Archive for February, 2014

Adcepts Support Team Cohesion says Paul Tidmarsh

“One of the most difficult areas for a client managing a brand innovation or npd project is ensuring that all those involved feel that their voice is being heard”, says B7 Innovation founder Paul Tidmarsh. “Using the traditional concept board approach in focus group research means that you have typically six areas which can be explored, and potential different angles within these themes can’t be expressed – this can lead to frustrations within the business where favourite ideas are excluded from the research for lack of space. Getting buy-in from all parties can be problematic.”

Paul Tidmarsh

Paul Tidmarsh

This is where B7’s Adcept methodology offers a clear advantage. “Our approach is different – we start by letting the consumers narrow down the areas that they find most interesting, then we look at these themes from multiple angles” says Tidmarsh. “We show up to 80 different Adcepts to a research group, which means that there is room to include any idea that a member of the team feels particularly strongly about. Each area has a number of different expressions to ensure it’s not overlooked without giving it its best shot.” Because of this, every person/department/region/agency feels that their input has been given a fair crack of the whip and winning ideas are recognised as being genuinely the areas of greatest opportunity.

Showing so many Adcepts to a group often surprises new clients. “It seems counter-intuitive but to isolate the precise areas of opportunity you have to look at it from multiple angles. This is a key difference in our methodology” says Tidmarsh. “We both widen the funnel and explore ideas to a level of detail impossible with traditional research approaches. This not only removes internal politics from the equation, it also gives the richness of information needed for confident brand development and communication strategy.”

Adcepts – Familiarity Breeds Content says B7’s Paul Tidmarsh

The purpose of qualitative research stimulus is to present realistic scenarios to target consumers in order to isolate the areas of greatest opportunity for a brand. Unfortunately, the stimulus used in 90% of qualitative research – concept statements – does this job very badly.

Concept statements (often accompanied by mood boards) have a number of fundamental problems, but the most damaging of all is that they are completely unfamiliar and unrealistic to consumers. They have never seen a concept statement before in their lives, so have no context in which to evaluate it. Also, concept statements are completely lacking in emotion, the core of any successful brand. But there is a better way…

Adcepts work where concept statements fail because they speak in the everyday language of brands – advertising. People understand how advertising works and they can place an Adcept idea in the context of the market in which it might compete. Also, unlike bald concept statements, Adcepts communicate an emotional feeling, from serious authority right through to laid-back self-deprecating humour. And because the words and the visual are together on one page rather than split between a concept board and a mood board, Adcepts work holistically. In short, consumers ‘get’ Adcepts and react to the emotional as well as the rational element they convey.

B7 has been using Adcepts in brand development and communication for over a decade and we have taken the raw idea of Adcepts and refined it into a uniquely powerful research tool. For example, our Adcepts are made to look slightly rough and unpolished so that respondents understand that they are looking at an idea rather than a finished ad. This stops them getting lost in the detail of the execution and encourages them to build on the idea expressed. The B7 methodology is also different in the sheer volume of Adcepts shown – up to 80 in a session – which allows us to explore multiple angles within the idea areas that respondents find most interesting.

B7 partner Paul Tidmarsh says “Adcepts work because to get consumers to explore something new, they first need to start somewhere familiar – Adcepts are familiar to consumers and familiarity in this case breeds content.”

Adcepts Get Emotion in a way that concept statements simply cannot

For leading modern brands, functional efficacy is usually a given – their real point of difference from the crowd is where they sit emotionally. Differences are often very subtle and B7’s Adcept technique can examine these with depth and detail in qualitative research in a way that traditional research techniques cannot match.

Within any product sector, the leading brands tend to stand for the same sort of emotions. For example most whiskey brands stand for maturity and discernment while washing powders compete over caring for one’s family. The key issue for brands in these sectors is to find what type of discernment or what type of care? The differences are almost always subtle and nuanced.

Unfortunately traditional research techniques lack the detail and subtlety needed to uncover and explore emotional areas. Concept statements only give you a handful of idea areas to examine and therefore cannot provide the pinpoint emotional positioning sought. Concept statements also suffer from being unfamiliar and unrealistic and lacking in emotion. B7’s Adcept technique is different – Adcepts ‘get’ emotion.

Because our Adcepts are in the familiar language of brands – advertising – consumers find them easy to relate to and asses. The format also allows us to explore different emotional tones – is our whiskey’s discernment modern or traditional, serious or humorous, internally or externally focused etc? Because we show consumers up to 80 Adcepts in a focus group, we are able to explore an emotional territory from a number of different angles. The volume of material combined with the 360 degree emotional view allows an idea to be explored with a depth and precision not offered by any other existing technique.

B7’s founder, Paul Tidmarsh, says “Defining and owning the right emotional territory is fundamental to a brand’s success – we’ve spent 10 years developing our Adcept methodology into the most effective way of unearthing and then precisely defining the emotional positioning for some of the world’s most successful brands.”

The Funny Thing with Adcepts says Paul Tidmarsh…

“The funny thing with Adcepts” says B7 founder Paul Tidmarsh, “is that they work in a counter-intuitive way – to get to the detail on brand positioning and communication, you first have to expand your focus to cover any possible angle or way in.”

B7 is the world leader in using Adcepts for brand positioning and communication, with over a decade’s experience working on brands such as Dove, Philips, Flora and Tesco. Paul Tidmarsh and his team developed B7’s Adcept methodology out of frustration with the traditional concept statement/mood board approach to brand development and qualitative research. “With concept statements”, says Tidmarsh, “ you get about six opportunities to strike a chord with consumers in focus groups. So unless you’re truly inspired or a bit lucky, you may not uncover any useful insights at all. Also, if an idea area is interesting to the group, it’s hard to pick-out what is most interesting about that area, and what particular expressions of it are most motivating.”

B7’s approach is different and can seem counter-intuitive. “We spread the net as wide as possible” says Paul Tidmarsh. “We explore every possible idea area and within each area we produce Adcepts with a slightly different angle or tone of voice. Because we show consumers up to 80 different Adcepts, no stone is left unturned. Then when consumers pick out the most motivating areas, we are able to see them from multiple angles, so that the information mined is so much more specific and helpful.”

New clients are sometimes surprised by the volume of Adcepts used in research but quickly come to see the effectiveness and efficiency of the approach. “One client described our approach as having the range of a blunderbuss with the precision of a sniper’s rifle – and that’s what makes our Adcept methodology so unique and powerful” says Paul Tidmarsh.