Firefish hires Liz Seok from Flamingo to Group Director role (plus 4 other new staff)
posted 7 Jun 2013
Liz Seok joins the innovative, award-winning consumer research agency Firefish from Flamingo where she worked as a director and managed international projects for clients such as Unilever, Nestle and Bacardi.
In her fifteen years of research, Liz has become a renowned strategic thinker with strong leadership skills and a passion for helping clients action the recommendations she provides as part of her projects, informed in part by her time as a clientside marketer at Unilever. In addition to her clientside and agencyside experience, Liz can speak French, Italian and Korean and has lived and worked in North and South America (Canada, USA and Brazil) and Europe (France, Italy and UK) making her a great fit with Firefish, who have offices in Amsterdam, London and New York.
Asked why she joined Firefish, Liz comments: “I joined to lead and inspire a team of bright, passionate researchers as it was time to take the next step up in my career and an agency like Firefish, recognised for its high standards and innovative and progressive thinking, is an exciting place to do that. I am looking forward to learning from the best, getting to know everyone at Firefish, and their clients, in more depth and making a positive contribution to their already excellent business”.
CEO, Jem Fawcus, adds “we are delighted to welcome Liz to strengthen our senior team. Her international and mixed client- and agencyside experience will help us continue to give even better strategic answers to our clients’ global questions. She’s also a really nice person too!”.
If you wish to contact Liz, you can drop her an email at liz@firefish.ltd.uk
In addition to Liz, Firefish also welcomes Jonathon Daykin to our Accounts Team to help with the expanding Firefish business, Dee Cahill as a Project Manager to our excellent in-house field team who is working closely with The Pineapple Lounge on Kids and Family recruitment, Rachel Lewis as a new Editor in our ever-progressive and impressive research film department, Firefilms and, last but not least, Shanice Evans as our Office Apprentice, getting to grips with the world of business and office life, fresh out of college.
Private View: Award-winning papers, presented just for you
posted 7 Jun 2013
We spend a lot of time thinking about, writing and presenting great things for conferences – wowing crowds and picking up the odd accolade along the way. Unfortunately, not everyone we would love to share our ideas and wisdom with can make it to the actual events themselves which means a lot of great stuff ends up in the Firefish back catalogue - rather than being enjoyed by the people it was intended for. So, to overcome this frustration we have decided that if people cannot come to the conference - then the conference will go to them - in the form of Firefish Private View.
In essence, this is a mini conference that comes to a place of your choosing (within reason) where we will present a pair of short conference pieces that can be selected from a catalogue of our greatest hits, including:
- Reality Check – The Importance of Context in Research
- Triangulation – Considering an Issue from Multiple Perspectives
- Behavioural Economics – How to apply it to your brand
- SwitchedOn – Multi-Focal Media Consumption
- Social Media – The Rules of Engagement
- Polyphonic Listening – Online and Community Methodology
- Lifelogging – History and Explanation
- Project Cool (TPL) – Defining a brand’s Cool DNA
- Role of Play in Kids Lives (TPL)
- Digital Mums (TPL)
The tour bus has been serviced and the driver is standing by, so please contact us to book your own Private View experience.
Successful Brand Launch Campaigns
posted 7 Jun 2013
When launching a new brand, or launching your established brand into a new market, there is always some uncertainty and a fine line between success and failure. In order to help our clients maximise their chances of success, we have had a think and have pulled together some examples of when brands have got it right...
All Good Bananas
‘Listen to your Conscience’ campaign. Great POS activity which really caught attention and connected with people- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cef4DDQ-CEc
Anthon Berg
‘The Generous Store’: Innovative way of generating buzz and connecting with your audience. Also an example of how to effectively incorporate digital/social media into bigger ideas - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cNfX3tJonw
Converse
Converse hijacked Mexico City by painting big stuff in a way that is both Mexican and on brand...(see picture)
It’s part of their ‘shoes are boring, wear sneakers’ campaign -http://www.brandingmagazine.com/2013/03/19/converse-shoes-are-boring-wear-sneakers/
Coke Zero
As part of the Skyfall campaign, Coke Zero gave away exclusive tickets to the launch, but you had to complete a challenge first which was given to you via a vending machine... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDiZOnzajNU
Microsoft Surface Graffiti
As part of the Surface launch, Microsoft invested in some interesting guerrilla marketing that involved painting graffiti of the Surface tablet onto the walls and pavements.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=microsoft+surface+graffiti&tbm=isch
Virgin Radio
Virgin radio’s big star on Regent Street was intended to improve the connection with current listeners, but also a buzz around the brand to increase awareness amongst potential new listeners.
http://www.emoltd.com/otherstuff/bigstar.html
Americanino
Americanino in Chile created a buzz by giving away free merchandise to the adventurous people to reveal themselves. Also highlights an impactful way of using mobile to interact with Millennials.
http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/chile-americanino-hypnotic-ad
Firefish in the Press
posted 7 Jun 2013
The research magazines have been picking up on Firefish’s excellence a lot of late and we thought, just in case you missed it, we would pop it in the newsletter for your perusal.
