the ipsos mori · ipsos mori almnac 2013 6 7 contents 176 it ain’t what you see, it’s the way...

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The Ipsos MORI

Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

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Contact Ipsos MORI+44 (0)20 7347 3000 [email protected] www.twitter.com/IpsosMORI www.facebook.com/IpsosMORI

Contents

08 Foreword Ben Page, Chief Executive Ipsos MORI

12 2013: let down or lift off? by Ben Marshall, Research Director Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

18 U-kip if you want to by Gideon Skinner, Head of Political Research Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

24 The perils of perception by Bobby Duffy, Managing Director Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

30 The economy and the public – what next? by Gideon Skinner, Head of Political Research Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

38 A right royal rebirth by Roger Mortimore, Director of Political Analysis Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

44 Scotland will decide by Mark Diffley, Research Director Ipsos MORI Scotland


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Contents

96 The Brits aren’t coming: Syria and the legacy of Iraq

by Tom Mludzinski, Deputy Head of Political Research Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

102 The new individualists? by Suzanne Hall, Research Director

Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

108 Are you a closet Big Data virgin? by Claire Emes, Head of Digital Research

Ipsos MORI

114 In the moment mobile research by Phil Shaw, Director

Ipsos ASI

120 The High Street is dead. Long live shopping!

by Stephen Yap, Head of MarketQuest Ipsos Marketing

124 The 40th anniversary of the mobile phone by Tom Cross, Research Manager

Ipsos MediaCT

130 The rise of the tablets by Sarah Gale, Head of Insight

Ipsos MediaCT

50 There’s no such thing as society: the Thatcher years

by Roger Mortimore, Director of Political Analysis Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

56 The NHS at 65 By Anna Quigley, Research Director

Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

62 Looking back to look ahead to 2014 by Ines Nadal, Head of Trends and Futures

Ipsos MORI

68 Public services surprise by Ben Page, Chief Executive

Ipsos MORI

75 The trouble with numbers: an interview with Nate Silver

by Ben Page, Chief Executive Ipsos MORI

84 What’s the best city in the world? by Simon Atkinson, Assistant Chief Executive

Ipsos MORI

90 We think more than behavioural economists think we do

by Oliver Sweet, Head of Ethnography Ipsos UU


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Contents

176 It ain’t what you see, it’s the way that you see it: the ads we watch in 2013

by Keith Glasspoole, Director Ipsos ASI

183 End notes

187 Some of our favourite infographics of 2013

136 Motherhood is not universal by Victoria Guyatt, Deputy Head of Ethnography

Ipsos UU

142 More than just the tip of the iceberg by Deborah McCrudden, Managing Director

Ipsos ASI

148 How to be brands and influence people by Gareth Jones, Director

Ipsos ASI

154 Employee myths and workplace realities by Jonathan Nicholls, Head of Employee Research

Ipsos Loyalty

160 The Business Elite: the secret to their success

by James Torr, Head of International Syndicates Ipsos MediaCT

164 How to turn your reputation on its head – let your people be real

by Milorad Ajder, Managing Director Ipsos MORI Reputation Centre

170 Being innovative with innovation: how do businesses keep up with change?

by Joe Marshall, Head of Ipsos InnoQuest Ipsos Marketing


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The much maligned public sector managed another year without meltdown, despite large reductions in some areas

– for example 35% in local government over this parliament. So far public perceptions of a host of services have held up well, with potholes in our roads being the number one result of austerity for most people. Users of services for the elderly

– a tiny minority – are most critical, but most of us say we have not really noticed any changes so far, despite being worried about the years of cuts to come.

Our adoption of new technology marches on – the mobile phone is now middle-aged at 40, and SMS messaging is 21. In a year where most British have a smartphone or tablet, we look at how we’re using these technologies in 2013 – and how this will change in the next few years.

Some things don’t change. One is our respect for certain key British institutions. If trust in Parliament is in decline, our respect for the Monarchy, and love of the NHS, both of which were again celebrated in 2013, are holding up well, and we explore their prospects here. For some, the Monarchy’s future now looks more assured than that of the NHS.

Finally, how human beings make decisions and our biased perceptions about the world around us are two of our favourite topics. One of the problems for anyone running this country is the fact that we tend to focus, helped by our media, on things that worry us. As we explore here, the British massively over-estimate the number of teenage pregnancies, the amount of crime, and think a quarter of the population are Muslims. As Nate Silver tells us in this edition, most people are poor at numbers of all kinds (we

Forewordby Ben Page Chief Executive Ipsos MORI

Welcome to Ipsos MORI’s 2013 Almanac. As usual we’ve brought together a spread of statistics and analysis as the year closes. The British are far more cheerful than at the start of the year, when 61% still expected a double-dip recession. During 2013, concern about the economy has gradually receded, and is now the lowest it has been since Spring 2008, before the crash. But while the public and most commentators now agree that a recovery is happening, the debate has moved to what kind of recovery, with record levels of public concern about poverty, low wages and the cost of living.

