It’s one of those topics that always comes up, whether it’s in the media, at market research conferences or just when discussing a brief and what the best methodology is. The humble focus group. Does it still have a place in marketing arsenal? Is the set up and design ‘leading’ people? Are there better and more reliable ways to explore feelings/behaviours/reactions/insert objective here? Are the people truly representative? Are we killing good creatives by ‘focus grouping’ them?

This year we decided to investigate what the Christmas experience is like for shoppers, from how they feel to how they celebrate and everything in between including gift buying and menu planning. Here we share some of the key highlights of what we learnt.

Marketing is slowly gaining importance in B2B organisations, however for various reasons it doesn’t always get the credit it deserves nor the attention and creativity required to cut through to the target audience. We’ve seen that this doesn’t have to be the case and here we look at what B2B marketers should be doing differently to reach their audiences by taking a page out of the B2C playbook.

Creating and holding onto brand loyalty is challenging. Researching it is even harder. In our research, we need to find ways that reveal consumers’ values, needstates and interactions in the category in order to understand what sorts of rewards would resonate and how we can connect emotionally to move away from transactional relationships. Here we look at one way of doing that.

Consumers are faced with increasing choice - an event that doesn’t make decision-making any easier. To work around this they use category and brand cues to navigate the plethora of options. Here we look at how brands can use these cues to communicate subtle messages about their brand to ensure their brand is always the one consumers reach for.