Intelligence Applied Autumn edition

Ideas to power business growth:
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■■

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The precision imperative

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Intelligence Applied

True growth and how to get it

From brain power to brand power

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Making sense of Big Data

Intelligence Applied – special edition
Autumn 2013

Happy shoppers spend more

There are three proven ways of making shoppers happy:
1. Give them the products they want
2. Make at-shelf choices easier
3. Make their trip as quick as possible
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TNS understands shoppers better than anyone else. To talk
about making more of your shoppers happy,
visit www.tnsglobal.com/shophappy

Retail & Shopper

Welcome
Intelligence Applied is the home of the latest thinking from TNS, where we
discuss the issues impacting our clients, explore what makes people tick and
spotlight how these insights can create opportunities for business growth.
In this edition, we share our views on the importance of taking a precise
approach to identifying where true opportunity lies. We explore what the
latest findings about the workings of the human brain mean for businesses
and brands, and we share new thinking on how best to extract meaning
from Big Data. We’ve also got insights on some of the key emerging market
opportunities for global brands – and our view on how qualitative research
needs to rediscover its unique value if it is to make a meaningful contribution to
business success.
We hope you enjoy reading Intelligence Applied. You can receive regular insights
from TNS by registering for our free email newsletter at www.tnsglobal.com/
intelligence-applied or join the conversation at @tns_global or
www.tnsglobal.com/linkedin

Bringing business issues into focus:
4


10

Exploring new markets: Africa

13


22

Time for ‘Big Metaphor’

30

Brands in the brain

38

Making Big Data into better data

45

Exploring new markets: Mekong

Understanding decision making:
20

A man walks into a bar...

29

Priyanka’s story

37

The story of attention in three primates

Facts and figures:
12

Matthew Froggatt
Chief Development Officer,
TNS

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Heather Payne
Chief Client Officer,
TNS

Did you know...?

21

Understanding the Chinese car buyer

44

Mobile is both curse and cure for retailers
at risk from showroomers

Autumn 2013

by Heather Payne
Chief Client Officer,
TNS

“I meant no harm.
I most truly did not.
But I had to grow
bigger. So bigger I got”
From ‘The Lorax’ by Dr. Seuss

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Growth is a business imperative – and a strategic
blindspot. It is repeatedly cited as the only way to
maintain position and share in highly competitive
markets, the core challenge facing almost every
CEO today. Failure to grow is not an option for
boards faced with targets that routinely exceed
what can be achieved in the normal course of
business. And yet despite being the primary goal
of almost all enterprises, growth remains
frustratingly difficult to pin down. One of the
reasons that it appears so elusive is that so few
businesses have a precise idea of what growth
means for them, what they should be aiming to
achieve and why. As the Once-ler discovered in Dr.
Seuss’s ‘The Lorax’, aimless expansion is often a
formula for business disaster.

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Many who pursue growth or proclaim its importance
struggle to define what growth looks like, and
how it will translate into business success. They
fail to differentiate between genuine incremental
growth and an expanding product portfolio;
between the size of their customer base and its
value to their business; between new activity and
new growth opportunities. As a result they can
invest significant time and resources in efforts that
grow some numbers only to erode the bottom line,
or which deliver short-term sales at the expense
of long-term value. When growth lacks a precise
direction, it starts to resemble somebody running
up a downward-moving escalator – forced to
expend energy to avoid going backwards, yet going
nowhere positive as a result.
The growth challenge for researchers
To grow successfully, any business requires a precise
understanding of its competitive context that can
be distilled into meaningful growth objectives and a

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clear, actionable plan for achieving them. Providing
clients with such precise and purposeful insights
should be the raison d’être of research. In order to
deliver them, researchers must not hold back from
interrogating their client briefs intelligently, ensuring
that the research process is driven by a structured
understanding of what true growth can mean for
each business, and where opportunities for genuine
business success are likely to reside.

Expanding
product portfolio
Size of
customer base
New activity
Short-term sales

Many who pursue growth or
proclaim its importance struggle to
define what growth looks like, and
how it will translate into business
success.

Genuine
incremental growth

?

Customer’s value
to the business
New growth
opportunities
Long-term value

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5

TNS growth map

More customers

New markets

New
customers

Today’s
business

New products
and services

Loyalty and
new spend

More money from each customer

The four paths to growth
The growth challenge appears daunting and
complex, but in one respect it is very simple. There
have always been two ways to grow a business:
either you can persuade your existing customers
to spend more money on your products, or
you can find new customers to start spending
with you. Looking in more detail at the ways in
which increased spend and customer acquisition
can actually be achieved, we still find a very
manageable number of possible routes to growth –
four, to be precise. A business can increase its share
of its current market using its existing portfolio of
products, either by attracting new customers or
growing the spend of existing ones, it can launch
new products and services that appeal to new and
existing customers, or it can expand into wholly new
territories or categories.

The incremental view
In assessing the potential of these different paths
to growth, we must be alive to the inherent
tensions that can exist between them. No growth
strategy exists in a vacuum – and awareness of
its implications for the other areas of the growth
map is essential. By considering all of the areas by
which growth can be achieved, we can ensure that
our analysis of opportunities identifies genuinely
incremental strategies, and that the value delivered
by efforts to grow a business in one respect is not
outweighed by the erosion of potential in another.
An increasing number of consumer businesses, for
example, depend upon new product launches to fill
the ‘growth gap’ between their current performance
and the targets set for them. However, launching
new products and focusing resource and budget on

In assessing the potential of the different
paths to growth, we must be alive to the
inherent tensions that can exist between
them. No growth strategy exists in a vacuum
– and awareness of its implications for the
other areas of the growth map is essential.

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Autumn 2013
6


growing sales volume for them can have profound
and sometimes negative impacts on the core
portfolio. New product launches that achieve high
sales volumes may appear to be growing a business,
but if these sales are not sufficiently incremental to
the existing portfolio, then they are more likely than
not to lead to actual decline. Misdirected growth
efforts that expend resources on areas that deliver
insufficient long-term value have serious potential to
undermine a business’s competitiveness.
Similarly, customer acquisition strategies must
be viewed in light of their impact on existing
customers, whose value for creating growth is
often misunderstood. Price promotions intended to
attract new customers may prove more successful at
reducing the spend of existing ones and, in the worst
case scenario, re-setting long-term expectations of
what products are worth – and what consumers
should be prepared to pay for them.

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The choices that customers make are
influenced not only by the ‘power in the
mind’ that different brands achieve in the
form of awareness and equity, but also
by the ‘power in the market’ that those
brands exert through product availability,
distribution and pricing.

Growth through market dynamics
For reasons such as these, research cannot hope to
guide growth strategies effectively if it offers only
an aggregate, generalised view of opportunities.
To identify the right approach to growth, we
must look deeper. We must explore the inherent
dynamism of markets, where customers are not
simply acquired or lost, but instead shift their
spend continually over a fluid range of brands
and potential products. The choices that they
make are influenced not only by the ‘power in the
mind’ that different brands achieve in the form
of awareness and equity, but also by the ‘power
in the market’ that those brands exert through
product availability, distribution and pricing. The
key to unlocking growth in existing markets and
for existing products often lies in adjusting these
market levers – but researchers must be precise
and clear about the effects of doing so when
defining a plan.

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Often the greatest potential for growth lies amongst
existing customers and the opportunities to increase
their spend on products and services already in a
business’s portfolio. However, the value of these
opportunities is often obscured by an aggregate
view of the customer base itself, which treats
broad segments of customers as equal and fails to
distinguish those with the greatest potential future
value. The key to successful growth lies in focusing
attention and resources on those customers where
the effort may be rewarded, and identifying the
specific measures that can increase their value
through advocacy, cross-selling or up-selling.
Towards game-changing innovation
When a precision view of existing and potential
customers is allied with a commitment to finding
genuinely incremental growth ideas, it can transform
a business’s approach to innovation. Disruptive new
products or applications are capable of delivering
long-term value far beyond the short-term sales of

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close-in line extensions. Since any business has finite
resources at their disposal, it must choose whether
short or long-term growth, each of which carries its
own risks, is the most relevant opportunity. The goal
of research should be to guide such judgements
through a precise view of likely impacts on individual
consumers’ spending patterns.

businesses seeking to respond to growth
opportunities as they develop. However, being
fast and being first can still be counter-productive
if the strategies adopted are not rooted in a clear
understanding of business issues. Research must
keep up with fast-moving markets, but it cannot
sacrifice precision in order to do so.

