If the conversion of products into (almost real) friends in the social networking sphere isn’t enough for you, then a new tool might make brands just a little more “human”. Some brands, like for example Dorito, the crisps brand, now comes with music attached - in the form of its very own playlist (see here). Similarly, Snickers, the chocolate bar, has a “work out” playlist - to help you “get some nuts”.
Both playlists seem to have been a little orphaned though - and with relatively few subscribers. So the question may be - how far are consumers willing to immerse themselves into a brand world? What do you think? Would you listen to “Burger Bar X” tracks? “Coffeeshop Y”? Washing powder Z”? Do you know of any exciting brands on Spotify? Let me know via the comment function !
Last week was Open Access week - the week to celebrate and highlight the amazing amount of research that is being made available through the various open access sources. One of the ways to get open access to published research is through scholars or universities self-archiving their material online. For scholars, this is extremely useful, as it means that articles or other work can be widely distributed - and is not only available to subscribers of a particular journal. This in turn maximises citations - and potential impact of the work.
However, self-archiving is often this is a little tricky, especially if the person doesn’t have a blog or personal website, and/or the university doesn’t provide a self-archiving facility. And even if the person has access to self-archiving, it still means having to figure out what the policies are for each publication the article originally appeared in - and what is ok to make available, and when etc (e.g. many journals have a 12 months embargo on publications before they can be made available via self-archiving)… The good thing is that Mendely, the iTunes for research if you so want, actually allows users to self-archive their own publications - and does so in line with the various policies automatically. All you need to do, is to download Mendely desktop (as if you haven’t done so already!), and drag your own publications to the “My Publications” folder. Mendeley will then make these publications available on your profile website - and presto! Much easier than uploading them to webservers etc - and, of course, they can be found by your colleagues and friends on Mendely. Nifty little trick!
Society is getting older - and also less active. With 2012 being the European Year of Active Aging, the importance of remaining active in later life is becoming more at the forefront of policy making - and not a year too soon: In England only 17% of males and 13% of women aged 65-74 are physically active. And inactivity is responsible for an estimated 5-8% of premature deaths in the UK - and costing the NHS an estimated £1,8 billion.
What can be done to increase the activity levels? We recently obtained funding from the British Academy for the Active Plus project looking at this topic from a social marketing perspective. And after the first few focus groups, here are the headline findings I’ll be presenting at the IRSPM in Dublin next week:
Perception Problems
There are major misconceptions about good levels of physical activity - actually not only amongst people who are over 65 - but also amongst care providers. While regular physical activity is particularly important for this age group - many people think that if they haven’t been active all their life there would be little or no benefit in starting in later life.
Relevance of Messages
Many of the messages directed at increasing physical activity are not considered relevant by people over 65. This includes social marketing messages who often emphasize other benefits then health benefits. The problem that emerged during the focus groups was that many people in the target group were actually more responsive to health centric messages - and that current messages tended to be perceived as for the “younger”. As the health benefits of exercise are not well understood, clarifying these is a major priority going forward.
Perception of Exercise Itself
Physical symptoms of exercise, i.e. being out of breath or muscle soreness were seen as negative signs - and interpreted as a sign to go slow or stop exercising. This is quite the opposite of many younger people - and again reinforces the need to raise awareness of the health benefits of exercise - and also demonstrate that physical symptoms like being out of breath are not a negative - but rather show that exercise is working.
Media Channels
Advertising was seen as the least effective way to promote messages - and current advertisements were noted - but not found to be relevant or interesting. Better channels included health practitioners raising the topic pro-actively. Amongst media channels, radio programs were seen as effective, especially serials and talk-shows. Several participants also mentioned that there was little depiction of characters in later life engaging in exercise in any of the popular shows in the UK - so there were no real role models.
Branding
Pretty much all participants also pointed out that they were not “old” - and therefore felt that many of the activity programs run by local authorities were not for them - as they frequently branded themselves “for seniors” etc. (a label that was seen by some as even offensive). Many participants felt the positioning should be more subtle - emphasizing well being and staying young - rather than being old.
These findings are based on only a few groups - but so far, from a social marketing perspective, a really interesting story emerges: the preference for health-emphasizing messages rather than promoting other benefits is interesting (and different to many other target groups). Equally, the various barriers and (often wrong) perceptions will be a challenge to overcome.
