Apparently it’s been a bad summer for box office sales. In fact, not such a great decade or two, with attendance and ticket sales fluctuating in a slow but steady downward trend. Clamours of extinction come as no surprise in the face of an inexorable shift towards “on demand” content consumption, where consumers can watch what they want when they want. Movie theaters are thus faced with a classic content and container problem.

“[...] Simplicity is preferable to complexity; brevity in communication is more effective than verbosity.”

It’s unlikely that Robert Browning had market research in mind when he coined the phrase Less is more in the 1850s and provided the minimalist movement with a raison d’être. Nevertheless, the mantra can be applied in many a field, including qualitative research and more particularly, with recruitment screeners.

Having dealt with recruiting for thousands of focus groups, we’ve realized over and over again that simple, short recruitment screeners deliver better quality participants. When criteria are less confined, recruiters have a larger pool from which to draw potential participants, and can therefore be more rigorous regarding enthusiasm and articulateness of the recruits.

Viral videos have become the holy grail for all companies, organisations and foundations. It’s a low-cost way of getting your message out there, but most of all, it’s a very effective one. However, creating a viral campaign is not an easy task, and very few actually succeed.

So how come “The Ice Bucket Challenge” went around the world so quickly? And more importantly, how can its success be reproduced by others?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzFRV1LwIo

En 2007, Cadbury a lancé une pub virale, intitulée Le Gorille. Maintes fois primée, elle a notamment remporté le Grand Prix aux Lions de Cannes en 2008. Son impact a été spectaculaire. Les ventes du produit annoncé (Dairy Milk) ont augmenté de 9 % et les perceptions favorables à l’endroit de la marque ont grimpé de 20 points de pourcentage. Mais Le Gorille n’aurait peut-être jamais vu le jour s’il avait été prétesté en suivant les mesures d’efficacité traditionnelles. Pourquoi?

Parce que la plupart de ces mesures ne captent pas l’ingrédient clé qui a fait de cette publicité un succès planétaire : les émotions. Or, ces dernières jouent un rôle clé, les consommateurs n’étant pas aussi rationnels qu’on l’imagine.

It’s every moderator’s dream – eight articulate, creative and engaged participants sitting around the table. Sure, a well-designed recruitment screener goes a long way, but what other tools do we have in our box to help get participants to “bring it” to the table?

From our experience in moderating and recruiting, the pre-group assignment, (aka homework), is an effective means of getting the job done for all parties involved: recruiter, participant and moderator.