New platforms and new markets
Digital and mobile platforms are significantly
increasing the scope for business innovation,
creating both new categories and new dynamics
within existing markets. The speed with which
mobile technology in particular is advancing,
increases the pressure on business to innovate,
to learn by doing, to experiment. Digital platforms
offer new ways to grow or lose share (through
mobile showrooming, for example) and they ensure
that these shifts in business fortunes can occur
rapidly. Leveraging new data sources effectively
and in real time is increasingly important for

Autumn 2013
8


One of the most significant promises of digital
technology is the lowering of barriers to entry for
new markets. From Africa to the Mekong delta,
the advance of mobile is expanding the reach of
the consumer economy through innovations such
as mobile banking, creating new categories of
products and service, and offering brands new
channels for growing awareness. Expansion into
any new geography offers a business the potential
for unequivocally incremental growth, and in
challenging times for mature markets it is often
emerging economies that hold the most promising
opportunities. Yet moving beyond established
territories comes with its own risks. Many are the
brands that confuse gaps in the market with simple
empty space, where no true growth opportunity
exists, or that assume the absence of a familiar
competitor means the absence of all competition.
Awareness of local cultural nuances, understanding

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of traditional trade, knowledge of the precise drivers
of choice for consumers in different contexts: all are
essential for identifying which markets represent the
greatest potential for growth – and for developing
strategies to secure that growth.

The most effective growth
strategies are precision growth
strategies; they are guided
by research that offers clear
and accurate insight on which
individuals behave in different
ways, and what might persuade
them to behave differently.

Growing – or getting bigger?
True growth is not achieved simply by getting bigger;
it comes about through changing human behaviour
in a way that can create incremental value for a
business. Aggregate numbers and broad-brushed data
do not provide the contrast and definition required
to make such genuine opportunities visible and
attainable – and growth consequently appears elusive,
often more elusive than it actually is. Because of this,
The most effective growth strategies are precision
growth strategies; they are guided by research that
offers clear and accurate insight on which individuals
behave in different ways, and what might persuade
them to behave differently. Such research must not
be afraid to question briefs and encourage clients
to confront the context of their business and what
growth means for them; and it must not be afraid
to discriminate between growth that offers true
incremental value, and growth that does not.

Autumn 2013
9

Exploring new markets:

Africa

African markets defy easy
generalisation, and
understanding the precise size
and shape of opportunities is
essential for companies weighing
up the decision to pursue them.
Those companies must take
hard-headed decisions about
which forms of growth they have
the will, budget and appetite
for risk to invest in – and which
challenges they are prepared
to overcome. However, when
they do identify a genuine
opportunity, the sheer scale of
African markets means that the
potential of that opportunity is
likely to be vast.

Africa’s economic
emergence has been
well-documented in
recent years, with
GDP growth expected
to reach 5.7 per cent
in 2013, the highest
of any global region.
Over a third of the
population in many
countries now falls
within the ‘middle
class’, with an income
of between $2 and
$8 per day and the
increase in those
having some access
to disposable income
is expanding the size
of African markets. At
the same time, Africa’s
rapid urbanisation
and expanding base
of mobile phone
owners invite brands
to compete in those
markets through
increasingly familiar
channels.

Africa today includes 52
cities with populations
of 1 million or more,
and the young
workers swelling the
ranks of urbanites
present brands with
a concentrated target
that can be reached
efficiently through
outdoor media and
served products
without depending
on unreliable African
roads. However, city
life does not equate
to developed market
opportunities and
standards of living,
nor to consumers
adopting the behaviour
patterns and attitudes
of developed market
urban consumers.
African cities
encompass great
inequality and most
continue to be blighted

by blackouts and
energy rationing that
have a huge influence
on their inhabitants’
priorities. They also
represent increasingly
competitive
environments, where
western multinationals
compete both with
local rivals and with
their equivalents from
Turkey, the Middle
East, India and China.
Even apparent gaps
in the market, where
rival brands are absent,
may already be filled
by traditional solutions
that brands must
instead compete with.

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10


Africa

This makes an
understanding of
cultural and religious
traditions and
established consumer
habits essential for
brands looking to
exploit new market
opportunities. South
Africa’s Tiger Brands
has had considerable
success expanding
across markets
by acquiring local
companies and making
considered judgements
about whether growth
is best served by
retaining local brands
or leveraging the
acquired companies’
infrastructures to
launch brands already
established in other
markets. The strategy
of reducing package
size to promote
affordability (and
reflect the habits of
many shoppers to make
several trips to the
market, buying small

items on each occasion)
has proven highly
effective for FMCG
brands in both urban
and rural contexts.
There are risks if brands
pull back from
rural communities,
which often have
a disproportionate
influence on growth
potential, in order to
focus too rapidly on
fast-expanding cities.
Rural communities may
be more challenging,
but they are often
where brand loyalty
is first built amongst
Base of Pyramid (BoP)
consumers. Rural
tracker surveys show
that these markets
exert disproportionate
influence when it
comes to growing beer
brands for example.
And mobile banking
services – a great

force driving inclusion
and helping to grow
markets across Africa –
have seen their growth
accelerate significantly
following take-up in
rural areas.
Mobile banking is just
one example of the
way in which the
mobile phone is
creating opportunity
across African markets.
Examples of companies
expanding markets
through mobile
channels include
M-Kopa, which enables
consumers to pay for
solar lighting on an ‘asyou-go’ basis using SIM
cards. However, brands
must beware the
temptation to import
developed market
mobile strategies to a
region where the vast
majority of handsets
are still ‘dumb’ phones,

and the most effective
mobile marketing
often makes innovative
uses of SMS and USSD
technologies and
Please Call Me (PCM)
messages. In mobile,
as in so many other
forms of marketing,
the challenges and
opportunities of
African markets are
unique – and are best
met through
re-engineering
propositions and
strategies from the
ground up.
TNS operates teams in 17
separate African markets.

Read more about
finding growth in
Africa here >

Autumn 2013
11

Did you know...?

2

There’s a reason why time is speeding up
We’re all familiar with the sensation that months and years fly by faster
as we get older. Knowing the reason for it isn’t all that reassuring. After
around the age of 30, we encounter less and less that is genuinely new
to us, and this means that our brains can navigate our experiences using
habits and heuristics that don’t require much conscious thought. Another
week or month goes past before we’ve had a reason to think about it.

You don’t always want a captive audience
Many have assumed that keeping shoppers at the shelf longer persuades
them to spend more; quite the opposite turns out to be true. Shoppers
who find their first item quickly will often pick up more items before they
leave an aisle; on the other hand, those that struggle to find what they
are looking for, depart quickly as soon as they have it in their basket.
If you want consumers to spend time on your category, it has to be on
their terms.

You can’t always get what you want…
and almost half the time, we don’t
In 42 percent of purchases made worldwide, people do not buy the
brand that they say is their preferred choice. It forms part of a massive
disconnect between what people say they will do and what they
actually do; between what we want and what we are happy, under the
circumstances, to get. To predict and understand behaviour accurately,
research must take account of the willing compromises we frequently
make as a result of availability, affordability and the needs of others.

You didn’t forget the bulb had blown
When was the last time that you walked into a room, flicked on the
light switch, and scolded yourself for forgetting the bulb had blown?
Only, the truth of the matter is, you didn’t forget. You experienced one
of the most frequent examples of the hold that habits have over us.
Flicking the switch was an automatically triggered sequence of actions
that is inseparable in your brain from the context of walking into that
room. It’s very hard for you to think about it at all – and it would take a
considerable effort for your hand not to do your brain’s bidding.

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Intelligence Applied Intelligence Applied – special edition
Autumn 2013

12

12

by Matthew Froggatt
Chief Development Officer,
TNS

For marketers, a broad-brush
approach to the world can
appear comforting and
convenient.
Opportunities appear greater when people
are lumped together in large groups – and the
assumption that consumers enjoy collective
experiences and inhabit collective identities makes
them seem easier and more efficient to reach.
However, businesses that view opportunities in

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such general terms are finding it increasingly difficult
to take advantage of them. The changing nature of
our world and its markets demands a very different
approach to understanding and influencing human
behaviour. It demands precision.