The shift in debate helped Ed Miliband and the Labour party recover some of the ground they lost in 2013 – as we go to press they are six points ahead of the Conservatives, but still a halving of their lead in January/February, with UKIP a wildcard for the Conservatives.

Foreword

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Foreword Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

found the British almost rejoice in this). Inside we look at why most decisions we make are unconscious, and what all this means for anyone running a business, developing new products, producing marketing or advertising.

Last year I ended this note saying “most of us are too pessimistic about the future of the country”, and if anything, I think 2013 confirmed that. The key question is what sort of country we want to be – and we will be exploring that in 2014.

All the best

Ben Page, Chief Executive, Ipsos MORI [email protected]

Society

2013: let down or lift off?by Ben Marshall Research Director Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

We began 2013 with fears of triple-dip recession and a post-Olympics and Jubilee hang-over – what was there to look forward to? Some 61% of the British thought it likely that the UK economy would fall back into recession. By autumn, public sentiment had shifted completely – the year has been better than many expected in all sorts of ways, and the underlying debate is not will there be a recovery, but what sort of recovery, and who will benefit?

The public still feel positive about the Olympics’ continued impact on the mood of the nation, on sport, the economy and Britain’s international reputation. Some 70% think we continue to benefit from the Games. We maintained the sporting feel-good factor through another successful summer with victories for Andy Murray at Wimbledon, the Lions, Chris Froome in cycling and Mo Farah on the track, and kept the Ashes – even leading some pundits to suggest

2013: let down or lift off? Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

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that 2013 matched or bettered 20121. Boris Johnson cheekily suggested that his pre-Olympic prophesy of a baby boom had come true, as Britain experienced the highest birth rate for forty years2.

Many were cheered by the sixtieth anniversary of the Coronation and the birth of Prince George. Our polls showed high support for Britain remaining a monarchy, close to the record levels recorded during last year’s Jubilee celebrations. Our global study of the best cities in the world found London second in a league table of major world cities. Other reasons to be cheerful, challenging stereotypes, included evidence that young people are behaving better – for example, the number who have used drugs has halved since 19983 – and that we are happier at work than before the downturn4. We even had the best summer weather since 2006, although it did follow a long, harsh winter and autumn storms that battered Britain.

Official statistics showed a fall in crime5 and our July Issues Index recorded the anxiety about it at the lowest level in over 20 years. In January, 38% of the British public had thought similar disturbances to the riots of August 2011 were likely. Despite the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, and attempts by the EDF to inflame the situation, nothing happened to match the conflagration of two years ago.

Another crime which hit the headlines was arson by Mick and Mairead Philpot which led to the death of their six children. The trial briefly became a political issue, with some commentators and politicians saying that the case epitomised the failings of the welfare system. While the

linking of this tragedy to the welfare system was criticised in some quarters, certainly, most of the British public think that the benefits system does not work effectively and, at the point of national roll-out, our polls found the Government’s benefit cap to be popular. Attitudes towards welfare are, however, neither fixed nor uniform across society, as shown by the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS) and our own ‘Generations’ analysis. In 2013 BSAS found softening attitudes to unemployment and welfare payments, following years of declines in support for welfare. This comes in the early stages of the implementation of a substantial programme of welfare reform and BSAS authors describe public attitudes as ‘thermostatic’, changing in line with government policy and spending6.

While the economy is improving, several other crises have emerged to fill its place, including the ‘housing crisis’ and above all, the ‘cost of living crisis’. Most people now agree there is a housing crisis in Britain and that something must be done about that and household bills.

In our research this year we have observed just how fragile some dimensions of day-to-day life can be. This observation is further supported by the inclusion of the new, and appropriately titled, classification ‘precariat’ in the Great British Class Survey7, a social group consisting of people whose lives are difficult because they have little or no job security and few employment rights. Spending time with a selection of families across the country we were able to observe financial fragility and its emotional and relational impacts, as well as the resilience of families. Our work for the London Food Board found 44% of families reporting


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they had cut back on fresh fruit and vegetables and 9% of children saying they sometimes or often go to bed hungry. More recently, there is evidence of a growing demand for food banks8.

Although, three-quarters of adults are happy with their lives9, but by a margin of six to one they think that the country is getting worse as a place to live. There are likely to be multiple facets to this, but the many misperceptions British have of their own country probably don’t help. Allied to this perceptions gap is a credibility gap; this year we found further evidence of the distrust the public have of the political elite.

