Culture Insight

 

Culture: Insight's third space - Conducting and integrating cultural analysis to drive brand value Julie Curphey, Andrew Dexter and Leanne Tomasevic ESOMAR Qualitative, Vienna, November 2011

 

 

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Culture: Insight's third space - Conducting and integrating cultural analysis to drive brand value Julie Curphey, Andrew Dexter and Leanne Tomasevic ESOMAR Qualitative, Vienna, November 2011

 

Culture: Insight's third space - Conducting and integrating cultural analysis to drive brand value Julie Curphey, Andrew Dexter and Leanne Tomasevic Pfizer and Truth, UK DO NOT ONLY ASK WHAT CONSUMERS WANT, BUT ALSO WHAT CULTURE WANTS There are two key spaces in the world of commercial insight – “the consumer” and “the brand”. We conduct studies that tell us how people think and feel; we have commercialised the observation of behaviour; and we touch on culture via semiotics, ethno, trends and futures. Culture is the “third space” of research where shifts in cultural surround influence and shape peoples’ beliefs, feelings, and behaviours, but it is not well integrated with consumer-centric research approaches. This work tends to exist in sub-disciplinary silos, without a consistent unifying framework within which to conduct and integrate cultural analysis. The third space of culture is the social environment that embraces both consumers and brands. It is what Edward Soja, a postmodern political geographer, describes as a “constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings.” It is in this space that we come to know who we are as consumers. This space is culture. Most of what influences what we buy and why we buy it is a result of this surround - what has gone on around consumers; what they have been using and doing, and what they have been seeing, hearing and communicating. This is how our needs develop, and how we decide (without deciding) that we want one thing or another. Untidy parts of life provide opportunities for brand innovation As researchers, marketers and brand leaders we tend to ignore ‘culture’ because of marketing and management’s inherited focus on economics, engineering and psychology. These disciplines, albeit, quite different from each other and useful in a less complex and chaotic life, can now oversimplify the world and ignore the value of what culture can provide and also how it informs what we do. As researchers, particularly on multi-country studies, we also tend to take culture at a surface level, as a few key trends or reference points, or as background to the key insights. Downloaded from warc.com

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As Cameron and Holt, leading brand strategists, espouse: “they remove all the messy bits of human life in order to present a tidy view of consumption that allows for corporations to function in a streamlined fashion. But it is in these untidy parts that innovation opportunities lurk.” This “third space” is where brands can innovate and disrupt the category conventions, paving the way to become brand icons of commercial value and profit. So the fact we have mostly ignored this third space becomes a real issue, particularly in a dynamically shifting marketplace, where brand managers and consumers have very little control over the branding process. In fact, culture controls how brands work to produce meaning, and is one of the most fertile grounds for developing brand strategy and innovation. (See figure 1.) Understanding culture creates new commercial angles So rather than using more conventional reductionist research approaches that focus on the present tense in snapshot form, offering a psychological understanding of consumers, a cultural approach gives us the opportunity to destabilise the status quo, challenging our taken-for-granted assumptions so we can identify latent and emerging needs of consumers.

FIGURE 1 Culture tends to be ignored to focus on business intention and consumer response using management thinking distilled from economics, engineering and psychology. This strips out the ability to use culture as a means of driving brand value. For example, looking at culture can allow us to stretch our horizons beyond the narrow confines of product – brand – category to embrace the cloud of meaning and influence that comes from: l

Communications, words and images

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Codes and hidden meanings

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Conventions and cultural roles

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Stories and archetypes

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Lifestyles and how they are signified

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Contexts, places and so on.

In short, we need to look at these messy parts of culture and get our hands dirty by reaching into this cloudy third space to uncover the richness of consumption, and what consumers will be looking for next - uncovering new opportunities that will help create iconic brands that will take us into the future. (See figure 2.)

