The Thinking
Ultimately, it’s all about the thinking. We don’t see ourselves as mouthpieces for the consumer point of view, although we do spend a lot of time considering how to get ever closer to what’s going on inside people’s lives and heads. The real value of our consultancy is in seeing patterns, making connections, and providing far-reaching, forward-looking recommendations. We are constantly drawing on new ideas from all kinds of sources: popular culture, academia, the media, talking to our grandmothers. And much of what we’ve thought we’ve turned into papers, delivered at conferences around the world.
Our published papers
Please select a paper from the list below for further detail and download option:
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Four trends about the New Youth Consumer
Annie Auerbach & Imme Ermgassen presented four trends about the New Youth Consumer at the recent DAS Spotlight Forum at Sketch, London.
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Ethnography: The Empathic Model
One of the pioneers of the Universal Design movement, Dr. Patricia Moore, is professionally associated with Flamingo International.
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Universal Design: A Marketing Challenge
How is it possible that even today research is conducted, products are designed, and creative messages are delivered without considering ALL potential consumers? Why do we in the marketing community regularly eliminate potential consumers for what we perceive they can’t do, without investigating?
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Web 2.0: From Collaboration to Criticism
Why brands are rejecting co-creation and taking back control
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Lipstick on a Pig - Get the Tastiest Pork from Japanese Qualitative Research
This paper will argue that Qualitative research and Japan don’t mix. That what goes by the name of qualitative research in Japan is, in many cases, something very different; a beast that has - in evolving to fit Japanese cultural assumptions, business reflexes and participant behaviours - been stripped of its ability to reveal consumer insight and provide real value. The paper will explore the reasons for this dichotomy and propose a new way forward for Japanese research that takes the best of both worlds.
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Global Method, Local Approach: How the Japanese Group Can Gain Focus
Overseas researchers and marketers have felt much frustration with the quality and depth of the focus group in Japan. We will argue that the failure to conduct groups optimally is a result of ignoring cultural differences in the approach to the context of the focus group and the respondent; and also the dominance of a quantitative mindset within marketing research in its approach to the facility and moderator. This paper proffers ways to rectifying these misguided approaches.
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Getting Connected: Redefining the traditional debrief
A new media landscape has irrevocably altered how people interact with each other, how communities are formed, how opinions are shared. This landscape is technology-led and technology-enabled, and has occasioned key shifts in the way consumers think about the world around them and about brands. We’re going to talk about how brands are dealing with these issues and the challenges that face market research.
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Sonic Semiotics
The Role of Music in Marketing Communications
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Emerging Signals; A Catalytic Gaze into the Semiotic Crystal Ball
This is part of a series of short articles in which Flamingo International’s semiotic team examines the impact of signs and mythologies on contemporary brands. These dispatches from the frontline are aimed to stimulate thought rather than to offer final definition, for in the end semiotics is not a scientific formula extracting ‘truth’, but an analytical methodology in pursuit of meaning
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Commitment to Irony? A Semiotic Analysis of Diesel Advertising
This essay examines the discourses and codes at work in Diesel brand advertising. Diesel is a fascinating subject for semiotic analysis because their work is invariably both visually arresting, deliberately controversial and foregrounds the symbolic and textual features of the advertising
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PowerPoint is not written in Stone
This paper observes that Microsoft PowerPoint has achieved great ubiquity as a means of business and organisational communication. It argues that there are meanings and structures embedded in the medium, and similarly, meanings and structures associated with the conventions of its usage. The paper considers these, and urges consideration of how practitioners of market research, especially in the qualitative sector, can use the medium to greater effect and develop their own reflexes to aid inspiring communication.
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Hide n Seek
This paper explores a major issue facing brands and organisations – the need to stimulate fresh thinking and prepare for tomorrow’s market. The paper demonstrates how a creative research design involving semiotics makes it possible to understand developments in different cultures and yet succeed in delivering insight that is of great relevance to the client at a global strategy level.
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Signs and Wonders
The success of semiotics as a research methodology has led to the absorption of some of its key methods into mainstream research (e.g. communication decoding, identifying emergent culture). If it is to have a future, semiotics must consider the role it will play as a methodological force in qualitative research. This paper offers a hypothesis as an answer to this timely question.
