CONFERENCE FEATURE: The Doughnut of Excitement

... and 'the Oompa Loompa of Ethnography'? Features Editor Teresa Lynch on a strange and wonderful Tuesday afternoon at the MRS Conference in London.

After lunch on the first day of the MRS Conference in London quite a few members of the Market Research Societycame face to face with the horrors contained in their own web sites and press releases. Among the words which were detested by the attendees of the workshop entitled 'Talk Normal' led by Tim Philips were deliver, insight, learnings and leading. This despite the fact that half of the (approximately 50 strong) audience admitted to using these words when describing their own company's activities and in presentations.

Philips is an entertaining presenter and led us through a miasma of ludicrous claims and hyperbole which involved almost every new mobile phone being described as 'game-changing' and every organisation having (the obviously ethically neutral) 'core values'. He told the workshop to use 'the doughnut of excitement' to tell the client the news about their product. This involves not giving them the boring empty bit of the doughnut that everyone already knows, and not going to the outer fringes of the doughnut where jargon (apparently) lives.

There was more plain talking and very little jargon in the ethnography session entitled 'Observation and Behaviours'. Rachel Lawes of Lawes Gadsby Semiotics chaired and explained that we were going to discuss 'new' concepts which were only 'about 100 years old'. Firstly Oliver Sweet of Ipsos MORI and Alison Marshall of UNICEF showed us a film demonstrating the difference between the amount of time UK families spend together and the amount of time spent by Swedish and Spanish families together. The thrust of their argument was that children don't want 'stuff' they want to play with their parents.

Less poignant but more amusing was a report on the visit of Alex Batchelor of BrainJuicer to the 'binge drinking capital of the UK' - Newcastle. Through relentless ethnographic enquiry the team came up with the following findings: people drink more when they are standing up (especially if they don't have anywhere to put their glass); people drink more when they are with other people who are drinking a lot; and people drink more to relax them in uncomfortable social situations, for example when they are wearing fancy dress. The last point was accompanied by a picture of a Geordie wearing an Oompa Loompa costume, a look which Batchelor said he had tried himself and advised against as being only suitable for the young and buff.

The session was nicely rounded off by Sara Sheridan from Firefish who showed her eager audience an ethnographic technique which involved putting static cameras in people's house and watching them 24/7. Her paper was accompanied by a film of a typical Sunday in one participant's house where a major finding was that although the television was on for over 6 hours no one watched it. Every other visual medium was used during this period, some of them two at a time.

Another new(ish) field, neuromarketing, has raised one or two temperatures here at Conference - and when we report on the debate tomorrow, we'll naturally be able to tell you exactly how many degrees. There's no substitute for a carefully placed electrode...

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.