FIGURE 2 Examining culture allows us to stretch further than the more simplistic boundaries of products, brands and categories. Using different lenses, we are able to reframe culture, making it more “researchable” However, the innate “cloudiness” of culture does present a few challenges. The way therefore to reframe this challenge is to think in terms of cultural lenses. By this we mean delimiting the cloud (or we could spend many hours, days, years, exploring its infinite fluffiness). Cultural lenses can include everything from fine art and fashion, fictional writers, cultural commentators, new technology, packaging design and/or advertising. It is the analysis of these materials that helps us to predict and understand how the world is changing, how people will change, and what consumers will want, need, and ultimately buy. A close examination of the relevant cultural communications and objects will allow us to determine how to execute this future ideal and ensure it is relevant and differentiating. Academically, definitions of culture are much debated, but one area of agreement is that it means different things to different groups. Different research questions, brands and consumers have different cultures – and part of the process of researching culture is selecting key areas of cultural activity to focus on. Downloaded from warc.com

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WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN “CONSUMER” AND “CULTURAL” INSIGHT? To understand the difference between a consumer and cultural insight let us look at health in the dairy category as an example. “Consumer” insight alerts us to dairy being a bit of a “dirty word” when it comes to health, but it doesn’t tell us how to respond to this challenge, how to change perceptions or how to make dairy healthy in the mind of the consumer. Yet “cultural”  insight can help us with this issue because it liberates us from a purely consumer focus, permitting us to talk directly to the category and investigate how it is changing. On one recent project, by examining retail outlets and advertising of various icecream and yoghurt brands we were able to create a set of guidelines to help create a new definition of what we have called ‘dairy skinny’. For example: By sitting in a Snog store in Soho, London, we were able to pick up on an entire new set of ‘healthy’ ice-cream cues. Instead of the usual traditional focus on rich, heavy and decadent creaminess, we observed a new language of fluorescent vibrancy and simplicity, as well an overriding sense of lightness, quite removed from what we originally and stereotypically perceive of ice-cream. Example: Similarly, when we paid attention to recent yoghurt advertising for Muller, we noted how they had taken the clichéd  wholesome cow lazing in the countryside to presenting it running like a horse along a beach. Like Snog, Muller has made dairy energetic, dazzling and fresh, and is another attempt to strip itself from the heavy, thick and slow associations we have of dairy. What both the retail space and television commercial indicated was how dairy brands and namely yoghurt have evolved to capitalise on the growing consumer concern and interest in health. Consumers might have been able to tell us where things were at, that heavy-dairy products felt ‘tired’, but by learning and borrowing from shops and communications we were able to give our client a very specific strategic and clear executional direction on how to move their brand forward, pushing it into a more leading edge space. Consumer insight alone did not give us this information; it could not tell us how to create a “healthy dairy”, whereas cultural insight revealed a visual and verbal lexicon, a crystal clear solution to our brand and category challenge. BUT WE ALSO NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE “VISIBLE” AND “INVISIBLE” SHIFTS IN CULTURE, CONSUMER INSIGHT CAN HELP WITH THIS TOO One of the important ways we understand cultural insight is by making sense of how the world is changing and how consumers are changing in a way that is much more intimate and relevant than generic trends and word associations, or simplistic consumer interpretations. The way we recognise these shifts and determine which ones are important is by pulling apart deep cultural slow moving changes versus faster, more localised “cool-hunting” type shifts. We have termed this as the bigger contextual movements and smaller localised patterns taking place. This has been adapted from McCracken, a world leading anthropologist who references the importance of distinguishing and combining the slow and fast structures and types of knowledge that exist within culture and can be found when spending time observing consumers.

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“Big” culture is more submerged, to the point that we often forget to pay attention to it: the long-standing values and traditions that underpin how we live. “It is everything beneath the surface: less charted and much less visible”. “Small” culture tends to get most of the limelight; it encompasses the latest fashions, fads, hot bands and movies, current slang and so on. “It is like all the boats on the surface of the Pacific. We can spot them, number them, track them” (McCracken, 2009). (See figure 3.)

