Is it worthwhile to be wrong?

This question has the same answer than “is it profitable to win the lottery?” At the beginning both are affirmative but it depends on which is your reaction in front of an event or another, depending on how you invest and how you apply what you obtained, whether the lottery or whether the learning gained by the mistake done.

According to the politician and philosopher Marco Tulio Cicerón “is about humans being wrong but is by foolish people persisting on the error”. In my opinion, what truly results worthwhile is not doing a mistake but recognizing it.

Canadian researchers have found some evidence that as older we are, more we learn from our mistakes than from our success, and, also, that the learning from the trial-mistake is more effective for the memory than the knowledge achieved without mistakes. 

Leave open the possibility to be wrong and having the ability of identifying and recognizing the error provides the companies a high opportunity for the development of the professionals, as well as for the evolution, growth and recognition (reputation) of the brand. The recognition of the error allows the brand to be recognized as human, to be recognized as an empathic brand for its clients, employees and society.

The consumers don’t expect their brands to be infallible neither to be always perfect; they just want them to be honest about their mistakes. The human nature makes us run away from those people that (apparently) don’t have weaknesses and that never get wrong. Those attitudes generate problems connecting, trusting and engaging with the company.

Therefore, that an organization has the possibility to be wrong (I am not even saying promotes) and has acquired and developed the capacity and the ability to recognized their mistakes (I am not even saying that has created the channels) will allow it to develop other qualities for what being recognize. Among those qualities I would highlight:

•  Innovation: It is not possible to evolve and growth without assuming that there is a possibility to be wrong, without recognizing that the correct path is not always the straight line. That is an ability that leads to the bravery of assuming risks that all companies have and that all innovation process, forced or not, entails. The worst decision is the one never taken or the one taken late.

• Flexibility: For creating the process that protect the possibility of making a mistake and understanding that only from freedom emerges the trust and the creativity to evolve.

• Objectivity: To be able to read in key of future and in a positive way the situation that leaded us to the mistake, as well as we should avoid blaming the others about our mistakes

• Transparency: It is one of the ways of incorporating the honesty to the features of humanity and empathy expected from a company or brand. This transparency should show the mistake through the communication and the rectification. In an hyper connected world transparency is not an option, is an obligation. Otherwise we already know that it is a mistake of incalculable consequences.

• Coherence: closely related to the last point; the coherence is the shorter distance between what I am as a brand and a company and what I am saying that I am. For a coherent brand/company it would be easier (and cheaper) to face their possible mistakes.

• Humility: It doesn’t mean to recognize a weakness but to possess the wisdom and strength to know how to rectify.

• And above all, the learning capacity: As Oscar Wilde said: “experience is the name we give to our mistakes”. The experience is what I am able to do with what I learned. The main point is that if as a company, brand (or even a person) I will not have the humility to recognize my mistake, I will not learn from the past and even less give a good answer to the future.

But the most important, beyond developing these skills, the image that you will project will allow you to acquire a competitive advantage that will be difficult to beat for your competence, the capacity to engage and retain a talent with those same skills, this same attitude. Creative people and professional, with capacity of innovation, brave, honest, transparent, and coherent with their behaviour and their way of thinking and doing, flexible in front of the adversity and, specially, with the humility needed to learn about their mistakes.

Values from a talent that in many cases the companies, and the society where we live, seem to waste when “retiring” by force professionals that, at 50 years old, with a bag full of experience, errors and good choices, mistakes and learnings, and probably in the best moment of their professional life, we deny, and with we deny ourselves, the opportunity to do shorter (and therefore, more worthwhile) the path they already did, forcing us to go across this path again and probably make a mistake once more.

It is not worthwhile committing, year after year, generation after generation, the mistake that we will be eternally young and lacked of the humility to recognize the value of the experience of those who already did the path before us and to not develop the capacity of learning from them. Human is the only animal that stumbles twice on the same stone and, with him, all the entire society.

If we have identified the mistake, we should learn from it and, as Cicerón said, don’t be so foolish to continue persisting on it

Sebastián Fernández de Lara

Marcas que se reinventan

Jordi Aymerich, profesor de Marketing de la Universidad de Barcelona, ha participado en “El Matí de Catalunya Ràdio”, para hablar de marcas clásicas que se reinventan con el paso del tiempo. También han participado el Director de Marqueting de Munich, Xavier Berneda y el Director General de Bultaco, Curro Bultó.