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Trouble in Paradise
This paper takes a close look at the way men and women are portrayed within our current advertising culture and suggests that if brands are to continue to engage and inspire they need to rethink how they play the gender game. In a bid to be contemporary many brands have focused their efforts on the female characters in their executions, developing them in such a way as to undermine male self-esteem and to imply rancour and competition between the sexes. It is this paper’s contention that across sexes and lifestages this approach is declining in resonance.
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A million consumers, a million brands
Drawing from PlayStation's qualitative research programme, this paper will argue that the latest generation of digital brands represent a step change in the relationship between brand and consumer. It discusses how these brands, unlike others, are given meaning not in the public, social sphere but in the privacy of millions of homes and imaginations. In effect, these are not brands made by marketeers, but brands people make for themselves…
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Even Cowboys Get the Blues
This paper sets out to argue that the influence American culture exerts on (young adult) European consumers is showing signs of decline, as a result of a decline in the relevance of the values of the 'America Brand', as currently expressed. It attempts to provide explanation for this phenomenon, with examples from a number of areas. And it points to some of the implications for marketing, leading to hypotheses about how brand owners can best define and communicate their brand's values to Europeans against this backdrop.
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Hip-Hop: Subculture or Super Brand?
We believe that a true understanding of the appeal of hip-hop can have valuable implications for marketers seeking to connect with young people. Hip-hop incorporates a number of key values which resonate powerfully with the youth target. This paper seeks to describe and explore these values and how they work, before articulating the interaction between hip-hop and the world of brands – an interaction which has rich potential if it can be properly harnessed.
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Brand Extension or Brand Pretension
This paper explores the limitations and value of qualitative research in a brand extension programme. Presented at the AQR/QRC conference in Paris it calls for the qualitative research industry to move away from the role of ‘consumer mouthpiece’ and to engage fully in the strategic thinking underpinning the extension initiative. The paper presents a model for exploring brand extension opportunities, in which strategic thinking and consumer understanding are combined. The application of the model is illustrated throughout with examples drawn from Levi’s, Sony, PlayStation and Lynx.
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Choose Change
Describing an approach to qualitative research which helps companies shape the future brand and advertising landscape. It explores the definition of leading edge and argues that for any one brand there is a multiplicity of leading edge targets depending on whether design, advertising, product development or product usage is the subject of the study. It dispels the myth that 'the leading edge' exists as an entity relevant across categories (a view particularly prevalent in the youth market) and looks at how each brand must define its own leading edge.
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Cool Mindshare
This paper looks at the role of forward-looking trend research and analysis in helping to protect the cool equity and youth credibility of the Levi's ® brand. From the start point of qualitative research, it examines the importance of instinct and intuition in looking beyond immediate category competitors of the Levi's brand, to understand the potential pressure on the brand's share of 'cool mind' from a variety of youth brands. It concludes by illustrating how Levi Strauss & Co. are using this learning to retain their position in the youth marketplace.
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Scouting
This paper sets out to show how research and specifically youth research can offer genuinely exciting and inspirational insight and information via a simple but alternative approach to recruitment, discussion and analysis.
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Truth or Dare
In this paper we describe a philosophical conflict which is underway and present at all levels of our culture today. The conflict is between a traditional framework for understanding truth and reality, and a second, increasingly important paradigm which valorises relative, subjective experience. This paper was presented at the Esomar conference in Budapest.
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Up Close and Personal
This paper discusses approaches to youth research designed to gain the maximum understanding. It looks at methodologies and techniques which go beyond the classical qualitative remit, challenging traditional notions of researcher objectivity, arguing that more subjective approaches to the world of the youth consumer enable a more contextualised vision of their world, and their relationship with brands.
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What's behind an answer?
This paper has at its heart a research project that took place in Jamaica and the USA in January 1999, conducted for Red Stripe Beer. It's essentially a case study, though it aims to go far beyond the particular issues in this study, and look at the analytical challenges that have to be considered when examining consumer responses in radically different markets, governed by fundamentally differing background factors.