FIGURE 3 By combining “big” and “small” shifts we can understand the direction culture is moving in and how this can be leveraged by brands to create leadership and growth. Small shift: Breast cancer communications have become glamorous To understand this in a bit more detail, let us consider an interesting shift that has taken place in relation to breast cancer. Cancer is now much more readily talked about than in the recent past and this change has come about, in part, because of the fashion activism seen in breast cancer advertising campaigns. These communications now look like the front cover of Vogue magazine despite representing a serious and potentially terminal illness. We are now also seeing this shift - in relation to the glamorisation of illness - extend itself into high end women’s health and beauty products. It is what we have called ‘medical aesthetics’, meaning women are using bespoke beauty products and procedures to make themselves look better whilst they are unwell. Blending both inner and outer health, it is now acceptable to use beauty as a means to feel good when one is sick. This is part of how women deal with being “unhealthy”. Big shift: Emergence of women in politics and expanded definitions of beauty, health and wellness At the same time, we have had wider, more macro shifts taking place under the surface that have provided the ground for these new developments to take shape. Think of the emergence of women in global politics and economics, or the expanded definitions of beauty – mentally comparing things now with five or ten years ago is a good way to think about this. Again, these clues - like the small shifts - are all around us in the “third space”. Whilst, this may all sound like fairly big picture ideas, this trickles down and impacts how women are represented in all media, their needs for the future, the types of products they desire, the brand messages and packaging that peaks their interest and what they will ultimately seek out and want to buy. SO HOW DO WE GO ABOUT RESEARCHING CULTURE?

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Different research questions, brands, groups of people, or targets correspondingly have different cultures, and the first part of the process is beginning to identify places where this culture can be found and what strategies to follow to collect it. The cultural cloud can be infinitely large – how do you decide what to look at and what to discard? There isn’t one rule to follow here but some key ways are identifying: l

Cultural experts and guides – Identifying experts who can share a view on cultural movements. On international projects this also includes local moderators and partners.

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Adjacent and matched categories – Not only adjacent categories, but those with shared themes or trends.

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Tuning in to culture – As researchers, this is already something we’re used to doing, but this might be enhanced by taking a visual ‘shopping trip’ or cultural safari.

Having made a start, iteratively following leads and directions that come up constitutes the next part of the process, remaining focused but collecting new materials based on information coming up. We structure the process of taking emerging themes and ideas and turning these into insight through two methods in particular, in order to integrate findings and make them usable: 1. Describing the theme that has been identified in terms of what has shifted? What did it used to be? What is it not now? 2. Using research in the first or pilot market (where there are multiple markets) and building a framework of themes to provide structure. This broadly characterises the approach we took to help Pfizer. CASE STUDY: PFIZER WOMEN’S HEALTH Our project was designed to help Pfizer, a global leader in the pharmaceutical and consumer health industry, to innovate within “women’s health” following the identification of it being a key area of growth for the business, just as Viagra had been for men’s health. With many of Pfizer’s product patents now coming to an end, it was ever more critical for them to better understand how they could leverage and disrupt the category with existing brands as well creating and/or buying new products and services, to continue to achieve brand growth and leadership. Ultimately, the three key questions we needed to answer were: 1. How can Pfizer make their existing products/brands more successful? 2. How can Pfizer successfully launch pharmaceutical products/brands into the areas of women’s health? 3. How can Pfizer create new growth opportunities, adjacent to the core Pfizer business, to meet the unmet needs of women in relation to health?

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The challenge Beyond the challenge of developing ingenious ideas to match innovations as powerful as Viagra, we had the added complexity of Pfizer’s inability to talk to women directly about their products. For all pharmaceutical companies in Europe, ‘selling’ is done to the healthcare professional – but in the changing environment where consumers are making more informed choices about medicines they take and how they treat their health, both healthcare professionals and Pfizer needed to be equipped to better understand consumers, not just the disease they were treating. Finally, our biggest challenge was how to develop a research approach that would not only allow us to understand the needs of women and healthcare professionals today, but would also enable us to identify how, in the broader area of women’s health, such needs would evolve in the future. The research To meet our key objective we focused on and integrated two critical perspectives: l

The cultural perspective: Drawing insight, inspiration and direction from immediate and adjacent categories in health, as well as wider popular culture.

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The consumer perspective: Grounding and informing the study in women’s attitudes towards health and wellbeing in general, and women’s conditions specifically.

As a result, the project involved an integration of cultural and semiotic analysis of both women and health contexts, as well as ethnographic observations, interviews and group discussions with consumers and healthcare professionals across Europe: in the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Italy, France and Sweden. (See figure 4.)

