Before I started blogging, I had no interest whatsoever in reading blogs, but when Blog Till you Drop was born, I also started reading other online blurbs to find out about what people had to say. When I started blogging, I also became part of the blogging community. Interviewing white collars, outsiders from the blogging community, was irrelevant.

If this study had been carried out amongst bloggers the answers would have been totally different. More and companies get involved in viral marketing; whose opinions are these companies looking for? One word: BLOGGERS. So while white collars in Central London may not be interested in what bloggers have to say, smart marketers will.  Blogging is still niche, but ignoring what we have to say would be myopic.

Drop me a line should you be interested in reading the full article.

Lost in multi-culturalism?

An American businesswoman comes away from a meeting delighted; she finally got her Japanese supplier to agree to a price. A few days later, she receives questions about price. It’s almost as if she imagined the meeting. “What‘s going on here?” she asks. “We agreed on the price already, didn‘t we?” [1]  

The businesswoman recalls all the Um-hmms and Yesses she heard in the meeting. “They agreed to the price, they said yes,” she mutters to herself. “They even nodded and smiled.” Welcome to the world of intercultural business communication.

This American Businesswoman is not the first or last to feel frustrated in this way. Other people have misunderstood a “yes” response.

A lot of my work lies in internationally co-ordinated qualitative research. This involves regular contact with people around the world in the context of work colleagues, clients and respondents. Like most qualitative researchers, I love watching people. Observation is a crucial part of our work and is at the heart of ethnography, semiotics and general qualitative research consultancy.  I believe I am well placed to talk about cultural similarities and differences in an international context, being French and having lived in Italy and the UK.

1) Language
Clearly language divides.  English is entrenched now as business language but not everyone speaks it fluently and there is a need for compromise. In Europe, Nordic countries, Germany and some Eastern European countries speak perfect English while the French, Italians and Spaniards are in need of more lessons! I worked on an ice-cream testing project a few months ago for our Italian colleagues who asked us to keep a new yoghurt-based ice-cream in the fridge when they in fact meant the freezer – needless to say, none of us got to try that new ice-cream.

And between English speaking countries in general there is a lot of room for misunderstanding. If you ask for a rubber, I’ll probably give you an eraser instead!  

2) Religion and ethnicity Religion and ethnicity are two factors that should be taken into consideration when conducting qualitative research. Even today you have to be careful in mixing religions in group discussions in Northern Ireland.  Do not think of having mixed groups of Flemish and French speakers in Belgium. 

3) Body language The way people greet each other and the gestures they use are of absolute importance in international interpersonal relations.  Even after 7 years, in the UK, I still kiss people on both cheeks instead of one! My friends are now used to it!Don’t even think about shaking your Japanese client’s hand – take a little bow instead. It’s not easy to do business internationally but I feel that clients and suppliers should make an effort to understand and embrace these differences. It takes two to tango!  

Lost in Translation?

• When Coca Cola was first marketed inChina in the 1920‘s, the name was translated phonetically (”ke-kou-ke-la) to mean “female horse stuffed with wax” or “bite the wax tadpole” depending on the dialect. It was quickly revised to sound more like “happiness in the mouth.”

• Ignorant of foreign language, 3M introduced its scotch tape in Japan with the slogan, “It sticks like crazy.” The Japanese interpretation of the slogan was “it sticks foolishly.”

• General Motors couldn‘t understand why the Chevy Nova was not selling well inLatin America, until they were told that in Spanish, “no va” means “it doesn‘t go.”

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[1] When “Yes” means “No” or “Maybe”–Avoiding Cross-Cultural Misunderstandings in Global Business   

Why? Pourquoi? Perché? ¿Porque? Warum?

 

C.B Whittemore at Flooring the Consumer tagged me in the blogosphere’s latest meme – 5 reasons why we blog. Here are my reasons:  

1. I blog because I am Lost in Translation, a slight paradox for a linguist! The plot of this movie is the plot of life. You have a beginning. You’re in the middle, and your story hasn’t ended yet. Blogging is an exciting journey of self-discovery.  

2. As Charles Darwin once said - ‘it’s not the strongest that survive, it’s not the most intelligent that survive, it’s those that adapt to change that survive’: what kind of marketer would I be if I didn’t adapt to change?  

3. I am a curious creative thinker – good job I am a Qualitative Researcher! My blog is the canvas where I organise my thoughts, and share what I see marketing-wise on this side of the pond with fellow bloggers. Needless to say, my colleagues are green with envy!  

4. Blogging is an amazing learning tool – and it’s fun too!  

5. And finally, my blog is my branding tool, and I hope that it’ll help me achieve my Big Apple dream… Everyone wants to be found. 

Now, I’d like to tag:

• Reshma Anand of the Qualitative Research Blog
• Chris Brown of Banding and Marketing
• Katia Adams of ¡Hola! Oi! Hi!
• Lyn Chamberlin of the Brand Dame
• Froggy of Organic Frog  

So tell me, why do you blog?