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The purpose of research should
not simply be to describe trends
or the broad market situation.
The age of precision
The growth opportunities that today’s businesses
must seek may be found in increasingly crowded
and competitive mature markets, or in emerging
markets with many differences (some clear, some
subtle) to those in which they are accustomed to
operate. The consumers that they target express
themselves in increasingly varied and complicated
ways; and they consume products and media
through fragmented channels and with alternative
mind-sets and identities. Individuals have less time
for brands that assume they are the same as other
people of a similar age or income level. And when
broad needs are already broadly met, identifying
opportunities for growth can require a micro

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approach, seeking out the individuals that add up
to a growth opportunity wherever they may be.
A fragmented, personalised world creates new
opportunities for precision, but it can work against
those businesses that fail to grasp them.
This presents a problem for the market research
industry, which has developed tools, models and
ways of working around clients who were happy
with an aggregate, general view of the world.
Achieving true precision involves far more than
simply focusing on smaller subgroups; it demands
a complete overhaul of the way that questions
are conceived and asked, of how consumers
and markets are understood, and of how this
understanding is translated into insight and action.
It requires a precise understanding of markets and
business issues, a precise approach to the research
process itself, and an ability to translate this into
precise recommendations for growth.

The precision view of markets and business issues
The purpose of research should not simply be to
describe trends or the broad market situation; a
precise view requires us to know how each individual
will act, so that we can understand their reasons for
acting and the factors that might influence them to
act differently. It is only by pushing for a granular,
micro view of all the people who constitute a market
opportunity, that we can develop meaningful plans
for taking advantage of that opportunity. And when
we do so, we often find ourselves challenging longheld aggregate assumptions about the way that
people and markets work.
An individual-based approach to brand tracking,
for example, tends to reveal fundamental dynamism
within markets that aggregate studies smooth over,
questioning many cosy assumptions about how
loyal somebody really is to a particular brand or
product. By being precise, we know exactly what

Autumn 2013
14


bearing factors such as price, availability and the
preferences of other family members have on the
purchases that consumers actually make – and we
can furnish clients with clear recommendations on
what additional share can be achieved by adjusting
different market levers.
Similarly, if we are to provide a business with a truly
precise understanding of its own customers, we
need to move rapidly beyond the assumption that
those customers are equally valuable, or even that
customers who spend the same amount represent
the same potential for future growth. And we need
to demand more than just Net Promoter Scores when
it comes to measuring the strength of customer
advocacy; a precision approach understands each
individual customer in terms of their various
networks and the role they play within them.

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■■ Context rediscovered
Besides being individuals, human beings are
contextual creatures. And our context involves not
just our environment but also our cultural situation
and mind-set. No insight can be precise and complete
unless it understands information in its full, relevant
context. And yet the context of our actions is often
excluded from the way that they are studied. If
anything, traditional quantitative research appears
to see the absence of context as a good thing, as if
it somehow increases perceived objectivity.

Taking information out of context can seem like
a tempting way to simplify a complex world. But
blinding ourselves to context ensures blinkered
analysis and invites bad planning.
When taken out of context, information streams
can result in automated responses that are a lot
less precise than brands and companies believe
them to be. Is it really smart to assume that every
phone owner passing a Starbucks is keen to be
served an offer for a free coffee, or that every user

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15


accessing an airline site from a German ISP requires
the site to be delivered in German? False insight that
embeds generalisations and assumptions can cause
significant damage to brand relationships in an era
when consumers have come to expect relevant,
meaningful and personalised experiences at all
times and through all media.

Tracking shows that 41 percent of mobile web users
make use of wi-fi networks that are not recorded in
operator figures. When viewed in this context, our
slice of Big Data is suddenly far less representative
than it first appears. This is not to say that the
operator data is not useful, but taken out of context
it could be dangerously misleading.1

■■ Precision understanding in the Big Data era
The increasing volume and velocity of data provides
us with a more detailed record of what is happening
– but only if we pay careful attention to what it
means and can integrate it with other relevant data
sources. The growing need to respond to such data
in real time means we must often rely on analytical
models; it is essential that these are carefully tailored
to reflect our precise understanding of the ways in
which different sets of data relate to one another.

1

Applying precision to the research process
A precise understanding of markets and
opportunities requires an exact view of the way
that individuals behave in particular contexts.
Unfortunately, a research industry accustomed to
dealing in averages is very bad at delivering this.
We have become far too comfortable with the fact
that data can be roughly valid at aggregate level but
wholly wrong about individual people, about who
does what and why.

Read more about
our perspective on
making Big Data
valuable on page 38

In the records of mobile phone operators, for
example, we appear to have a fairly exhaustive
record of mobile internet consumption – or do we?

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Autumn 2013
16


Striving for individual truth
To change things, we must restructure our approach
to research around the way the human brain
actually works and the crucial distinction between
our unconscious decision-making systems and
our rational, survey-completing ones.2 This is the
distinction that researchers too often ignore when
asking consumers to think long and hard about why
they take the decisions that they do. We are inviting
well-intentioned guesswork and post rationalisation
- something Kahneman tells us humans are all too
comfortable doing - but guesswork is not precise.
We, the researchers, must push harder for the truth.
■■

A great starting point is to ask questions that a
respondent is actually capable of answering in an
accurate and meaningful way. If a researcher has to
prompt someone to establish their awareness of a
particular brand, there is really little value in asking
them how the brand resonates with them. Similarly,
it becomes counter-productive to ask a consumer to

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list up to ten brands in order of preference, since the
brands outside the top two or three listed are really
not preferred at all. The precise approach to brand
tracking involves far shorter surveys that focus on
questions that are relevant to the way an individual
makes decisions; it encounters fewer inaccurate,
vague answers because it doesn’t ask the questions
that encourage them. And as a result it produces
far more consistent, valid responses that correlate
significantly with actual behaviour.

2
In ‘Brands in the
brain’ on page 30,
we explore what
neuroscience teaches
us about decisionmaking

Once we are armed with more precise, respondentlevel data, we are able to integrate that data with
other sources in more meaningful ways. We can
link passively collected mobile data that records an
individual’s actual behaviour with survey data around
that particular individual’s attitudes and drivers,
giving a precise picture of the true influences on
consumer actions. Similarly, cookie-collected data
on online behaviour is given new meaning when
mapped to responses valid at the respondent level.

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Equipping qualitative research to explore
context
Qualitative research has a vital role to play in
understanding the context for individual behaviour –
but only qualitative research rooted in interpretative
expertise is able to do this. Quotes, soundbites,
video diaries and focus group reports do not provide
context in themselves; it requires a skilled, expert
approach that understands the many different sides
of themselves that people show to the world in
different situations (the public versus the private, the
workplace versus the social space, the online versus
the offline) and can design interviews and settings
around these.3

It can be tempting for researchers to range broadly
in search of answers, but filling surveys with
irrelevant or invalid questions tends to obscure real
meaning. Similarly, when developing growth ideas,
many feel the need to ‘think outside the box’ putting
forward a broad range of innovative suggestions.
A precise approach, in contrast, first identifies the
areas where real opportunity resides for a business,
and then interrogates these areas with focus, to
identify the most effective strategies.

Delivering precise recommendations for growth
Precision is not just a prerequisite for gathering
information but a challenge for how research
agencies and their clients act upon it. Businesses
that demand precision need researchers that are
bold in identifying the intelligence that matters,
and applying that intelligence to develop clear and
inspiring plans for growth.

3

Precision leads naturally to action, equipping
businesses with specific and realistic routes to
growth. It provides researchers with the potential
to make a far more meaningful contribution to the
success of our clients. However, we will only realise
this potential if we have the vision to reassess what
research is for, the courage to confront its many
historical weaknesses, and the precision to engineer
a better approach for the future.

■■

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We discuss the
importance of
context in ‘Time for
Big Metaphor’ on
page 22

Clear, precise and focused recommendations have
the ability to inspire people and organisations in a way
that a mass of alternatives never can.

Autumn 2013
18

Is research killing your best new product ideas?