XI Congreso de Retail 2014 en Lima

Sebastián Fernández de Lara, socio director en hamilton, ha llevado a cabo varias ponencias en el XI Congreso de Retail 2014 en Lima sobre los consumidores, su evolución y lo que buscan en las marcas. Según Sebastián cada vez las marcas se encuentran con un consumidor más exigente e infiel. ¿Cómo se da este cambio? ¿Qué estrategias pueden seguir las empresas frente a ello? Sebastián da respuesta a estas preguntas entre muchas otras

Free Gluten... ¿New Trend?

Gluten. What is gluten? How is it affecting society? What is it causing? Do celiac and non celiac act in the same way in front of free gluten products? Is this a necessity or a trend or a revolution? 

The gluten, a glycoprotein found in some cereals such as wheat, rye, barley and oats, is present in our daily diet and in the trolley of the person responsible for the household purchases, therefore, the store shelves are becoming a huge repertoire of free gluten products acting as commercial claim for many brands.

Without realizing it gluten free products have entered inside the basket of the preservatives, additives, proteins, etc. and more ingredients that help to preserve the food and that, we all want to avoid in our daily diet.  Gluten has become one of the biggest trends of recent times.

In addition to that, the food industry is seeing a gold mine on that protein. Unintentionally, gluten has become the protein that the modern society wants to erase of their diet even without having been diagnosed as intolerant or gluten allergic by a specialist doctor. This has turn to a mass phenomenon born from the need of the people gluten intolerant or allergic. A need that claims to the food manufacturers to:

• Have a clear labeling on products, helping them to avoid risk in their diet. 

• Have a wide variety of products without gluten.

Intolerants also claim for an affordable price. In this issue the distributor brands are gaining much ground. According to data by Hamilton Intelligence the main purchasers of gluten free products (pastries, pasta, bread, biscuits, flour or cereals) usually buy brands of the food distributor (private-label).

Died and trend or intolerance? Where is the origin?

It is difficult that the trend to eat products “without” don’t influence us. More and more people join to the “without” product consumption (without gluten, without lactose, without preservative, without salt, etc). The last published data regarding to gluten is that the 30% of the adults in the USA-almost 1 out of 3- has stopped or are trying to stop consuming products with gluten.   

Elisabet Suárez

Consumers from the cadle

Perharps for the fact of becoming a mother and for every thing that this involves, you feel suddenly inverse in a world, until this moment, unknown for you and it is then when you see how they grow up and how they learn and evolve and, moreover, when you realised how fast time passes and the constantly changing needs that they experienced. All of this, united with my investigation task, leads me to dive into this fascinating world of market reasearch of children.

Through the market research we try to bring closer the frims with the clients, known them better in order to offer them services/products more adapted to their likes, preferences and needs. And for that, it is also important known the children market, even thought studying this target it is always a challenge.

A challenge that adquires importance day to day because this young consumers increasingly become part of the decissions of the buying process at home. What mother has not bought a product in the supermarket at the insistence of his son at the shop shelve? Or at the insistence of the child when seeing the advert on the TV? Or what mother has not succumbed under the sentence “my friend has it”? Because we don’t have to forget that the main prescribes are the kids, the classemates or the games that encourage to “have what someone else has”.

For that it is important to understand this segment, understand the behaviour of the kids. How do they think? How do they act? What do they need? How do they connect with the brands? How do they absorb all the inputs they get? What influences in their decisions? How do they interact with their friends?...

But if we analyzed in detail this target, not only we need to understand well their behaviour, their concerns and their motivations, we also need to take in account the complexity of this segment due to their fast evolution, what they like today they don’t tomorrow and that is because they are constantly searching for 
the novelty. An other aspect to consider is that it is a target that develops themself so quickly for the reason that in the short term they have fundamental changes, concluding that nothing has in common a kid 5 years all with one of 9 or this with one of 12.