So… the alcohol industry has slammed a report by Gerard Hastings and Nick Sheron in BMJ that brandished the self regulation code as “clumsily imposed”, and asks for much tighter regulation - similar to the regulations currently in force in France. The mad.co.uk report features a statement from Diageo (owner of Guinness amongst other) describing how well they (and others) comply with the various codes of practice. Of course, it would be correct to point out that the last upheld complaint against Diageo by the ASA was in 2006 - and that since then no complaint was upheld. So while compliance seems indeed the case for traditional media - the alcohol industry wouldn’t be the first to be caught with their hands in the cookie jar when it comes to the much less (or even unregulated) area of the internet - and social media in particular ( check this study on advergames for some insights) - an area which Hastings & Sheron don’t really mention in their report.
Take for example Guinness’ owners Diageo - whose unnamed spokesperson so eagerly dismisses Hastings & Sheron’s article. Diageo, is a signatory of the Portman Code - yet a little look at their facebook page would suggest the code has stopped working. Checking out some of the pictures there (don’t worry, you DON’T have to click like to see them - just go here) seem to be quite in contrast to what the code says: Drinking is routinely displayed as important to social success (the many party pictures!), there is plenty of irresponsible consumption (or shall we say - over-moderate consumption), people who look quite definitely under 25 (see this picture) and on and on and on… And competitors are not far behind: Stella Artois, (owned by AB InBev) another signatory to the same code features a baby (”future stella fan”) and even vomit on the pavement (”I drank 8 pints of Stella while in Liverpool, after I Puked I screamed Stellaaaaa!!!! into the night”). And the list goes on…
Of course, the industry could argue that the pictures I’m referring to are user generated - and then posted tho their respective pages. That is true. And of course, any advertising code can’t - and should not- regulate what private people do. But - what the industry is playing on is people taking user-generated too much at face value - and not checking (or understanding) the technical details: These pictures are indeed uploaded by users - and not by the companies. But they are uploaded to “pages” operated by these companies (posted to the “Wall” to be precise). This means that the company as the owner of the page gets informed that a user has shared a picture (or other text) on the Wall - just like a normal facebook user gets informed when someone leaves a message on their Wall. This mechanism is, of course, there to avoid inappropriate content from being posted - and allows the page owner to remove posts quickly. I.e. if the pictures or text is still there after a few hours, the company has decided to leave it there - and it will be shared with anyone visiting the page. So while it may be the case that television and print advertisements are all nice and compliant with the codes - what happens in other media forms seem quite different. Legal? Probably… Ethical? You decide!
Social media has changed market research, making real time “consumer research” possible. With the growing popularity of #altmetrics (or less twitter-like: alt-metrics) it is also starting to make inroads into measuring (academic) research impact (N.B. for those in the UK: this is not the same as the REF impact - but hey, we only have a few words to chose from!). It addresses a real problem of how to measure research impact, which was extremely slow and often time consuming: popular measures rely on citation counting (such as average citations per year etc). H-Index for example calculates this for individual authors, ISI Web of Knowledge for journals and so on. The logic is that if something gets cited it is good - the main problem: getting cited takes time, often years (there are some good arguments against this logic, but enlarge I’d say it’s probably a good proxy - given enough time).
With more and more on-line resources available, alt-metrics combines social networking tools and applies this to research. Alt-metrics isn’t in itself a number, but rather a selection of tools, which help create impact, awareness and promise to advance research. Here are a few useful tools for researchers today:
SSRN has long been a popular tool for “working papers”. It provides views and download data for submitted papers (for example, see this one) - which gives at least a rudimentary estimate of how popular a paper is (or may be).
Another alt-metric is build on a similar premise as social bookmarking - a bit like an academic version of digg if you want. A main advantage over traditional citations is the immediacy of the measure (well, relative immediacy anyway). Readermeter.org which uses Mendeley data to calculate bookmark rankings for readers - assuming that bookmarking is somewhat similar to expression of esteem or even as good as a virtual citation.
Peerevaluation is a different alt-metric tool - aiming to speed up the peer-review process. The idea is that rather than waiting for weeks on end to get two or three peer-reviews, other website users can review papers more quickly and efficiently. In a way, it’s like crowd-sourcing the peer-review process (which must be welcomed by anyone who has ever encountered an unhelpful reviewer - and who hasn’t encountered one of those?). Let’s hope the site catches on - at the moment I seem to be the only marketing guy there (please join me!)