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FIGURE 4 An example of the types of cultural material we examined in the United Kingdom to understand the full spectrum of women’s health. OUR APPROACH To examine both perspectives we also developed our own unique research methodology using a three stage analysis framework adapted from Cameron and Holt (2010). This framework allowed us to integrate both “cultural” and “consumer”  methods of research investigation. Stage 1. Mapping the category’s cultural and consumer orthodoxy Looking at women’s health from the outside: We used semiotic analysis to prioritise visual and linguistic patterns in marketing communications and in culture at large, as well as conducting ethnographic immersions with women (including their partners, families and friends for a 360 perspective). Here, we identified the dominant and emergent themes in relation to women’s health and wellbeing, to generate truly new thinking and unlock the future potential of the women’s health landscape. What women’s health looks and feels like: We completed an analysis of the competitive landscape in pharmaceutical branding online, in print and in packaging, as well as conducting interviews with healthcare professionals such as GPs and gynecologists. This allowed us to recognise the macro and micro shifts taking place, i.e. where the category was headed and how to lead it into the future to ensure Pfizer’s brand communications both align with the consumer mindset as well as being able to differentiate itself. Stage 2. Unearthing the ideological opportunities and applying cultural tactics Stretching and developing cultural and consumer expressions: Adjacent categories unearthed further opportunities into the future of women’s health. For example, an analysis of fashion/visual culture at large as well as anti-aging, beauty and personal care such as ‘Cosmoceuticals’ allowed us to see conventions of youth and aging. Stage 3. Crafting a brand and innovation strategy Downloaded from warc.com

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Getting a sense of the future: Discourse analysis and interviews with experts allowed us to shape the final brand strategy in line with both big and small trends revealed to us by experts across gender studies, health academics, fashion journalists, entrepreneurs in female-focused businesses, alternative healthcare practitioners, advocacy professionals such as social workers, as well as service & technological innovations in healthcare, publishing, etc., to understand what consumers’ future expectations would be. INTEGRATING “CULTURAL” AND “CONSUMER” INSIGHTS IN WOMEN’S HEALTH TO DEVELOP BRAND INNOVATION IN EUROPE The integration of both the cultural and consumer perspectives - using our three stage framework - provided us with a holistic understanding of women and women’s health. It was this combination of newer qualitative techniques such as cultural analysis and more conventional techniques such as interviews, immersions and ethnography that enabled us to complete our circle of consumer understanding and enabled us to establish several important emerging macro trends taking place across Europe. In addition to this we identified several micro shifts that were equally impacting women’s attitudes towards health. For the purpose of this paper, we have included a summary of some of these shifts to give you a flavour for what we found and how they could be provide new directions for Pfizer in both product and brand innovation. Several examples of macro shifts taking place in women’s health across Europe 1. Achievement: “From restricted roles to multiple avenues”. This relates to the widening of roles for women, which is creating more avenues for achievement. l

Self-fulfilment through work is being replaced by self-fulfilment through a life-long journey of self-discovery of which work and sharing knowledge are a key part.

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Appearance is portrayed as the key to success – more emergent models of achievement involve celebrating the role of older women as the pillars of society.

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Age and achievement are viewed differently depending on if you are a baby boomer expecting a comfortable retirement or a younger citizen wary of an uncertain future.

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Later years are now seen as an opportunity to continue the journey of self-development rather than rest on one’s laurels.

The opportunity: Pfizer needs to find products and services that support women in achieving their life goals. (See figure 5.) 2. Confidence and Sexuality: “From constrained by age to enhanced by experience”. Older women are being celebrated for an energy and attractiveness based on age and experience. l

Sexuality is changing from being a political issue closely associated with self-empowerment to being more about individual self-fulfilment through sensual pleasure.

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Older women are increasingly portrayed as predatory, giving them an agency and set of individual needs lacking in the previous predominantly objectified images of women. Downloaded from warc.com

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As the age hierarchy is flattened an attractiveness based on depth of experience is seen as equally valid to one based on frozen youth.

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Older women are reclaiming sexuality from younger generations and reconfiguring their look into something attractive but age appropriate.

The opportunity: Pfizer needs to support women in their desire for attaining this age-based beauty. (See figure 6.)