Otherwise, there were some signs of significant socio-cultural change. For example, emboldened by polls showing public support, MPs passed legislation allowing gay marriage, something unthinkable just a few years ago. The public said no to military action in Syria, and Parliament listened.

But perhaps one of the most substantial contemporary trends relates less to who we are and what we think, and more to what we own. Digital technology continues to push possibilities and change behaviour (‘meshing’10, the process of using one form of media to enhance the experience of another, surely being a candidate for verb of the year), but there are downsides too and ‘trolling’ (another candidate for verb of 2013) also made headlines.

What next? 2013 has not seen lift off, but neither has it been a let down. Austerity is still biting, but the recovery is apparently underway, albeit playing out very differently across Britain,

both geographically and socially (one American banker has gone so far as to say “London is a great city with a crap country attached to it”). And while Britons are more bullish about the economy than they were, household budgets are tight and people remain downbeat about social progress. Compared to the underlying picture in 2012, things really are getting better, but what next? Will we see a further hollowing out of the middle classes as recovery’s gains go to the wealthiest, as in the USA, or will a rising tide lift all boats? We’ll be watching.

To get in touch with Ben, please email [email protected]

U-kip if you want toby Gideon Skinner Head of Political Research Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

U-kip if you want to Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

U-kip if you want to Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

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Six in ten (61%) UKIP supporters are men, making them the most ‘male’ party. UKIP also has the oldest age profile of any of the four parties, with 58% of their supporters aged 55 and over. Older people are, of course, an important group to court as they actually bother to vote, unlike the under 30s.

Whilst they are particularly dissatisfied with the government and with David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, they love their own leader. Mr Farage receives higher approval ratings from UKIP supporters than any of the other leaders do from their own party’s supporters.

They are not just obsessed with Europe. By far the most important issue for UKIP supporters is immigration: 70% name it as one of the most important issues facing the country, more so than supporters of any other party, and more than the number that say the economy is an important issue (44%). Only one in five (20%) UKIP supporters name Europe/the EU as an important issue – albeit more than other parties.

Despite having a good year in 2013, UKIP still have some way to go if they want to become a serious force in Parliament. In the last few months of 2013, support for UKIP appears to have tailed off, falling back down to 8% in November, still higher than their 2012 average, but 8 points off their peak.

Three in four (73%) people think UKIP are different to the other parties (which helps their position as the outsiders), but just 14% see them as fit to govern. The public has little idea what their position is on key policy areas such as the economy, crime and the NHS: their relative strengths lie mainly on immigration and Europe.

In last year’s Almanac we said it is rare that a single event such as a ‘gaffe’, a single speech, or one announcement has a lasting impact on the polls. Yet there did appear to be one ‘game-changer’ in 2012 – the ‘omnishambles’ Budget, and its subsequent unravelling, saw Labour opening and maintaining a significant lead over the Conservatives last year.

This year we’ve seen a number of trends emerge with the potential to have a significant impact on the political landscape including the development of UKIP as a political force in British politics.

UKIP received just 3.1% of the vote at the 2010 General Election and have no MPs. In 2012, they averaged around just 4 to 5% in Ipsos MORI polls. This year, however, they have averaged 12% – peaking at 15% in April – and have been ahead of, or equal to, the Liberal Democrats. In February, UKIP came second in the Eastleigh by-election and in May, at the local elections, the BBC’s calculations estimated that UKIP’s performance was equivalent to 23% of the vote nationally (compared to the Liberal Democrats’ 14%, Conservatives’ 25% and Labour’s 29%).

So, who are UKIP’s supporters and where have they come from?

Despite UKIP Leader Nigel Farage’s assertion that “we’re not just a protest collection of Tories from the shires” almost half (45%) of UKIP supporters (those who say they will vote for UKIP in an immediate general election) did in fact vote Conservative in 2010. They also tend to be in Conservative held seats, largely in the Midlands and the South of England, though not London.

9% of children (equivalent to 74,000)

in London said they sometimes or often

go to bed hungry

U-kip if you want to

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Next year’s European Parliament elections provide UKIP with an opportunity to build momentum. Success in mid-term elections is no barometer for success in subsequent general elections – winning just the one seat in Parliament will be a big enough task for the newest force in British politics. But even should they lose every seat they contest at the general election, the votes they draw from the other parties may have a crucial effect on the result.

Who will win in 2015? No sensible pollster will tell you that now, but all the signs point to a very close finish. The part UKIP will play in the final act adds an extra layer of uncertainty in the already unknown waters of coalition politics in Britain.