Existent, and yet-to-be-developed, tools are all potentially useful to increase impact of good research and slowly move away from the sometimes arbitrary and easily manipulated measures used today (such as the Journal Impact Factor - see here), although it will probably take time to become more recognized as a real measure of quality.
The Chancellor presented his budget for the next year today. Of course, not all of the exact figures are in the final document (which can be found here), but here are some first observations:
The budget raises the duty on alcohol and tobacco - something that isn’t actually an invention of the current government, but a tax which had been introduced by the previous government. The budget also introduces a new tax on “high strength” beer, in order to discourage their production and consumption. In other words the government tries to encourage the production of more low strength beer, rather than highly alcoholic beer. While this is sensible, as the evidence is overwhelming that pricing does directly influence consumption of alcohol (see this article for a review of the evidence), it is sad to see that other alcoholic drinks, especially those with higher alcohol content don’t get more taxed.
The government also increases duties for cigarettes (as in every budget), and puts an additional 10% duty on hand-rolled tobacco. Similar to alcohol, a rise in prices is probably a good incentive to persuade people to give up.
Unfortunately though, the government does not seem to think that making unhealthy foods more expensive is a good idea. This remains a major problem area: In many cases healthy alternatives remain more expensive than unhealthier choices. And the current budget does nothing to correct this - or indeed to incentivize healthier food choices - a major public health concern. This would have been a courageous choice to make, and showing that the government is not just talking the talk when it comes to public health - especially after the withdrawal of the various health groups from the widely touted government campaign.
A different area, where the government could have made some progress from previous budgets would have been a further cut in VAT on condoms. He is happy enough (and probably short sighted enough!) to cut the funding for sexual health interventions (a staggering 43% of the Pan London HIV Prevention Programme, for example) - but this cut is not compensated by a further cut on VAT for condoms from the current 5% - introduced by Gordon Brown in 2006. Probably a recipe for more infections and more long-term costs to the health system.
The budget is, of course, very price focused, and often focuses on specific items. So how other health spending will pan out in the long run remains to be seen. With the COI disappearing, one has to wonder how the government plans to use the other “Ps” of the marketing mix to achieve health objectives.
Overall then, the budget had some cautious points in the right direction, in terms of taxing high-strengths beer and cigarettes - but some opportunities are not used. Let’s hope in future budgets the government is more courageous!
Of course, there are some really great health-promoting advertisements around. Some are well designed, snazzy, well target - but unfortunately, more often than not, adverts promoting healthy behaviours are beyond lacklustre. Go to your local GP surgery, and you’ll probably be amazed at the amount of flyers you can pick up that seem to have been designed by one of the admin staff on their coffee break (even if that is probably not the case). Compare that to most commercial advertising, emphasising how much better one can live after buying product X, and directly speaking to the target audience. On a recent trip to my GP (family practitioner for those who are not in the UK), I picked up a leaflet about physical activity - as far as I can see produced by the local NHS trust. When I read in it that “physical activity is scientifically proven to decrease the chances of heart desease” - my first thought was that it almost read like one of those health warnings on tobacco packs a few years ago. I was starting to wonder if they were trying to make physical activity attractive - or turn me off it completely? Digging a bit more deeply I found out that the SMOG index for the leaflet was 12 - meaning it was at the level of an A-level student. Quite high really, especially for an inner-city borough of London.
Just how much could the effectiveness of these flyers and adverts be improved by just a bit more work on them? Maybe making them a bit more interesting, easier to read - and above all emphasising more “glamorous” outcomes - rather than reading like a health warning! Particularly, marketers know that people with lower educational levels respond particularly well to a range of visceral clues in advertising: using visual priming (such as before and after pictures), vivid displays of rewards (such as testimonials) and focusing on the proximity of rewards, by making specific time claims. Unfortunately, none of the leaflets I could locate used these - at all. Even the much touted Change4Life posters, while much more colourful, and generally appealing - read a little more like a serious newspaper. But if they are addressing a tabloid oriented audience - will broadsheet language and style really work?