Therefore we must made products/services to mesure for them. for each moment of their childhood and is for this that when we face an investigation with children we need to take in account different facets:

• Headed Target: Important to define what ages we would like to collect because we must do small age cuts (3-5 / 6-8 / 9-11 / 12-14) or we can also have the need to study unique ages (P4 kids, kids from the 1st year of the primary school, ...) because their tastes and opinions are really different and what can perfectly fit with a 5 years old child can not fit with on of 8 years. Another important topic when working with kids is getting the fathers or tutors permissions for child under 14 years old.

• The interviewers: It is important to select well the interviewers because they need touse a language adapted to the children. Moreover, they need to be albe to stabilshed a good relation with the kids in order to extract food information from them.

• The questions and the wayof asking them: It is important adpat the questions to the target language and at their comprehensive level, this implies using comprehensible scales for them and easy to answer, supported in many occasions with draws or incons very easy for them to identify.

• The techniques to use: These are manyany and varied and it will highly depend on the product/service that we are valuing or on the information we need to apply one or another. At the generic level we can speack about quantitative studies (hall-test, home-test, pre-test and post-test, studies about habits, use or actituds, conjoint analysis, etc.) or also qualitative studies (kid observation in situ, focus group, projective techniques, etc.).

Finally, it is important to remark that the brands must take in account that we are facing a permeable and influenced target and more than beyond the law, the brand should approach them in a responsible way.

If we keep in mind all these aspects we will realized a good investigation that will help us approaching this small consumers that are usually the most demanding.






Mónica Rabasó

Neurosegments, segmenting the consumer mind.

Neuroscience has proved that any consumer first decides the purchase through the emotion and after, justifies the decision through the reason. This sequence, as simple as powerful, opens a path in the way of understanding the consumption as well as the purchase and their motivations, in definitive, it opens a path in understanding the consumer in the essence.

The essence belongs to the base of discovering the main consuming motivational levers of a specific brand. What makes it attractive? What seduce us from it? What emotional guideline underlines? What triggers the purchase?

A brand should build its relational discourse through knowledge of these motivational levers and to do that it should define, as a main objective, the weight of each in the final purchasing decision.

As simple and as complex as to segment the consumer thought in decision rules through the emotions.

Imagine an urban family that wants to change their car due to the arrival of twins at the house. For that they are considering to buy an European berlina premium with more capacity in the boot. They don’t want an all-terrain for the reason that is not practical to move around the city. What brand should they choose? Audi, BMW or Mercedes? What model, Serie 3, Serie 5, A4, A6, a C-class or an E-class? What kind of bodywork, normal or Touring/Avant? With or without total traction? As Xdrive, Quattro or 4Matic. Ultimately, there appear ten of elements to decide through the detection of different emotional “insights” that justify the reasoned decision.

How can we detect these motivational levers? Through the knowledge of the consumer reality in 3 stages:

• Stage 1: Through the ethnographic analysis it can be detected the real connection between the brand and the product through the daily experience with the same, with their real context, defining the interaction level with the self-propulsion market in this case, analyzing values, attitudes, habits and needs. What reality coexists with the car? What needs are detected? What is projected to the future?

• Stage 2: Through the Neuromarketing, analyzing the impact that has the competition set analyzed between the consumers and the potential buyers. What kind of emotions causes the real view of the competition set? What attracts that? What generates rejection?  What role is the brand playing in building the emotion? For this we can use techniques as the EEG (Electroencephalography) that will offer us the main measures of the cerebral answers on the stimulus presented, in this case, the different models of cars preselected. Use Eyetracking glasses (coordinated with the EEG) to detect the elements where the consumers put the eye on the car and be able to get heat maps of those aspects that re more relevant for the consumer. Complement with tools of "facial coding" showing us the main emotion expressed about the presented stimulus, that allow us to detect the basic emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, contempt).

• Stage 3: Cluster the different motivational levers found through advanced segmentation techniques that allow defining behaviors patterns related to the competition set. If we are able to segment by motivations (do not confuse that with life style or psychographic behavior) we have a powerful strategic tool to activate empathy elements with our potential buyers. We are addressing to the primary root of decision and can influence aspects of communication, relational aspects and aspects of the product.

Getting the last decision base we are getting the behaviour reality of our potential buyers.

It is exciting the future opened about the consumer behaviour analysis.

Jordi Crespo