To get in touch with Gideon, please email [email protected]


Ipsos MORI interviewed 522 children aged 8-16 and 522 parents of children aged 8-16 in London on behalf of the London Food Board. The interviews were conducted face-to-face, at the home of respondents, between 28th February - 9th March 2013. Findings are representative of the child and adult population in London in terms of gender and social class. http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/publications/1585/Child-Hunger-in-London.aspx

The perils of perceptionby Bobby Duffy Managing Director Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

One of the reasons why politicians have such a hard time leading the British may be that the public are often wildly wrong about what the country is really like, as we showed in a survey for the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London earlier this year.

We think one in four of the entire population is Muslim (5% in reality). We believe 31% are immigrants (the official figure is 13%). We have an extraordinary view of teenage girls, believing that on average 15% under the age of 16 get pregnant each year (0.6% in reality). We think £24 out every £100 of benefit spend is claimed fraudulently (it’s actually 70p). We think crime is rising (it’s been falling for years). We’re also more likely to pick out foreign aid as a top item of expenditure than state pensions (we spend nine to ten times more on pensions).

The perils of perception Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

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The scale of our errors is startling – but this isn’t particularly new: similar patterns have been seen in other surveys. So the more interesting questions are why these massive misperceptions arise and what, if anything, can we do about them? When we present these results at any conference, someone in the audience will immediately shout out that the reason for these apparent misperceptions is ‘the Daily Mail’. But it’s more complicated than that.

I’d group the explanations into four. First, there are simple measurement and definitional problems. It’s difficult to get across what can be quite complex and precise issues in simple survey questions.

The public are also not always thinking about the things we think they are, or as precisely. For example, when we ask

people what they were thinking of as benefit fraud when they guessed at its scale, they select things that can’t be counted as actual fraud. In people’s minds, it includes claimants not having paid tax in the past and people having children so they can claim more benefits.

Second, there are a whole range of cognitive errors and biases, simple mistakes humans make when answering these types of questions. This includes problems of statistical literacy – for example, we just struggle with very big or very small numbers, and find it hard to distinguish between rates and levels.

Third, there is certainly an impact from media coverage and political discourse. The links are complex and difficult to prove, but the association between attitudes and media coverage on key issues is often strong. Of course, the media also reflect our concerns and tastes for types of information: to a large extent we get the media we want. The focus on vivid stories rather than straight facts is because we pay more attention to those vivid stories ourselves (we admit we rely on personal experience and information from those around us more than representative data).

Which leads onto the fourth key explanation – that these misperceptions may be an effect of our concerns rather than a cause. That is, we overestimate crime or immigration partly because we are worried about these things, rather than being worried because we believe we know their full extent. Academics call this ‘emotional innumeracy’: we’re making a point about what’s worrying us, like crime or teenage pregnancy, whether we know it or not.

Source: RSS/Ipsos MORI 2013; Census 2011, NOMIS; 2011 Census, Population and HouseholdEstimates for England and Wales (July 2012) ONS; Families and Households, 2012 (November 2012)ONS. Base: 1,015 British adults aged 16-75

...Actual

We have a very odd view of our populationOut of every 100 people in Britain, how many do you think are:

Single parents

Muslim

Unemployed

Black or Asian

Aged 65+

Christian

...Mean public estimate

28%

3%

24%

5%

22%

8%

30%

11%

36%

16%

32%

59%


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corrective: the more those using statistics badly are pulled up, the less likely others will think the risk is worthwhile.

All these steps will always struggle to get to a key part of the problem. There are many instances where a piece of information provided by politicians or the media may be perfectly factually accurate, but vanishingly rare. The vivid anecdote is often the only thing people remember. This is part of the reason why ‘myth-busting’ exercises alone are likely to have very limited impact on perceptions.

But we can engage people with a mix of fact and stories. We regularly run deliberative workshops on tricky policy issues where information is provided, experts give evidence and the public have time to reflect on things they don’t normally get the chance to. We find their views often do shift. This serves a useful purpose in its own right, if it means policies are based on what a more informed public thinks.

But it’s obviously not very practical to get the whole population in a workshop for a day or so. However, new communication technology does provide easier ways to do this. It won’t be as cathartic and will only reach a subset, but online mass deliberations by independent organisations (say, the BBC) could play its part in improving our currently ill-informed debates.

Just don't expect a public epiphany soon – we’ll be living among many thousands of phantom pregnant teenagers for some time yet.