TNS research shows that you could be investing in the wrong
innovations 40% of the time. We can help you improve your
success rates by identifying the ideas that represent genuine
new growth opportunities. Isn’t it time to learn more?

Contact enquiries@tnsglobal.com or visit
www.tnsglobal.com/ipd to find out more.

Innovation & Product Development

A man walks
into a bar...
It’s a fashionable
downtown bar in
Manhattan, and he is
an ambitious merchant
banker out for a
drink after work. As
he scans the spirits
behind the bartender,
he is surprised to see a
bottle of his favourite
scotch whisky,
the product of an
independent distillery
in Islay that he once
visited. He has quickly
come to consider its
unique taste part of his
identity as a discerning
man of the world,
especially when he
sips glasses of the stuff
in the evening at his
Tribeca loft.
When the bartender
asks the banker what
he would like to
order, he pauses for a
moment then orders
a bottle of Johnnie
Walker Black Label.
He also asks for four
glasses.

How do we explain
this apparently
fundamental
contradiction
between attitude
and behaviour? Why,
when our whisky
drinker exhibits such
strong affinity with a
particular brand, did
he order something so
different?
The fact that strong,
personal brand
preferences do not
always translate into
brand choices is
something with which
market researchers
frequently grapple;
the challenge is that
consumers’ own
explanations (such
as “that brand is best
suited to drinking at
home”) often don’t tell
the whole story.

Decisions like this one
are often driven by
heuristics: rules of
thumb that we follow
in given contexts to
avoid the need for
in-depth thought and
angst. The clue to the
all-important context
for our whisky drinker
lies in the four glasses.
He is drinking with
colleagues, including
his boss. The rule of
thumb he is following
is to buy the bottle that
he can be confident
everyone will approve
of. It’s a heuristic that
many people follow
in group-buying
situations. He buys a
safe, familiar brand
with the right profile.

TNS frequently
uncovers such
contextual drivers
at the core of
many apparently
contradictory purchase
decisions, using
techniques such as
cognitive interviewing
to reveal why strong
personal convictions
are set to one side in
particular situations.
Often, as in this case,
the key to expanding
market share lies less
in a brand’s positioning
than in its general
profile, distribution
and accessibility.
The insights that we
generate can be very
different as a result.

Read more on cognitive
Intelligence
interviewing here >

Applied – special edition
Autumn 2013
20

Understanding the Chinese car buyer

460

different car
models compete
for customers in
China, with an
additional 155
expected to
arrive in the
next 5 years.

8.18m

new cars were sold
in China in the first
six months of 2013.
(Source: China
Passenger Car
Association, June
2013)

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14%
90%

of Chinese car
buyers change
their minds about
the brand they set
out to buy, once
they get serious
about making a
purchase.

80%

of Chinese who
bought a car
within the last
two months did
so because of a
special deal or
promotion, up
from 43% in 2012.

51%

Over half of
Chinese car buyers
decided against
a brand after
reading negative
comments on
social media sites.

26%

of Chinese car
buyers say car
dealers are their
most trusted
source of
information.

of Chinese firsttime car buyers say
that the opinion
of family and
friends is their
most important
influence.

In TAPPS (The
Automotive
Path to Purchase
Study), we
talked to 1,000
people in China
as they made a
decision about
which car to buy.
We gathered
the information
in real-time to
understand how
people make
decisions and
what really is
influential at
each stage of the
purchase journey.
The full findings
from TAPPS 2013
are available from
October. To find
out more please
contact
enquiries@
tnsglobal.com

Autumn 2013
21

by William Landell Mills
Global Director,
TNS Qualitative

In the era of Big Data,
qualitative research (qual)
is free to focus on a form
of understanding that it is
uniquely qualified to provide.
Researchers have become accustomed to existential
questions in recent times. It has become the
conventional viewpoint that Big Data will make
much traditional research obsolete. Quantitative
study has become data curation, with researchers in
the role of observational data scientists, harvesting

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information from vast data fields. But what does
Big Data mean for qual? The answer should be
that it frees qual to focus on what observational
data alone cannot reveal: the metaphorical thought
structures that demonstrate the true meaning we
attach to things.

Autumn 2013
22


There’s a whole industry
developing on the basis of
providing answers, not knowing
what the questions are.
The increasing abundance of data generated from
every moment of our lives has eliminated two once
important reasons for using qual. The good news is
that both of these reasons were worth eliminating.
They represented damaging uses of qual that led to
serious misconceptions about its value. One of these
was that qual is cheap. In the days when surveys were
expensive, qual was chosen as a low-cost alternative.

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This did a lot of harm by framing qual as trivial research A key contribution of qual will be in helping to
define the most meaningful questions, which our
with tiny sample sizes.
newly abundant data can then be directed towards
answering. Qual can do this because it is uniquely
Another reason was that qual was a great way to
suited to the psychological interpretation of context.
‘hear the voice of the consumer’. Nowadays with
Let’s take as an example the question, “what is
social listening and interactive panels, qual is by
breakfast for?” which is unanswerable through
no means the most efficient way of exposing a
statistics alone. By looking at the way breakfast is
business and its employees to real people. This is
also welcome, as qual should never have been about prepared, presented, consumed and talked about,
communicating the voice of the customer in a literal, qual can identify the cultural and emotional forces
that shape and surround it. The needs around
unmediated way.
breakfast can then be measured and concepts
In this sense, the Big Data era has helped to clarify
developed to deliver against them.
what qual isn’t, but it also signposts what it can be.
Once we accept that qual is all about the
Qual originally evolved as a response to the rigidity
understanding derived from an appreciation
of quantitative research. Now a new tension is
emerging – and a new contribution for qual to make. of context (and we at TNS think this should be
uncontroversial) we arrive at another question: what
Information is omnipresent, constantly generated,
cheap and abundant, but how does one know what is qual’s unique value when it comes to interpreting
matters? Franck Sarrazit, a singularly acute colleague context? Or to put it another way, “what defines
of mine observed recently: “there’s a whole industry qual information, as opposed to information that
can be gleaned from other sources?”
developing on the basis of providing answers, not
knowing what the questions are”.

Autumn 2013
23


Daniel Kahneman makes the point that there
are three types of information that can be
extracted from what people say: Rationalisation,
Association and Metaphor. Approaching qual
from this perspective helps to pinpoint the distinct
forms of information that we elicit and the need
to handle them in different ways. And it can also
help to distinguish what it is about qual that is truly
unique within the research field.

When people are tricked into
thinking they have chosen
something when they really didn’t,
they will almost always provide a
coherent rationalisation for why
they chose it. This is despite the
fact that, in reality, they didn’t
choose it at all.

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Rationalisation is the type of information that
consumers deliver in response to an implicit or
explicit question, for example: “I bought the car
because it had a big boot and great fuel efficiency”.
Rationalisation is what most people would
recognise as a conventional answer. It is essential
to communication (imagine reading an instruction
book that had no rationalisation in it), but it has
acquired something of a bad name where research
is concerned. However convincing and convinced
consumers may be, they are not reliable witnesses
to their own motivations or behaviour. Lars Hall
and Petter Johansson have done fabulous work on
‘Choice Blindness’, showing how, when people are
tricked into thinking they have chosen something
when they really didn’t, they will almost always
provide a coherent rationalisation for why they chose
it. This is despite the fact that, in reality, they didn’t
choose it at all.
Experienced qual practitioners are able to identify
self-serving answers through reference to wider

context. But this is not a capability wholly unique
to qual research. While quant is less well placed
to make these kinds of judgment, it has come a
long way from a blind acceptance that consumers’
mention of “class-leading boot space” reveals the
actual motive for buying their car. Rationalisation
is a data source that both qual and quant need to
learn to use without naivety. It is a form of contextspecific linguistic behaviour, a clue but not the
literal truth. Qual is better placed than quant to
interpret rationalisations, but this is not the form of
information that defines qual’s unique contribution
to research.
Association is another form of information that is
easy for qual to access and is in many ways more
valuable than consumer rationalisation. When we
understand people’s associations, we understand
the context that a product or brand is set within,
and where it sits in the synaptic networks that our
minds use to store and structure reality. “What
goes through your head when you think of Ford?”