The government has been in for quite a ride in the last two days: On Monday, several high profile groups rejected the government’s “responsibility deal” on alcohol, leaving only three health groups siding with the government. Today the government then announced a deal with 170 companies (and three health groups) on better labeling and more openess and transparency of food and drink items. The list of companies reads impressive - from KFC to Tesco to Diageo. One could say, well done for achieving this outcome. But this would ignore the question of why some of these retailers are suddenly so eager to join the government (and have been so reluctant in the past). While the threat of legislation may be a strong one - the question is who will actually benefit from this “health programme”. If those charities that are at the forefront of fighting for healthier food and drink choices are to be believed, amongst them Diabetes UK and the British Heart Foundation, then one has to wonder who will really benefit. Of course, it is way to early to say, and maybe the large (and small) companies are really in for good now - but judging by their past performance, some companies definitely attempted to use loopholes in (self-)regulations before. So the question is, whom do you trust to give you information you really understand?
I’m always excited when I get approached as a potential PhD supervisor - but sometimes find that some potential students seem to be confused as to what they need to do (or in fact what a PhD is!). Doing a PhD is a great achievement - and something that takes a bit of planning… especially before approaching potential supervisors. I hope the following points make the process of securing a PhD place a little easier - at least if you are looking for one with me as your supervisor!
What is a good PhD topic?
The main point to remember is that - at least in the UK, and especially in business - a PhD is something that you as the future PhD-holder “owns”. Even if the PhD student ship is part of a larger research grant, it’s important that the topic of your PhD is yours - and not just a write up of what the “main research” is all about (which really wouldn’t be a PhD at all). Almost all universities will require you to submit a Research Proposal with your application, often a short summary of your proposed research (at Hull, this is around 2500 words). Sometimes this can be pretty daunting - especially if you have never written one before (I remember I hated that the most about my PhD!). However, it really shouldn’t be a big hurdle: There are different views on this, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m very happy to give feedback and discuss a research proposal before the formal application. The most important part is probably the Research Question, which should be something that is worth of an extended study and that makes a contribution to the field. While this can sometimes be a simple question - simply giving the question is not enough to be considered a serious research proposal. However, the worthiness of the question should be proven by conducting a critical Literature Review showing how far the current knowledge has come - and where the gap in the knowledge is (i.e. the research question begins). If you can describe how the knowledge you hope to gain from your research will fit into the wider debate, then that is pretty much perfect.Remember though that the research must be quite focused: three years (or five years part-time) is not a long time to complete the work!
A crucial component of the proposal is the Methodology section. A thorough literature review should really help you a lot in writing this - take some inspiration from people who have done research before you! I often find that this seems the most problematic part - lacking in clarity, justification or simply the proposed research is far to broad to be useful. It’s important to concentrate on what you will do, how you will do it - and if what you are doing is realistic (in terms of time, resources etc). Interviewing experts in 25 countries would be great - but really isn’t realistic. Equally the data you collect must be relevant to the question, and have the potential to answer the question you are proposing - a muddled research question will bite back badly at this stage!
Finally, I’d look for a suggested Timescale. Of course, some things will change during the course of the PhD. But showing a realistic timescale and demonstrating awareness of the various steps involved in carrying out the research emphasizes that you are serious about the research.
Shall we meet?
Somewhat controversially, I’d always encourage having a meeting fairly early on during the PhD application process - even if you are planning on doing the PhD from a different country. The point of such a meeting is that both myself and you should be comfortable with each other - and that we can work on the research proposal together. While theoretically this is possible by never meeting face to face, having a face to face discussion makes things a lot easier. It is, of course, even more important if you want to do the PhD full-time and on site in Hull - but either way, my experience is that once we had a face to face meeting then it’s often easier to work jointly on making the research proposal work both for you as the PhD student and for me as a supervisor (oh, and the university campus in Hull is really pretty nice!).
I hope this little overview was useful. If you are looking to do a PhD, especially in social marketing or cross-cultural marketing - then please get in touch!
If the conversion of products into (almost real) friends in the social networking sphere isn’t enough for you, then a new tool might make brands just a little more “human”. Some brands, like for example Dorito, the crisps brand, now comes with music attached - in the form of its very own playlist (see here). Similarly, Snickers, the chocolate bar, has a “work out” playlist - to help you “get some nuts”.
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