To get in touch with Bobby, please email [email protected]

A variation on this is seen in an excellent experiment by Yale Professor Dan Kahan. He presented the results from two (made up) experimental trials to groups of Republican and Democrat supporters of varying mathematical abilities – a neutral trial on whether skin cream cleared up a rash and a politically-charged one on whether gun control reduced gun crime. With the skin rash data, the more numerate were more likely to get the right answer. But with the gun control data, the more numerate supporters of each party were actually most wrong – in the direction of their pre-existing beliefs. Better numeracy alone is a poor guard against motivated reasoning11, which we are all susceptible to.

What we decide to do about public misperception depends on which of these effects we think are mostly to blame. The boring, but probably accurate, answer is that it’s likely to be a bit of each, so we need a range of responses. In particular, we need to avoid a convenient conclusion that because our misestimates are partially a reflection of our concerns, we shouldn’t even try to correct them. That just leads to a vicious circular argument that perceptions are reality, even when they are plainly wrong.

We do need to improve statistical literacy – which is as much about improving our confidence to question both statistical assertion and anecdotes as improving simple maths skills. This needs to start in schools, with more use of real-life data rather than abstract problems. Alongside this, we need to continue to challenge the misuse of data by politicians and the media, through bodies like the UK Statistical Authority and FullFact. Of course, this will have a limited direct impact on public perceptions, given it is working against the weight and habits of the media and political rhetoric. But the aims of these bodies are at least as much preventative as

The economy and the public – what next?

by Gideon Skinner Head of Political Research Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

Since 2008, any discussion about the state of Britain has had to start with the economy. It dominates the public mood: for 62 consecutive months it has topped Ipsos MORI’s monthly Issues Index of the major concerns of the public. The media

What do you see as the most/other important issues facing Britain today?

Economy

Change since Oct 2012

Race relations/Immigration

Unemployment

NHS

Inflation/Prices

Education/Schools

Poverty/Inequality

Crime/Law and order

Pensions/Benefits

Housing

Source: Ipsos MORI Issues Index, Base: 975 British adults 18+, 11th-21st October 2013

The economy is still the top issue facing Britain

44%

36%

32%

25%

19%

18%

15%

14%

11%

10%

-8

+15

0

+6

+2

+8

+4

-4

+2

0

The economy and the public – what next? Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

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diverse as the IMF15, the CBI16 and NIESR17 have all raised their forecasts for UK economic growth. Taking a world view from the Ipsos Global @dvisor survey, while other western European countries such as France, Italy and Spain remain very downbeat about the strength of their economy, there are some signs that the mood in Britain is beginning to pull away.

So, does that mean that the government can now be more confident in their own position than 12 months ago? Well, after a year following the ‘omnishambles’ Budget in 2012 when Labour and the Conservatives were neck and neck on managing the economy, the Conservatives have now opened up a clear lead. Furthermore, and perhaps just as significantly, after the first eight months of the year when the Conservative vote share was stuck stubbornly around the 30% mark, they then spent two consecutive months in the mid-30s.

focus on it constantly and our politicians struggle to take control of the issue. Look at the claim and counterclaim over whether or not household disposable income is rising12 which, as an aside, is unlikely to do wonders for the public’s already shaky confidence in statistics (revealed by Ipsos MORI, the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London earlier this year, which Bobby Duffy explores elsewhere in this issue).

2013 saw this debate change, and become not just about whether the economy would improve, but instead about how much any recovery would benefit average households, with the ONS showing no rise in real wages since 200313. How this argument develops in the public mind will play a key part in determining the result of the 2015 general election.

Let’s start out with the big picture. Early this year, it was looking in a pretty sorry state. The post-Olympics feel-good factor had evaporated, and nearly half of us expected the economy to get worse. Taking a global view, Britain had been bumping along in the relegation zone of economic pessimism for a good three years. Since then, though, there has been a remarkable turnaround. Ipsos MORI’s Economic Optimism Index rose in every month between April and September, to reach its highest level for four years. According to our Halifax Housing Market Confidence Tracker, expectations of price rises in the housing market are now at their highest for over two years.

And this reflects what is happening in the real world. The latest ONS figures showed GDP growth of 0.8% in the third quarter of 2013, the highest since 2010 and the third quarter of positive growth in a row14. Meanwhile, organisations as

Source: Ipsos MORI Political Monitor. Base: c. 1,000 British adults each month

How economic optimism has risen in the last year – and increased the Conservatives’ leadon economic competence with it

-70

-60

-50

-40

-30

-20

-10

0

10

20

30

Economic Optimism IndexConservative lead over Labour as best party on managing economy (+%)

2010

3 31 1

5

1813

10

2011 2012 2013


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Again, this has a clear political dimension. While the Conservatives have a lead on the best party on managing the economy, Labour has struck a chord with its focus on the cost of living. Ed Miliband’s announcement of a freeze on energy prices was the single most popular policy to come out of the 2013 conference season (also giving a boost to his own personal ratings). When asked which party would make your own family better off, neither party has a lead – this battleground is still to be won.