Autumn 2013
24


we might ask. “Sales reps, blue oval, plasticky
interior, Cortina boys...”. Thoughtful and detailed
analysis of such a stream of consciousness can be
extremely powerful. In a sense, the sum total of
these associations in the mind of the population is
the brand equity. Observing patterns of associations
can provide strong evidence of the assumptions
that underlie a topic and how it is framed. And
this enables qual to make a significant contribution
through association-focused techniques. Increasingly
though, this is not a unique capability. Quantitative
research is becoming adept at presenting this kind of
data and identifying significant patterns of response.
Indeed, this is now one of the primary outputs of
social listening programmes. In the future, qual
practitioners will continue to derive great value from
stream of consciousness data because such data is
free of consumer rationalisations, and it provides
us with insightful maps of the mind. Once again
though, it is not a form of information over which
qual has a unique claim.

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This takes us to Metaphor. Here we are not
just talking about metaphor as poetic flourish.
What we are talking about is metaphor as the
thought structure that is essential to cognition and
the communication of meaning. Let’s call it ‘Big
Metaphor’ to help underline this distinction.
Big Metaphor is an observation about how the mind
identifies meaning by observing a parallel between
one thing and another.

“What is breakfast for?”
is not a question we can answer with
statistics alone. By looking at the
way breakfast is prepared, presented,
consumed and talked about, qual can
identify the cultural and emotional
forces that shape and surround it. The
needs around breakfast can then be
measured and concepts developed to
deliver against them.

In a fundamental sense our minds are pattern
recognition engines, which enable us to make sense
of the stimuli around us by identifying patterns
(those polished planks as a desk, that green thing as
a tree). Our speech and cognition are impregnated
with this kind of invisible metaphor, in fact we use
a metaphor every four sentences on average, and
often without realising it. The opening sentence
of this section is in fact a metaphor. We have not
actually been transported to a place called Metaphor,

Autumn 2013
25


but the intention is to create a sense of the argument Metaphor provides a way of using what you do
moving along with seamless logic! There! I have
know to understand what you don’t. Through the
given myself away with my own metaphor.
iron horse metaphor, we get a glimpse into the
mind of a 19th-century Native American.

Metaphors are profound
because they are essential to
the communication of meaning.
If someone doesn’t know what
something is then it has to be
explained by a metaphor (“it’s like
X that you already know...”).
Metaphors reveal the way that our minds frame
the world around us. When Native Americans first
saw steam engines they spoke of them as ‘iron
horses’, a metaphor to help them understand and
communicate an awesome and alien technology.

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Metaphors do not just reflect thought, they also
structure our perception. In ‘Metaphors we live
by’, Lakoff and Johnson use the example of how
metaphors reveal that the true meaning of ‘argument’
is ‘war’. Arguments are ’won’ and ‘lost’, ‘positions’
are ‘defended’ and their ‘weak points’ ‘attacked’.
They go on to say that ‘argument’ would be a very
different thing if the underlying metaphor were, say
‘dance’ with its collaborative and expressive emphasis.

framed in terms of old things. Metaphors serve as
a mechanism for cultural continuity and coherence,
absorbing new ideas by explaining them within
existing references. Hence trains having ‘carriages’.
Hence the ‘phone’ in iPhone. We are unknowing
captives of our cultural metaphors.

Shifting from words to actions, it is clear that
metaphoric meanings are as evident in behaviour as
in language. Think of the difference between French
and British lunch. British eating habits reveal an
underlying assumption that food, for all its delights,
is essentially a means to an end: enjoyable, possibly
high-status fuel, but fuel nonetheless. Hence the
pragmatism of the sandwich. In France, in contrast,
Metaphors are profound because they are essential to it’s fair to say that lunch is far more meaningful. To
the communication of meaning. If someone doesn’t
the British it can seem that in France “life stops for
know what something is then it has to be explained
lunch”, but to the French, that is to miss the point,
by a metaphor (“it’s like X that you already know....”). since to them “life is lunch”, and a tuna mayonnaise
This means that new things are explained and
sandwich represents a life scarcely worth living.

Autumn 2013
26


These kinds of deep metaphorical constructs are
evident in all we do, from the way we clean the
bathroom to the way we travel to work.
The job of observation in research is essentially to
identify these implicit metaphors, because they
explain why people do things in the way that they do.
Analysis of metaphors allows us to unwrap
psychological mechanics and align products, ads
and brands with these invisible rules.
In talking about ‘metaphor’ what we are really
talking about is psychological meaning. Looked
at this way, it becomes obvious that products are
full of metaphorical meaning: milk is love, Coke is
happiness, lipstick is hope and tea is reflection. At
the more granular level, every ad has a story, which
will be archetypal at one level and will therefore be
a bearer of metaphorical meaning. The way that ads
pile metaphors on each other creates the texture
that makes them interesting.

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If we understand metaphor in this broad sense, as
Big Metaphor, we can see that it encompasses all
that is most valuable in qualitative practice: from
personification, to collage, to storytelling. They
are all ways of generating the consumer meanings
that we already know are core to inspiring and
insightful qual.
Machines cannot recognise metaphor, since they
work by calculation rather than by analogy. This
is a major gap given the central importance of
metaphor in human cognition. New data sets
and algorithms will yield ever broader, more
immediate and more powerful information, but its
psychological significance will remain elusive unless
we leverage the most effective research tool that
we have for unlocking metaphorical meaning. As
Big Data increasingly defines the future of quant
research, so Big Metaphor will increasingly define
the role of qual.

Machines cannot recognise
metaphor, since they work by
calculation rather than by analogy.
This is a major gap given the
central importance of metaphor
in human cognition.

See how we approach qualitative research
to inspire growth.

Autumn 2013
27

Inspiring growth through qualitative insights

At TNS, we believe that inspiring qualitative research can be
central to unlocking growth. Drawing on the best traditions of
qualitative and progressive thinking, we help you understand
people and brands in their real-world contexts to deliver
actionable business strategies.

To find out more, contact qualitative@tnsglobal.com
or visit www.tnsglobal.com/qualitative

Priyanka’s
story
Unlike the more
affluent students at the
college, Priyanka does
not have pocket money
– but her parents give
her small amounts
for transportation
and food. For the last
month, though, she
has gone hungry most
days. Hidden in her
college bag, a secret
from her parents, is the
reason: a small tube of
Neutrogena moisturiser.

Priyanka is 19 years old.
She lives in a small
village near Lucknow in
India, part of a family
of six that survives
on an annual income
of $4,000. Every day
Priyanka travels for
over two hours to
attend college in the
city. And her parents
have carefully set aside
what money they can
to send Priyanka to
college, hoping she will
land a well-paid job.

Neutrogena is
expensive – but
Priyanka loves the
way that the cream
feels on her face – and
she is certain that the
soft look it gives her
skin helps her to fit
in amongst wealthier
students. Neutrogena
prevents her skin
feeling dry and spotty
as a result of the long
hair that her parents
won’t allow her to
cut. They fear it will
damage the prospect
of a good marriage for
their daughter.

Although the
moisturiser is the only
beauty product that
Priyanka buys, it is
not the only product
that she uses. One of
her friends has also
been saving her lunch
money – in order to
buy a Pond’s face wash.
By sharing the two
products, the girls are
able to use a full skincare regime.
Her parents cannot
know about the
Neutrogena. Keeping
them happy is very
important to Priyanka
– but fitting in at
college matters a great
deal too. Neutrogena
helps her to balance
these two competing
influences on her life
that often seem to
pull her in opposite
directions. And that’s
why it’s worth skipping
lunch for.

Where brand loyalty
means more Priyanka’s
story is a fictionalised
reality, compiled by TNS
researchers from many
different interviews
conducted with Base of
the Pyramid consumers
and used to bring the
issues that these people
face to life. These
consumers demonstrate
a strong and surprising
preference to buy
a brand over a
commodity, provided
the brand proposition
is relevant, accessible
and affordable.

Read more about
Priyanka’s story, and
brand building at the
Base of the Intelligence
Pyramid
here >

Autumn 2013
29

Brands in the brain
This article was developed by
TNS Brand & Communication community.