FIGURE 5 An example of how this macro shift regarding ‘achievement’ is evolving in Sweden, from women playing a supporting role to continuing their self-development.

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FIGURE 6 An example of how this macro shift in ‘confidence and sexuality’ is evolving in France, from women being forever young to become a force of age. 3. Health: “From binary health to wider wellbeing.” The concept of health is expanding to a more holistic understanding of what being healthy really means. l

From an appreciation of the multiple methodologies of holism to a focus on the cellular energy underpinning everything – whilst scientific, it is almost metaphysical.

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Health is changing from being perceived as a state of physical perfection achieved through hard work, to about broader well-being underpinned by sensory pleasure.

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Women’s health was previously framed in terms of a duty towards aesthetic health for civic (i.e. men’s) pride, but is becoming a political issue linked to women& rsquo;s equal wellbeing.

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From health underpinned by a pure nature extracted by science to a wellbeing supported by a responsive and intelligent nature giving the body exactly what it needs.

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The opportunity: Pfizer needs to enable women to be and feel healthy in multiple areas of their lives. (See figure 7.)

FIGURE 7 An example of how this macro shift in ‘health’ is evolving in Spain, from health being something that is hard-earned health to more of a multi-sensory feeling of wellbeing. 4. Illness: “From discreet silence to open conversation.” The silence is being broken and women are becoming more open about living with illness. l

The polite ‘cosmetic reality’ of health campaigns is giving way to the ‘harsh reality’ of illness and disability.

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Big public personalities are breaking the silence on illness and imperfection – creating empathy and solidarity between the well and unwell.

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Moving from an acceptance of illness to an appreciation of the role of appearance and aesthetics in wellbeing.

The opportunity: Pfizer needs to help break taboos and support women to live openly and healthily with illness. (See figure 8.)

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FIGURE 8 An example of how this macro shift in ‘illness; is evolving in the UK, from mainstream acceptance to medical aesthetics. 5. Authority: “From top-down and impersonal to networked and responsive.” Women are more empowered to direct their own healthcare as top-down authority is eroded. l

The acceptance of a top-down, one-size-fits-all system is giving way to a desire for a more responsive and personalised care.

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Responsibility for health lies heavily on women’s individual shoulders, however digital networks are forming and they are starting to connect, support and care for each other.

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Top-down authority is giving way to a more distributed and networked expertise that enables women to deal with the saturation of contradictory information.

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A single model of what it means for women to be in control of their body is giving way to multi-faceted, multicultural models.

The opportunity: Pfizer must support women in making better choices for themselves but also help HCPs manage more Downloaded from warc.com

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empowered patients. (See figure 9.) 6. Reproduction: “From social norms to scientific intervention.” Science is giving women the ability to bend biological and social norms to their needs. l

More openness around contraception ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology) via the proxy of international celebrities who enable a public discussion without upsetting the old order.

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Recognition of the difficulties combining career and motherhood and an increased focus on older pregnancy as a result.

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Women are too exhausted to have it all and are selecting and rejecting the aspects of motherhood they desire based on personal preference not social expectation.

The opportunity: Pfizer needs to help women manage their reproduction in ways that are beneficial to their overall wellbeing. (See figure 10.)

FIGURE 9 An example of how this macro shift in ‘authority’ is evolving in Germany from perfect precision to designed compliance

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FIGURE 10 An example of how this macro shift in ‘reproduction’ is evolving in Italy from traditional family to progressive woman. CREATING BRAVE NEW COMMERCIAL ANGLES FOR PFIZER Whilst the new products and services Pfizer currently have in development - as a result of these macro and micro shifts we identified – are confidential and have not yet been accurately monetised, we believe the wider strategic implications of our work speaks powerfully to this future impact and has already increased Pfizer’s brand value, both culturally inside the organisation and externally as Pfizer has become a more consumer facing company. The insights from our integrative and broader approach - going beyond consumer based research to include cultural insight and a unique framework for analysis – could not have been gained through consumer dialogue alone. All of these outcomes established for Pfizer have been drawn out of our focus and exploration into the unconventional parts of culture, helping us to unearth opportunities that have helped Pfizer build breakthrough brands and move their business forward in a way that will provide better health solutions to women. There are three significant outcomes for Pfizer which have not only changed how they do business, but also how women will be changed as a result of our work. Outcome 1: Informing Pfizer how to message women across Europe and Canada Downloaded from warc.com