There has been much quoting of Ronald Reagan’s famous question in the 1980 US Presidential debate, “are you better off than you were four years ago?”, as relevant to the outcome in Britain in 2015. But as in any research, we have to ask what does this question mean? Before you answer the

But of course, this is only one side of the story. If all politics is local, then so is some economics personal. There, the picture is not quite so rosy. It’s pretty hard to overestimate the impact the economic downturn has had on the national psyche: over half of us think that the recession has been so tough that Britain will be weak for years to come, while the old assumption that our children will have a better quality of life than us has been overturned. Two in three of us are worried about the effect of cuts to local council services on our families in the next 12 months, which is an increase in unease from the beginning of the year, while our financial capability research for the Money Advice Service18 highlighted a number of concerning trends:

52% feel they are struggling to keep up with their bills and credit commitments (up from 35% in 2006)

42% would have to think about how to cover an unexpected £300 bill

Those who say they have money saved for a rainy day has fallen from 75% in 2006 to 62% now

36% have experienced a shock to their finances in the last three years

Source: Ipsos MORI/British Future, Base: 2,515 online British adults aged 16-75, 23-27 November 2012

56%The recession has been sotough that Britain will be weakerbecause of it for years to come

31%Even though the recession has

been tough, Britain will bestronger when it gets through it

We expect the impact of the recession to last a long time

Source: Ipsos MORI Political Monitor, Base: 1,004 British adults 18+, 12th -15th October 2013

...best for me personally

An energy bill freeze was the most popular policy coming out of the party conferences

A freeze on gas and electricity prices for 20months

A freeze on petrol duty for the next 18 months

Raising the income tax threshold so thatno-one earning the minimum wage paysincome tax

Free school meals for all children aged undereight

A government scheme to guarantee mortgagesfor people buying a home with a deposit between5% and 20%

25 hours of free childcare per week

...best for the country

62%

50%

56%

44%

40%

44%

29%

41%

23%

33%

22%

33%

29% of Britons describe the current economic situation in their country as ‘good’ which is less than the Germans (68%) and Chinese (65%) but more than the Spanish (4%) and the Italians (5%)

The economy and the public – what next?

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question ‘is the economy improving?’ we have to ask do you mean ‘my economy’, or ‘the country’s’? The answer may well be different depending on whether the public are thinking of the latest national GDP figures or their perceptions of the amount of money in their own back pockets. Whether people focus on national growth and stewardship of the economy, or simple disposable income, will go a long way to determining the public’s mood in 2014.

To get in touch with Gideon, please email [email protected]

Source: Ipsos Global @dvisor 50: The economic pulse of the world October 2013. The survey is conducted monthly in 24 countries via the Ipsos Online Panel system. A total sample of 18,083 adults aged 18-64 in the US and Canada, and age 16-64 in all other countries, was interviewed between October 1st and October 15th 2013. Approximately 1000+ individuals were surveyed in each of Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United States of America, and c. 500+ individuals were surveyed in Argentina, Belgium, Hungary, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden and Turkey.

A right royal rebirthby Roger Mortimore Director of Political Analysis Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

Professor of Public Opinion Institute of Contemporary British History King’s College London

A right royal rebirth Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

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A right royal rebirth Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

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In our business, we have to be very suspicious of ‘interesting’ results – public opinion is actually relatively predictable (even if the predictability is sometimes limited to knowing that the opinions themselves are volatile). Sudden or dramatic changes to the pattern of things, unless there is a very clear reason for them, are more likely to indicate that something has gone wrong with the measurement than that public opinion has really flipped. So, when we have measured attitudes to the same question regularly over forty years, and got the same answer (within the margin of error), our natural reaction if we suddenly get a poll eight percentage points out of line is to scratch our heads and wonder what has gone wrong.

Yet this was exactly what happened in 2012, and none of us even blinked because we didn’t have any difficulty at all in believing that the change was real. In 1993 when MORI first asked the British public whether they favoured keeping the Monarchy or having a republic instead, 69% said they preferred the Monarchy and only 18% a republic. That 18% support for a republic was the same level as Gallup had found back in 1969 when they asked a similar question (the first time, as far as we have been able to find out, that any polling company did so). Between 1993 and 2011 we asked the same question 21 times in polls, and every single time, bar one, we found that support for the Monarchy was at 72%, plus-or-minus 3%, and support for a republic at 18%, plus-or-minus 3%. But in our poll in May 2012, suddenly, support for the Monarchy touched 80%, and in our three polls since then, carrying the trend through into 2013, it has been 77%, 79% and 77%.