It is often said that brands
are owned by consumers,
but more specifically they
belong to our brains.
Brands reside in the networks of neurons that
house our memories of them, and their fortunes are
shaped by the highly efficient and often unconscious
systems that our brains have evolved for making
decisions and navigating the world.

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As our understanding of neuroscience rapidly
expands, we now know more than ever about how
people remember, relate and respond to brands.
And this understanding needs to have fundamental
implications for the way we develop communication
strategies and evaluate their effectiveness.

Autumn 2013
30

Brands in the brain

How we make decisions
The task of running our day-to-day lives is mostly
delegated to our intuitive, unconscious self. We
make decisions as efficiently and rapidly as possible
using fast and frugal heuristics. Heuristics are the
brain’s shortcuts, the simple rules of thumb that
we use every day to approximate the best course
of action and avoid considering options in any
more detail than is necessary. This highly efficient,
autopilot-driven way of navigating life has been
popularised in the work of the psychologist and
behavioural economist, Daniel Kahneman as our
‘System 1’ brain. Only when we encounter a new
situation that doesn’t fit with our pre-determined
approaches to solving problems and getting what
we want does our slow-moving, energy-intensive,
deeply rational ‘System 2’ brain get involved.
This is not to say that our rational, deep-thinking
mental resources have nothing to do with the way

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we respond to brands and make decisions. Many
of the heuristics that we follow have been formed
consciously, at some point in our past, and they
often reflect our deep-rooted attitudes and the
way they see the world. However, once System 1 is
armed with these rapidly applicable rules of thumb,
it doesn’t have to get System 2 involved in its dayto-day decisions. And this means that most of the
decisions we make about brands are made using
the instinctive approach of System 1. People will
often purchase the same brand again and again or
will buy within an established repertoire. As long as
those choices continue to yield the same (essentially
satisfactory) results, there is no need for System 2 to
intervene and start considering other options.

A heuristic is a rule of thumb. They are
often applied in problem solving to limit the
amount of detailed reasoning required by
making decisions based on a limited set
of criteria (or heuristics). Heuristics can be
useful for rapidly approximating what the
best course of action is likely to be in a
specific scenario.

When we repeatedly follow the same course of
action in the same circumstances and get the same
beneficial result, our behaviour has the potential to
become fully automatic. When habits concerning

Autumn 2013
31

Brands in the brain

brands become hard-wired into our brains they
remove the need for decision-making completely;
we behave in a particular way and it requires a
considerable conscious effort to override the habit
and behave any differently. Understanding where
habits exist, and how to create or circumvent them,
can be vitally important when helping brands to
grow or protect their market share.
Creating and reinforcing brand memories
The heuristics that we use to make decisions are
shaped and reinforced by memories, which take
the form of networks of neurons within our brain
that ‘fire’ together to recall experiences and bring
associations to mind. The stronger these neural
connections are, the more rapidly and repeatedly
they fire up when we encounter a relevant trigger.

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The strongest memory structures within the brain
are ‘affective memories’, which are aligned with
deep personal feelings and motivations. When
brands are able to form and consolidate such
memories, they become powerful influences on
our behaviour, springing rapidly and readily to
mind, reminding us of positive experiences and
associations and biasing our choices in the direction
of the brand in question.

The heuristics that we use to make decisions
are shaped and reinforced by memories,
which take the form of networks of neurons
within our brain that ‘fire’ together to recall
experiences and bring associations to mind.

Creating potent brand memories is therefore key to
success. In fact, studies show that these memories
are powerful enough to influence our actual
experience of brands, not just our attitudes towards
them. The presence of a powerfully affective brand
memory doesn’t just promise enjoyment, it can
cause us to experience that enjoyment as well.

Autumn 2013
32

Brands in the brain

All forms of brand exposure have the potential to
create and reinforce brand memories. In addition
to paid activity (own-brand and competitive
messaging), the experiences of others help to form
stronger affective patterns, attaching considerable
value to word-of-mouth and endorsement. But the
most powerful force for creating neural connections
is personal experience. The impact of strongly
positive personal experience is highly likely to bias
consumers towards choosing the same brand again.
Updating the brand narrative
When our memories are contradicted by present
experience, our brains may respond by updating or
reshaping them. When the unexpected experience is
negative or contradictory to the brand narrative, this
represents a potential threat. However, marketers
can also use the updating process to freshen,
strengthen and evolve their brand memories.
Balancing novelty and consistency in brand
messaging is the most effective means of staying

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in control of the brand narrative in this way. Novelty
alerts our brain to the possibility of connecting up our
memories differently; aligning with our existing
affective memory structures through consistency helps
to convince the brain that this particular brand
memory is important enough to invest in updating.
And in today’s complex media environment, where
cutting through the clutter and getting noticed is
in itself a challenge, the balance of novelty and
consistency is also one of the most effective strategies
for capturing and holding attention.

The brain is constantly and swiftly selecting
the things that we will pay closer attention
to at the expense of others.

Capturing and holding attention
Attention exists because the brain needs a means
of focusing its finite resources and ensuring that we
capture, process and encode the information that is
most important to our survival and success. The brain
is constantly and swiftly selecting the things that we
will pay closer attention to at the expense of others.
In general, these things have a greater likelihood of

Autumn 2013
33

Brands in the brain

engaging our attention if they surprise us, if they
generate an emotional reaction, or if they align with
our existing motivations, priorities and sense of self.
Our awareness mechanism reacts very quickly to
movement, the appearance of something new or
to objects that contrast with their surroundings, but
it also jumps quickly into gear when confronted by
something novel that contradicts our expectations.
If something stands out from the way that we
expect the world around us to be, then our brain
makes sure we know about it. Ads such as Cadbury’s
famous ‘Gorilla’ have made highly effective use of
the unexpected or initially bewildering to ensure an
audience’s attention.1
A stimulus that triggers an immediate emotional
response is another effective tactic for capturing
attention. Emotion, brought about by the release
of specific chemical signals within the brain,

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signals to our brain that something requires urgent
attention – and so stimuli that are associated with
powerful emotions such as fear, loss or the promise
of reward, are swiftly promoted up the queue for
being consciously noticed. Well aware of the value
of emotion in ensuring attention, many brands
create campaigns around events such as Christmas,
Ramadan or Chinese New Year, and train consumers
to anticipate the rich emotional hit that these deliver.
The third characteristic by which a stimulus increases
its chances of being noticed, is alignment with our
existing motivations, priorities and sense of self, or
with existing memory structures. In these situations,
the stimulus is working with our world view rather
than seeking to interrupt it, and this can be
particularly important when we are seeking to
capture attention in environments where the target
audience is likely to be consciously focused on a
specific task.

1

For the
neuroscientific
explanation of this
ad’s effectiveness,
see ‘The story of
attention in three
primates’ on
page 37.

Autumn 2013
34

Brands in the brain

The brain in context
Being noticed is an essential starting point for any
brand communication, but it is only a starting point.
Our expanding understanding of the human brain
makes it increasingly clear that marketers must
seek to do more with human attention once they
have captured it. They must seek to build strong
brand memories and effective brand narratives that
can exert a dependable influence over consumer
choices. And they must invest in understanding
how those memories will interact with our brain’s
heuristics and habits when it comes to day-to-day
decisions. Creative and media strategies that can
capture prolonged attention put us in control of the
way a brand is represented within the brain of the
consumer. However an equally important conclusion
of the latest neuroscience is that it is not only the
structures within our brains that determine our
actions, but the way these systems, memories and
heuristics interact with the contexts we encounter.
A complete marketing strategy takes account of
these contexts as well.

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As one of the world’s
best-established and most
recognisable brands,
Coca-Cola has created many
of marketing’s most powerful
affective memories. Here are
two powerful examples
of those memories in action.

The ‘Hilltop’ ad
featuring the
lyric ‘I’d like to
buy the world
a Coke’ aligned
powerfully
with the
yearnings of many
Americans during
the divisive Vietnam
era. In an age before
social media, many called
radio stations asking them to
play the commercial and called
TV stations to find out when
the ad was scheduled to air. The
affective memories created by the
ad mean it is still one of the most
recognisable commercials of all time,
and has asserted powerful influence
over Coke’s subsequent appeal.

Well aware of the value of emotion in ensuring
attention, many brands create campaigns
around events such as Christmas, Ramadan
or Chinese New Year.