First up: “Reality Check: Putting context back at the heart of research”
ESOMAR’s Research World magazine has published a summarised version of the award-winning paper (Peter Cooper Qualitative Excellence Award) from ESOMAR’s November 2012 Qualitative Congress, that uses our work on BT’s fibre optic broadband service Infinity as a case study.
You can read the article published in ESOMAR’s Research World here
Dr Bob also presented this paper at the Future of Consumer Intelligence conference in San Francisco in May, extolling the importance of context to a US audience. There will be a video of this presentation available for viewing in the near future, but we are also happy to come to your office to present this paper to your team, with our new Private View presentations.
Next up: Associate Director, Martin Smith’s IJMR Young Research Writer of the Year shortlist for his paper on using mobile to unlock youth around the world, have been featured in an article in AQR’s InDepth Spring supplement, which you can read here.
It is a fascinating piece on gathering youth opinions around politics from India, the UK and China, using our MobileAquarium smartphone research app. You can also read the full IJMR paper here.
Finally, and a little sneak peek, in the upcoming issue of the MRS’s excellent new Impact magazine, Firefish are referenced in an 8-page article about Tate London and how we helped them overcome a large challenge with the first major rehang of its permanent collection in many years, using our FireFrames technology, so do keep an eye out for that later this month.
If you would like to hear more about any of these papers, then please just get in touch
Quantified Self Conference: The Future of Lifelogging
posted 7 Jun 2013
The Quantified Self
Imagine the scene: you just land off a flight from Boston, having been working at a Front End of Innovation conference. You have been chatting with the US’s insight and innovation elite and, although invigorated by this, are still sleepy from the jetlag. You then board another flight to Amsterdam for the Quantified Self conference: a gathering of likeminded ‘lifeloggers’ from across Europe and the World, feeling slightly unnerved by any more cerebral action. If you don’t already know, Firefish has been working with ‘autoethnography’ and lifelogging technology since 2009 and it has been used by a whole host of our clients to unlock new moments of insight in new ways, allowing them to think in new ways about their consumers as well as inform new NPD and much more.
I had not attended this event previously but my inner tech-geek was keen to get there and dive in to the latest things on offer, to see what people have been up to and how we might be able to utilise some of this stuff for understanding people and their behaviour.
The opening keynote was a remarkable presentation in to clinical depression and ‘biohacking’ yourself to try and analyse how you might end the depression cycle. Two incredibly brave people shared their stories on how they had used a variety of lifelogging technology that they had built/adapted to track where their periods of depression were and what behaviour and its monitoring had counteracted/coincided with this. It was fascinating and I knew this working weekend was going to be an interesting one.
From discussing the number of different Health Trackers on the market, meeting with app developers and product developers and neuroscientists and software geeks, I got a window in to the brave new world of the Quantified Self, which is really starting to gather pace, what with the more consumer-friendly QS products being released like Nike’s FuelBand and the soon-to-be-released Google Glass.
One of the big things to come out of these conversations is the issue of privacy and how it will need to be much more open to get people to adopt QS behaviour on a mass scale. This may come in the more user-friendly Nike FuelBand and its FuelPoints system or something born out of the need to track your diet and activity for a healthier lifestyle but it seems that there are many things out there (or about to be out there) that will allow people to log corners of their life they never even thought about before...but why would you...and why would you want to share it with people, yet alone brands?
The answer to this may lie in an interview I conducted in Boston, with the VP of Innovation for Intel. We talked about the #WeTheData initiative and how everyone in the world will be sharing their ‘life data’ in the future, but how there are steps that need to be taken to get there. My general perception was that, as technology develops, people will likely adopt the behaviours that work for them but, before all that, there needs to be some reframing in the mind (attention, BE fans) – if people can see that the data they are sharing is used for positive things, or that data other people have shared can benefit them, then they are more likely to get involved.
We here at Firefish continue to look in to where all this technology is going, when people might start tracking more sides of their lives through smart devices and how our clients can use it, and our 5 years in the ‘lifelogging for research’ world gives us a definite advantage in understanding and interpreting it, in context.
So watch this space...until then, keep your RunKeeper on, you never know what it might unlock about your life in the future.