The reason, of course, is not hard to find. In 2011, Prince William married his princess. In 2012, the Queen celebrated

her Diamond Jubilee (and capped an already triumphant year by appearing with James Bond to lead off the London Olympics). In 2013, the birth of a son to William and Kate inspired a further wave of interest in, and affection towards, the Royal Family, and potentially secured the future of the Monarchy for a further generation. At the turn of the year we found that the Royal Family is near the top of the list of things that people say make them feel proudest to be British (and three in five Britons say that “I would rather be a citizen of Britain than of any other country in the world”, so national pride is not, by any means, a negligible force).

The Royal Family has received a continuous wave of positive media coverage in the past couple of years, but possibly just as important has been the opportunity afforded by these great occasions for the people themselves to publicly express their support for the Queen and for the Monarchy. Even without opinion polls to reduce it all to numbers, nobody could easily mistake the national mood of the past couple of years.

How different from the mid-nineties when the momentum seemed to be with the anti-monarchists, press coverage was almost universally negative and, numerous though they were, royalists punched far below their weight in terms of visibility and doubted whether the Monarchy could survive much longer. That loss of confidence has its own effect on public opinion. People who feel their views are unfashionable, or are losing ground to those who think differently, become more reluctant to express them and perhaps eventually lose the courage of their convictions and change their minds altogether. Conversely, a clear majority view that is so publicly in the ascendant,

Britons gave Prince Harry as much

chance of getting engaged in 2013 as

NASA finding life on Mars

(20% vs 19%)

A right royal rebirth

42


as has been support for Britain’s royal traditions in the last couple of years, will tend to make converts. The increase in support for the Monarchy that our polls have found in 2012 and 2013 is exactly what we would expect in the circumstances, notwithstanding the apparent immovability of the trend in the previous decades.

But what happens next? There is no doubt that personal affection and respect for the Queen (who scored 90% satisfaction ratings in polls last year) play a huge part in bolstering support for the Monarchy. For the future, there is a significant minority (35% in July) who say they think that, when the time comes, the crown should skip a generation, with Prince Charles giving up his right to the throne in favour of Prince William. That is not going to happen. Many, too, favour ‘modernising’ the institution: two-thirds, for example, want Prince George to have ‘a normal job’ before taking on full-time royal duties. (On the other hand, only three in ten think he should be sent to a state school – but does that say more about the public’s view of the Royal Family, or their view of state schools?) What may be crucial here is that support for the Monarchy is, as it always has been, lowest among the young. But it is also among the young that William and Kate, as well as Prince Harry, are most popular, and support for the Monarchy has been rising among young people just as much as among their older counterparts. If this generation of young Royals can continue to appeal to Britons of their own age, and a few years younger, that is the best guarantee that support for the Monarchy will continue at levels that will ensure its survival long enough for William, and eventually George, to succeed.

To get in touch with Roger, please email [email protected]

Source: Ipsos MORI Political Monitor 1,015 adults aged 18+ across Great Britain, 12th - 14th January 2013

Scotland will decideby Mark Diffley Research Director Ipsos MORI Scotland

Scotland will decide Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

Data taken from MORI and Ipsos MORI polling(1999-07 data taken from Scottish Social Attitudes Survey)

0

10

20

30

40

50

60 Introduction ofthe poll taxin Scotland

Devolutionreferendum

Support for independence – a long term trend

1978 1990 2000 20101980 2013

Devolutionreferendum

SNP formminority

SNP formmajority

EdinburghAgreement

ScottishParliamentopens

Ipsos MORI: Scottish Public Opinion Monitor, Base 1,000 adults 16+, 9th – 15th September 2013

25%May not vote

8%Are undecided

11%May change their vote

Around 44% of voters areuncommitted or undecided

Scotland will decide Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

46 47

debate. There are two reasons why we should be cautious about predicting the referendum result too early. The first is that there are still a large number of Scots who remain uncommitted about whether they will vote at all and who are unsure about whether to vote ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. The headline figure from our most recent poll on independence shows the proportion of undecided Scots among those who will definitely turn out to vote is 10%, broadly in line with previous surveys. But, if we add those undecided voters to those who tell us they may change their minds before September 2014, and those who tell us they are not certain to actually turn up at the polling station, then the picture changes, with around 45% of voters either uncommitted or undecided.