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The results from this project have been used to inform the women’s health brand teams about their end users and feed into the development of their strategic plans such as businesses, products and services to be purchased or developed to support and create a more relevant portfolio. Pfizer is now working on its ‘female Viagra’ amongst many other innovative products. Pfizer stakeholders now have a concrete understanding of how ‘women as health consumers’ need to be communicated to, both from a strategic and conceptual positioning and at an executional, granular level. These insights have helped Pfizer reach way beyond what is currently inside women’s heads, to innovate truly new and leading ideas that cannot only bring women forward in health, but also as human beings and their role in society. Outcome 2: Challenging how all pills are launched globally and restructuring the organisation Our findings have really challenged the organisation to simply look beyond ‘how do we launch a new pill into this market?’ This is a major cultural shift internally for Pfizer. A Women’s Health Strategic Platform team has also been established to take the insights from our work and initiate future business opportunities. The research continues to have a long and important life within the organisation and is now also being used globally as the benchmark in terms of approach and depth and diverse level of understanding required to properly assess business opportunities in this space. Outcome 3: Creating cultural change with women and also with Pfizer By completing the consumer circle of what women want, and understanding how these wants are shaped, Pfizer has also successfully reorganised itself to take advantage of significant revenue opportunities as well as maximising sales from its existing brands and future products for increased profit. HOW INTEGRATING CULTURAL AND CONSUMER INSIGHT CAN HELP BRANDS BECOME “ICONIC” By leveraging these cultural and consumer insights, brands such as Pfizer are able to develop the status of becoming a cultural brand icon. There is much evidence of this with brands such as The Body Shop, Dove, Whole Foods, Starbucks, Nike, Method and Marlboro, to name a few. For example, Starbucks made use of new cultural capital codes of authenticity, meeting the consumer need for a more aestheticised and sophisticated food culture (i.e. the high-end Italian espresso bar experience), whereas – to take a more historical example - Marlboro created an ideology of working-class frontier masculinity, this met the consumer backlash against the new “organisation-man” (Cameron and Holt, 2010). Both of these brands leapfrogged the weary orthodoxy of their categories and were able to profit from cultural innovation. Consumers came running and the brands became iconic. HOW CULTURE CAN INFLUENCE THE FUTURE OF BRANDS AND MARKET RESEARCH As culture now plays a much more important role in consumer life and we as market researchers need to understand how that life is shaped and is changing, we may find ourselves spending more time in malls, high streets, market stall and boutiques Downloaded from warc.com

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the shopper haven and delight – as this is becoming the new playground for research. Culture becomes a powerful resource for brands Culture now also provides the source material that can be taken advantage of by brands. As Stephen Brown, a postmodern marketer, claims in Brand Culture, “Cultural artefacts such as art, literature and media representations generally – can provide more meaningful insights into contemporary consumer society than traditional tracking studies, questionnaire surveys or laboratory experiments.” All of this can be utilised to create meaningful identities and strategies for brands. This is particularly important as consumers have become much more reflexive and eclectic in how they use brands; creating self-image through unique consumption patterns of mixing and matching as well as subverting and co-creating their own messages and responses. Again, culture becomes an even more relevant resource for brands who are very much this bridge and at the interplay between art and business, production and consumption, images and stories, design and communication (Salzer-Morling and Schroeder, 2006). Brands can therefore become the purveyors of cultural capital, tapping into and utilising this shifting landscape to give consumers a relevant ideology they can use to create their own meaning. McCracken states: “Every manager is a de facto meaning–manager” and culture now provides the missing link and source for how this can be done. CONCLUSIONS: THE WAY FORWARD FOR INTEGRATING CULTURE INTO CONSUMER RESEARCH As an industry of market researchers, giving advice to businesses and brands, we must also evolve to reflect this shifting role and importance of culture – especially as it is an extension of the qualitative toolkit we use today. Where previously we needed to learn how to be interviewers and moderators, to make sense of data, and to communicate effectively with people, we need to now cross fertilise our skills further and become more like cultural historians, sociologists and literary critics. Ultimately, we need to foster the ability to understand how meaning and aesthetic expression functions in the marketplace, and how this can be used to build brand equity, strategy, innovation and all importantly, value. There are five key aims for market research: 1. Market research should take commercial ownership of the cultural marketing space The “third space” of insight can no longer be ignored or merely used in a superficial way to draw distinctions between markets, but must be brought into the fold to become a key part of market research. At the same time it should not be seen as a narrow methodological specialism, but an intrinsic part of our everyday jobs. 2. Market research should capitalise on the gap between management intention and consumer response Cultural insight has become the rich and fertile ground for unearthing opportunities and creating brand innovation. This is also the gap between tick box managerial models, emotional propositioning and consumer response focused research. These approaches are typically centred on cognitive psychology and often lack context, history or an inspiring view of the future.

