Posts Tagged ‘brand’

DIY Brand Deconstruction

Published on Jan 24th, 2011 by Liz

I’m all for saving money where you can and if this means doing something yourself rather than paying extortionate amounts of money to someone to come round, suck air through their teeth and claim the job at hand is very complicated and will therefore cost ten thousand pounds (plus VAT), I’m all for it.  Let’s take the example of plumbing, I can plumb in a washing machine or dishwasher, take u-bends off sinks to remove blockages etc – it’s not rocket science.  But what if I needed something a bit more specialised doing, such as re-fitting an entire bathroom. Unlike plumbing in appliances where all the pipes and fittings are out of sight, a whole bathroom is on full view to anyone who visits it, and this includes future prospective buyers of my house.  It’s a well known fact that bodge DIY jobs have a negative effect on the valuation and saleability of your property, so although I know I could do the work myself, I also know the finished product would not be as good as the work done by someone who fits bathrooms day in day out.  I would get someone in to do it.

So why am I waffling on about plumbing on a Research blog?  Well, it’s because of a few experiences I have had of late of surveys which have popped up on websites I have visited which were clearly of the DIY variety.  And I’m not talking here of questionnaire design (wording, routing etc) I’m talking about visual design.  The company websites that these surveys popped up from were well designed, visually pleasing and extremely representative of the company’s branding in terms of colour, text, tone of voice etc.  But then the survey popped up, and suddenly I was transported from living the brand to a vision of monochrome monotony. ‘OMG’ I thought, what on earth is this, what are they doing???!!!  The sites I was looking at were for premium and luxury brands, but the only words that sprung to mind when I looked at these surveys were cheap, cost cutting, basic, primitive; they went completely against the brand image being portrayed on the main websites. These surveys just weren’t reflective of the brands.  They were jarring and left me with a negative impression.  I don’t purchase from these brands, but I wondered, what were people who do purchase from these brands thinking ie the customers?

And this takes me back to my plumbing illustration.  In the future I am selling my house; externally it looks great, well decorated to a high standard, the potential purchasers who are viewing the property are moving in in their minds and planning where they will put all the furniture – and then they get to the bathroom, which in the end we decided to fit ourselves.  The taps are wonky, the grouting of the tiles is messy, the purchasers start looking around the room and seeing the flaws on display, and they are starting to think that maybe all isn’t as great as it seems, and what other botch jobs are laying unnoticed behind the scenes???  They leave the house never to be heard of again.

Think of a DIY survey as a bad DIY job, and a house as a brand – 99% of the offering may be perfect, but it just takes one botch job to get people to walk away……

The Sound of Your Own Voice

Published on May 3rd, 2010 by Ian

In the 1960’s the writer Truman Capote was once holding court with New York’s literati when after talked incessantly about himself declared “Hey, enough of me, what do YOU think about me?

Now we are all commentators what do we need to do find out what people really think?

Will it be easier or harder for research?

Indeed have you wondered if the inexorable, inevitable rise of the “me” generation will lead not to a more objective research respondent but the need to mark off for an even greater degree of opinion masquerading as “belief”?

As the ride to even greater degrees of narcissism gets faster and faster and the need to share the ever smaller minutiae of everyone’s life places almost intolerable burden on even the most committed communicator how will we separate the tweet from the naff?

More importantly how will we frame the conversation in a world of people talking AT you?

Can we listen better when everyone is waiting for the other person to stop talking about themselves so that they can talk about themselves?

It could be of course that we are starting to see the rise of a new form of “professional respondent” not the previous title holder who made a second job out of focussed groups but a more articulate,  media savvy, brand conscious informer.

Let me know what you think – about what I think of course.