Kicking off our new Lightbox Loves series on the7stars blog, we wanted to share with you some of the highlights of last week’s MRS Yorkshire event. It was a chilly day up in Leeds, but we were armed with our notepad & an open mind.
Now, you wouldn’t think John Lewis had much in common with Nigel Farage and Trump, but in the first talk, Alison from ABA Research took us through how they all employ similar tactics in their communications.
The three rules?
- Create an emotional connection, when everyone else is being too rational
- Be the antagonist in the picture
- Use digital communications to spread the word authentically and effectively
Next up was Nationwide telling us about how they work with Join the Dots to put insight at the heart of their organisation. They talked about using members from their insight community in live, face to face panel discussions with members of the senior leadership team – something many brands would be too nervous to do!
We then presented the findings from our Untangling the Fairy Lights Christmas research study – where interrupted shopping missions, or passively tracked the mobile phones of in total 2000 Brits over a five-week period from Black Friday through to New Year. This won’t be the last we tell you about this, so I’ll keep schtum for now.
The final presentation of the day was from Sara Picazo at Twitter, on the research into Discovery they conducted with The Numbers Lab @ Firefish. It was clear from their research that Twitter is a “look at that”, outward facing platform, not a “look at me”, self-reflective platform. They identified 3 mindsets that people browse twitter in. These were:
- Mission based discovery – looking for an answer to specific questions
- Inspiration based discovery – a theme in mind, but open to exploration
- Serendipitous discovery – no real aim, an open mind
These mindsets are important to advertisers, as their neuroscience research revealed that consumers undertake 31% more memory encoding when in discovery mode, versus general internet browsing.
Some interesting learnings for us in Lightbox @ the7stars from the whole day, and we’re looking forward to the next one!
