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AQR Picks Frootful Research
The UK's Association for Qualitative Research (AQR) has given its 2004 Prosper Riley-Smith Effectiveness Award to Bryan Urbick, Director of Research at CKC/KidsLink Research Limited, for innovative research on the Kellogg's Froot Loop cereal brand.
Urbick will share the award with Sarah McDonald from the Market Research team and Carolina Polo,
Senior Brand Manager at clients Kellogg's, based in Battle Creek, USA.
In response to a brief to determine why sales of the Froot Loop brand were declining, Urbick devised an imaginative methodology to assess children's emotional response to the brand. The project combined the use of story completion with in-depth 'creative' interviews to encourage children aged between six and ten years old to identify their feelings about the brand. A new style of communication has since halted and reversed the decline in sales.
Presenting the Award, Anne Hastings, judging panel and AQR committee member, said there was a very good response to this year's scheme, with an encouraging increase in the number of entries on last year. She described the winning entry as 'a perfect illustration of the effective use of qualitative research... It was a difficult task identifying children's connection to this brand, but they showed real creativity in tackling the challenge and achieved a highly successful end result for the client'.
Bryan Urbick said 'It's very gratifying to receive industry recognition for our work, and particularly important that the client research team and brand team were an integral part - without the creative vision and trust of the client, innovative approaches are meaningless: research is only effective when
lessons are learned and applied to business needs. It is this combination that made this project successful'.
Mike Mickunas, Director of Market Research for Kellogg's USA Morning Foods division, says that teams working with long-standing, well established brands 'can often fall into the trap of conducting very routine research that only revisits common knowledge. Sarah, Carolina, Bryan and our ad agency team challenged themselves to dig deeper and find a path to more powerful insight'.
The judges also commended Nick Newell of CML for his work researching ways to reduce crime on-line.
The AQR's web site is at www.aqr.org.uk
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