You can find more of our thinking on the
real drivers of human behaviour and how
brands can learn from this work to develop
strategies that build business in ‘The brain
game’ >

The power of such memories was
demonstrated in a famous taste-off
orchestrated by the neuroscientist
Samuel McClure in 2004, tasters
were first asked to sample Coke and
Pepsi in a blind test. When they did
so, preference was split roughly
equally between the rival colas.
However, when they were then
served the drinks from branded
containers, Coke became the
favourite. Interestingly, fMRI
scans of the tasters’ brains
showed significantly different
brain activity when knowingly
drinking Coca-Cola than when
consuming it blind. Knowing the
brand triggered affective memories,
which changed the actual experience
of the product.

Autumn 2013
35

Three minutes is all you need…

…to get an in-depth understanding of your brand. TNS
tracking studies ask only the most accurate, predictive and
relevant questions. We know which questions relate to actual
behaviour and ask only the questions that are relevant to each
individual to provide precise, growth-directed insights.

Contact enquiries@tnsglobal.com
or visit www.tnsglobal.com/brands to find out more.

Brand & Communication

The story
of attention
in three
primates
When it comes to
‘experiments’ that
expand our
understanding of
human attention, a
great ape of one type
or another seems to be
an essential part of the
team. Here’s a quick
summary of primates’
greatest contributions
to neuroscience – and
the implications of their
involvement for
communications.

Ape 3: Is being novel
enough?

Ape 2: Showing the
value of novelty
Ape 1: Simons and
Chabri’s Invisible gorilla
In 1999, the researchers
Simons and Chabri
asked a gorilla (actually
a volunteer in a suit) to
walk through a circle
of people passing a
ball between them,
and beat its chest (who
said neuroscience was
no fun?). When others
were asked to watch a
film of these goings-on
and count how many
times the people in
the circle passed the
ball between them,
most didn’t notice
the gorilla at all. The
‘inattentive blindness’
this experiment
demonstrates reminds
us that exposure is no
guarantee of attention,
especially when
people are focused on
something else.

Real apes took
centre-stage in a
2002 experiment
demonstrating the
power of novelty in
diverting human
attention. These apes
were given food under
different circumstances:
when they didn’t
expect it and when
they did. Their levels of
dopamine (a ‘chemical
currency’ used by the
brain to register
surprise) spiked not just
when the unexpected
food arrived – but also
when the apes
expected it to arrive
again. Dopamine
re-tunes our temporal
and spatial attention
through anticipation.
Once we capture
attention through
novelty, it is easier to
capture it again in the
Intelligence
future.

The 2007 Cadbury ad
‘Gorilla’ owed much
of its initial fame
to the way human
attention works. It
stood out through
novelty and contrast
(different to any ad
that had appeared
before), it evoked
emotion through the
Phil Collins track ‘In the
Air Tonight’ – and its
peculiar, unexplained
nature triggered
prolonged attention
through the Zeigarnik
effect, whereby our
brains pay prolonged
attention to complex
things that are not
easily resolved. In the
years since though,
some analysts have
argued that despite
being novel, ‘Gorilla’
lacked the consistent
brand elements to
deliver long-term
benefits to Cadbury.
This challenge of
balancing freshness
and consistency lies at
the heart of effective,
attention-grabbing
communications.

Read more about how
attention actually
works >

Autumn 2013
37

by Mark Kingsbury
Global Head of Marketing Science,
TNS

and Bob Burgoyne
Development Director, Marketing Science,
TNS

It may be immense, fast and
mind-bendingly varied. But to
make the most of Big Data we
must remember that it cannot
speak for itself.

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Autumn 2013
38


Mind and the machine
Big things can be intimidating. Marketers and
researchers cannot allow Big Data to be one of them.
It’s true that the numbers involved are staggering:
90 percent of the data that has ever existed was
created in the last two years and ‘data taps’ such
as mobile, social and POS will continue to pour out
raw information for researchers to work with at an
ever faster rate. It may be tempting to conclude that
human intuition must surely give way to computers
and algorithms when it comes to keeping up. But if
our response to this wave of data is to retreat behind
number-crunching technologies then we will have
missed a huge opportunity. New data sources have
the potential to transform the role of research and
expand our understanding of human behaviour.
However, they can only do so if we continue to apply
the immense, unique power of our own minds.

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So what do we mean by ‘Big’ exactly?
Big Data would feel a lot more manageable if
it were just a question of having more numbers
to deal with. But Big Data is bigger than that. It
represents the coming together of several different
themes, each of which would be fairly paradigmshifting in its own right.
First of course, is the sheer scale of the data
now being produced and stored. Walmart
currently handles more than 1 million customer
transactions every hour, in databases estimated
to contain more than 2.5 petabytes. Such an
organisation may soon have created more data
than research surveys have ever delivered.
Data’s velocity, the speed at which huge volumes of
it can be generated, is every bit as breathtaking as

its sheer size. Data now generates itself; it is created
and stored simply by virtue of things happening. And
as a result there are no limits to how big it can get
and how fast it comes at us.
Yet perhaps the most challenging shift of all is that
this size and speed is combined with an explosion
in the variety of data forms. Big Data comes in
all shapes and sizes. Researchers are leaping on
new sources of data – and new sources of data
are leaping on us: from mobile activity to Twitter
feeds, geo-location information, facial expression
capture and much more. We are quickly moving
from dealing in numerical scores to dealing in
shapes, movement patterns, expressions – and
human language. And such data does not come
readily packaged for analysis; using it must involve
translating it as well.

Autumn 2013
39


You created it: you deal with it
Faced with such challenges, it’s tempting to believe
that computational power, which has taken the
lead in creating this new world of information, must
also take the lead in defining how we deal with it.
In this view of the world, the researcher starts to
look less like a person, more like supercomputer in
a bunker: one where we simply have to feed in the
right question or combination of questions, plug it
into the river of Big Data – and wait for the answer
to pop out. But there are significant dangers to this
approach. If Big Data ends up becoming processed
and commoditised data, then we are all in trouble.
Digesting really raw data
It’s a mistake to believe that data can ever speak for
itself. Data always speaks with a human voice; it can’t
say anything otherwise. Every statistic that we deal
with is the result of subjective judgement about the
problems that we should try to solve, what we think
the answers should look like, and what data forms we

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can enlist to help provide those answers. And these
judgements are human ones.

Big Data would feel a lot more
manageable if it were just a
question of having more numbers
to deal with. But Big Data is
bigger than that.
In the Big Data era, the human imagination
continues to play an essential role in envisaging what
our many different data sources can be made to do,
and in aggregating, translating and coding them to
enable them to do it. To take a very simple example,
Google can predict a flu epidemic by spotting
spikes in searches on cold and flu remedies. This is a
tremendously cool thing, but it only works because

somebody realised that this pattern is significant –
and that it correlates to something meaningful and
useful. Similarly, micro-location data gives TNS
a powerful new tool for mapping movement
around stores – but it is only powerful because we
have established an understanding of what these
movements mean.
In his book The Signal and The Noise, US election
poll guru Nate Silver points out that data does not
arrive in ready-made, readable patterns. We must
come to it armed with models and ideas based on our
existing insights and understanding. Silver devotes a
chapter to global warming and the fact that it would
be impossible to find any evidence of this in the
notoriously unstable climate record, where annual
temperatures fluctuate hugely, were scientists not
armed with a theory telling them exactly what to look
for – and which data to prioritise. It’s an important
reminder that the bigger data is, the more it needs
help to become articulate.

Autumn 2013
40


In the Big Data era,
we are data curators,
working with information
that has been generated
independently.

From data creators to data curators
In the Big Data era, we are no longer data creators,
designing the structure of information from the
outset, through the crafting of questionnaires;
instead we are data curators, working with
information that has been generated independently.
As such, we will face many new challenges and
require many new skillsets. However, as we evolve
the role of research, the skills that once went into
structuring surveys will remain crucially important
in aggregating and selecting data sources, and
deciding exactly how they relate to one another.
For now, this might involve incremental

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improvements such as linking spend and retention
data to customer experience surveys, as we already
do at TNS, or using listening apps on mobile phones
to record actual exposure to TV ads rather than
relying on recognition metrics.
In the future, we will find more and more scenarios
where the data we aggregate does not include
traditional surveys at all. When we start to plug
observational data directly into look-alike models,
for example, we start to change the role of
research, making it a key element within media
planning and buying.

