Esomar held a conference on Consumer Insight in Milan last week. Greg Rowland and I have presented a paper called "Warm Vodka and Sweaty Women". The paper describes development of new communication strategy for Rexona in Russia.
We have picked up a nomination for award from Esomar (Esomar Award Nominations), which is great. I think and hope that we got the nomination because of our focus on the end product - the communication itself. Consumer insight seems meaningless on its own, it is just a mean to an end -the end being new products and communication. I thought that too much time at the conference was given to discussion as to what consumer insight is and what it isn't...But that is the way of market research conferences, I guess.
It was good to see some old friends and colleagues and meet new and interesting people such as Virginia Valentine and Malcolm Evans who run the workshop on semiotics in Milan.
Here is the presentation:
i liked the thing about Stoppard & so on.
and the Russian commercials are fascinating.
> obviously, the sensibilities are so different in different countries -- i think
> you must know that if you aired a commercial here in Toronto showing a girl
> with body odour demonstrated by a pig (no matter that it is animated)in her armpit you would get some very irate responses. i cringed, myself.
> we wouldn't find it funny. woman = pig == very bad.
>
> over here, body odour is so well controlled it's actually unusual, and deodorant ads don't talk about smelling bad,
> they just talk about freshness and not getting white stuff on your clothes
> and lasting all day ...
actually MENTIONING body odour is pretty much taboo.
>
Posted by: janice L. | July 19, 2007 at 08:02 PM