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Yet it is through our understanding of the cultural ideology of a category or context – when integrated with consumer centric research - that we are able to develop brand strategies that are truly disruptive and create profound change to businesses, brands and the bottom line. 3. Only market research can integrate cultural and consumer perspectives to understand key drivers and brand opportunities Our project with Pfizer demonstrates the value of integrating cultural and consumer perspectives, using a three stage approach to provide a holistic understanding of the drivers influencing and shaping women’s health. We can think of nobody better placed than qualitative market research to integrate these perspectives. By identifying the big, macro shifts, alongside the smaller micro movements, we were able to develop opportunities for brand innovation across Pfizer’s portfolio of products and services. This also includes fundamentally changing how Pfizer organises itself around its marketing activity and guiding priorities for the future development of new medicines and therapies. 4. Brands should focus on the expression of cultural consciousness, rather than slices of consumer mind-share It is no longer good enough to hope to gain consumer attention through emotional benefit fixation. Instead we have to tap into the cultural collective consciousness, allowing consumers to extract value from brands, helping them to use this for their own purpose of crafting unique messages about themselves. This is a subtle but very specific distinction, and is about positioning brands in such a way that they become cultural artefacts that do things to people, rather than being simply objects that people buy. 5. The third space is the cultural playground we need to integrate with consumer research As marketing and brand strategists, we can learn a lot from the cultural experts and need to spend time with journalists, media spokespeople, filmmakers, sociologists, novelists, museum curators, editors of magazines, to name a few. We can also engage with activities such as visiting fashion exhibitions and art galleries, reviewing new technology and simply just paying attention to the world outside of research. If we ensure we are as interested in what goes on around the consumer as we are in the consumer herself, it will pay dividends. It is this diversity and integration of what is going on around consumers as well as what is in their heads that will enable us to recognise and access the relevant emerging shifts taking place, ensuring we are able to create new opportunities for brands and, essentially, drive brand value to create enduring brand icons. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Truth and Pfizer would like to thank our colleagues who made a valuable contribution to this research. Truth: Brendan Bolger, Gabrielle Ackroyd, Kahlia Pyle and Marian St Laurent. RELEVANT READING Bauman, Z. (2011): Culture in a liquid modern world. Polity Press, Cambridge. Cameron, D., Holt, D. (2010): Cultural Strategy using innovative ideologies to build breakthrough brands. Oxford University

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Press, New York. McCracken, G. (2009): Chief Culture Officer. Basic books, New York. McCracken, G. (2005): Culture and consumption II. Indiana University Press, Indianapolis. Miller, D. (2010): Stuff. Polity Press, Cambridge. Rapaille, C. (2006): The Culture Code. Broadway Books, New York. Salzer-Morling, M., Schroeder, J. (2006): Brand Culture. Routledge, New York. Tomasevic, L. (2011): Why Cultural Stuff Matters. ESOMAR RW Connect, London. Tomasevic, L. (2010): Cultural insight is marketing's untapped resource. Research, London. THE AUTHORS Julie Curphey is Brand Team Leader: Viagra; EuCan, United Kingdom. Andy Dexter is Head of Truth, United Kingdom. Leanne Tomasevic is Managing Director, Truth, United Kingdom.

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