But in all of these contexts, it’s not just a question of
being excited about what data can do. It’s equally
important sometimes to step back, look at how
complete and representative a given set of data is,
and ask ourselves rigorous questions about what
questions it is best qualified to answer.
The continuing evolution of analytics
At TNS, we’ve already evolved from the era of adhoc analysis, when researchers collected data with
little reference to how it would eventually be used
(and then looked through it in the hope it would
reveal something useful). Today the design of the

Autumn 2013
41


instruments for a particular piece of research is
informed from the start by the challenge of how
best to answer business questions.
The conceptual framework that we use for any type
of analysis reflects how the human brain naturally
makes sense of information. This framework consists
of four different ways of looking at any set of data.
‘Dimensions’ and ‘landscape’ address the structure
of information; the first seeking out common
themes across a data set (the key themes defining a
product category, for example), the second looking
more closely at competitive relationships, owned
and disputed territory and areas of opportunity.
We then build on this structural understanding
with more action-oriented means of addressing the
data: ‘groupings’ to segment the subject matter
and ‘drivers’ to reveal the variables that influence
relevant results, including causal connections that
can be far from immediately apparent.

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This approach provides a checklist for where and
how to look for patterns and themes. In the Big
Data era, we will learn to look for different types of
patterns in vastly diverse forms of data, but human
reason remains the key driving force in identifying
them and drawing purposeful connections between
them.

Computational muscle can give research the
scale and speed that we will increasingly
require in the Big Data era, but it is important
to distinguish between automating processes
and expecting machines to design them in the
first place.
We must not fool ourselves that Artificial Intelligence
(AI) is ready to take on the task of formulating
questions and crafting the algorithms to answer
them. After all, even those that welcome the
concept of a technological singularity in which

human-designed AI surpasses that of humans
themselves, don’t envisage it happening until at
least 2045. That’s a long time to wait to take real
advantage of Big Data.

We must not fool ourselves that
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is ready
to take on the task of formulating
questions and crafting the
algorithms to answer them. Even
those that welcome the concept
of a technological singularity
in which human-designed
AI surpasses that of humans
themselves, don’t envisage it
happening until at least 2045.

Autumn 2013
42


Data and the human imagination
Imposing structure on Big Data will throw up some
intriguing challenges – and these challenges will
involve logical leaps and lateral thinking for which
the human brain remains our best available tool.
What is a meaningful way of scoring a positive
tweet or Facebook rant? What aspect of somebody’s
location is actually relevant to the client brief – and
what other sources of information can be integrated
or overlaid to give context to this information? The
location of a car by itself is meaningless. If it’s a car
unable to fit into the WalMart parking lot on Black
Friday, it becomes a whole lot more interesting.
When we talk about deploying computational power
in the Big Data era, we must therefore be pretty
clear about what we are asking computers to do.
Depending too much on non-human processing
power risks confusing correlation with causation
and failing to distinguish between relationships that
are meaningful and those that are not, and it risks
setting narrow parameters for our thinking that we
forget to look beyond.

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We must continue to exercise our judgement as to
which information is valid and valuable, and how
its many varied forms can be coded in meaningful
ways. As data curators, that’s our job. But by
unleashing the power of today’s machines we can
dramatically increase the scope of data that we can
use, the range of questions that we can ask, and the
speed with which we can answer them. When Big
Data is aligned properly with human insight and
human reason, it can unleash their potential in ways
never envisaged before.

Read more about our perspective on
Big Data here >

Autumn 2013
43

Mobile is both curse and cure
for retailers at risk from showroomers
Who’s showrooming?
Global
33% of people
globally showroom
21% of them use their
phone while doing so
71

60

33%

54
36

29

21%

10
44

33

30

28

19

10

9

5

7

8

6

4

North
Emerging
SSA
China
America
Asia
Developed
Europe
MENA
Latin
America
Asia

India

How are they using their phones?
43% of showroomers

use their phones to
read reviews while in store

14%

use their phones to
check availability at
another store

31%

use their phones
to compare prices

14%

use their phones to
check if it’s easier
to order oline

Mobile Life is an annual study from TNS that draws on the behaviours,
motivations and attitudes of 38,000 people in 43 countries, to develop
recommendations on activating a business and marketing strategy via mobile.

People who showroom

Showroomers who use their mobile

How can retailers get involved?
38% of people

are interested in
redeeming mobile coupons

31%

would like a
mobile app to help
navigate the store

36%

would like to scan
a barcode for more
information

30%

are interested in
completing the
purchase on their phone

F
or more information visit www.tnsglobal.com/mobilelife

Mobile Life
44


Mekong
The most effective
strategies

The opportunity

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The lower basin of the
Mekong river
represents one of the
world’s great emerging
market opportunities,
from already-emerged
Vietnam with its
GDP of $123 billion
to Cambodia with
the fast-increasing
disposable income of
its urban population,
Laos with its close
connections to the
developed market of
Thailand, and Myanmar
which, newly emerged
from international
isolation and with
investment expected
to catapult to $20
billion, is quite possibly
the most exciting
opportunity of all.

The challenges
Each market comes
with its own precise
challenges that result
from different stages
of development and
different phases of the
brand cycle. Brands in
Myanmar are hampered
by a fundamental lack
of infrastructure that
extends for now to
mobile, an industry
deliberately disrupted
by the government
in recent years. In
Cambodia, urbanites
enjoy increasing
disposable income but
rural populations still
dominate the economy,
45

and express strong
preferences for buying
local brands. This may
be due to significant
language barriers that
exist as a result of the
devastation of the
education system under
Pol Pot. Vietnamese
similarly express a
preference for products
from their own country,
although they happily
set this aside when
it comes to Honda
motorcycles, Dell
laptops, Samsung
TVs and Panasonic air
conditioners.

Education is the need
and aspiration that
looms largest in the
minds of consumers
across the region – and
strategies offering
educational support
or increased powers
of concentration (for
example, through
energy drinks) have
proven consistently
successful. Marketers
must pay close
attention to local
cultural nuances
when positioning
their products (the
individualism and
self-expression of
Cambodian and Laos
stands in marked
contrast to the
traditional Buddhism of
Myanmar, which views
the idea of expressing
status through
brand choice with
suspicion). In addition
to identifying decisionmakers, marketers must

also be precise about
how to communicate
with them – and
which channels to
reach them through.
Women control
domestic budgets in
each country, but enjoy
significantly higher
status (and are more
likely to be welleducated) in Myanmar
and Vietnam. And
no matter what their
income level, they
are likely to do much
of their shopping in
traditional markets,
which still dominate
the consumer economy
across the region.
Understanding their
behaviours and
motivations is a key
starting point to
defining a plan for
growth in the region.
TNS has teams on the
ground in Cambodia,
Myanmar, Thailand
and Vietnam.

Read more about the
opportunity in the
Mekong here

Autumn 2013
45

What do your customers really want?

Strategic customer understanding and real-time feedback drive
efficient, profitable customer relationships. At TNS we help our
clients define and deliver the optimal customer experience, in
the areas that matter most, to drive growth.

Contact enquiries@tnsglobal.com
or visit www.tnsglobal.com/ce to find out more.

Customer Experience

Precision Growth

TNS is a global consumer insights business, translating unique
understanding of individual consumer behaviour into precise
plans for business growth.
With a presence in over 80 countries, we have more
conversations with the world’s consumers than anyone else,
and we understand precisely the conscious and unconscious
factors shaping attitude and choice in every cultural, economic
and political region of the world.
We offer expert analysis of business issues and a unique
product offering designed to pinpoint opportunities and deliver
precise action plans. Our specialist expertise includes Innovation
Product Development, Brand Communication, Retail
Shopper, Customer Experience, Employee Engagement,
Qualitative, Automotive, and Political Social.

TNS is part of Kantar, the data investment management
division of WPP and one of the world’s largest insight,
information and consultancy groups.
Please visit www.tnsglobal.com for more information.
Or follow us on twitter.com/tns_global

Intelligence Applied Autumn edition

Intelligence Applied Autumn edition

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