Our polling suggests that nationalists need to convince the vast majority of the undecided/uncommitted population to vote ‘Yes’ next year in order to win the day. A tough call, but they do still have time on their side. What will help both sides of the debate to gain support is to concentrate their efforts on those uncommitted and undecided voters. Part of the challenge is in persuading people that turning up to vote on September 18th 2014 will actually be worthwhile. Half of young people (aged 16-24) tell us that they are not certain to vote, while the same is true for over a third of those not working and those who live in social housing. The

Next year sees Scotland decide if it stays or goes: it’s not currently at the forefront of the political dialogue in Westminster village, but the impact of the vote will be huge.

We have been polling Scots’ attitudes to independence for over 35 years and the long-term trend highlights the stiff challenge facing the SNP in achieving their dream.

As the campaigns prepare for the final months of persuasion and argument, that challenge appears as tough as ever. What is actually most noticeable is how little public opinion has shifted in 2013. From 30% in favour of independence in October 2012 to 31% now, and from 58% to 59% in favour of the union over the same period, it looks as if ‘No’ will win convincingly next year.

It would, however, be foolish to bet too much on the outcome. If a week is a long time in politics, then the next nine months in the Scottish independence debate may seem like a lifetime for those on both sides of this increasingly heated

80% of the British public

agree that there is a national housing crisis

but 45% disagree that new local homes

are needed

Scotland will decide

48 49


campaigns have a lot to do to convince them that voting is actually worthwhile.

Then there are those who will definitely vote but are either undecided or tell us they may change their minds. This accounts for around 20% of committed voters. These floating voters are more likely to be women, young people and live in the more deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland. As the campaigns become increasingly focussed on identifying and persuading undecided voters, this is where they will need to concentrate.

What might change people’s minds? The ‘Yes’ campaign will hope that the recently published ‘White Paper’, the blueprint for independence, will provide voters with the information they need about what an independent Scotland would look like and give them the confidence to vote ‘Yes’. Their opponents will hope it has the opposite effect. If 2014’s celebrations to commemorate the Battle of Bannockburn, the ‘Homecoming’ events and the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow can garner national fervour then nationalists will hope that will also persuade some floating voters. When we throw in the performance of the Scottish and UK economies and the run up to the 2015 General Election, then it would be foolhardy to attempt to predict the referendum result with too much certainty at this stage.

Independence may look unlikely as things stand – we’ll report back next December on what happened in the end – and why!

To get in touch with Mark, please email [email protected]

Ipsos MORI/ Evening Standard – Interviewing took place by telephone between 12-14 January and involved interviews with 1,015 British adults aged 18+. Data has been weighted to the known population profile. www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3129/80-per-cent-agree-UK-has-a-housing-crisis.aspx

There’s no such thing as society: the Thatcher years

by Roger Mortimore Director of Political Analysis Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

Margaret Thatcher, who died this year, was Prime Minister for the longest continuous term of office of any premier since the Great Reform Act. Any politician in power for such a long period will divide opinions, and Mrs Thatcher certainly did that, more violently perhaps than most. But one thing on which most of her supporters and her opponents would probably agree is that her years in Downing Street had a profound effect on Britain.

When she retired in 1990 as Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party, we found that 52% of the public thought that her period in power had been good for the country, although 40% thought it had been bad. But this was with the judgment of hindsight, for far fewer than 52% of the public had ever voted Conservative in general elections

There’s no such thing as society: the Thatcher years Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

51


52 53

while she led the party, and even when she was riding high in the polls (1984), those who said they disliked her policies outnumbered those who liked them by 54% to 41%. The passage of time has modified the overall positive judgment on her administration only slightly: this year, after her death, 47% said they thought her government had been good for the country, still just exceeding the 42% who were of the opposing view. Even of those who would vote Labour today, one in five credits Thatcher’s government with having had a beneficial effect; and of those of the public aged 55+, old enough to have reached voting age before she was first elected, a clear majority (53% to 43%) judge the effect to have been positive.

Probably it is the economic changes wrought in that period that are most vividly remembered, and more of us think that she would do a better job getting Britain out of its current economic crisis than any of the four PMs that have come since. (She was picked by 31%, well ahead of the 21% who picked Tony Blair, in second place – among Tory voters she was preferred to their current leader, David Cameron, by two-to-one.)

In her campaigning, Mrs Thatcher – helped by her speechwriters – was particularly adept at the use of the soundbite, a short and memorable phrase that encapsulated her key message and that would get her point across when only an excerpt from her speech was reported. Yet, ironically, the Thatcher soundbite that has probably been the most widely remembered has been a damaging one, a phrase taken out of the context in which it was used and which has entirely misrepresented the point that she was trying to

make: “There is no such thing as society”. Earlier this year, we decided to do an experiment which, as far as we know, nobody tried at the time: we read a sample of the public the whole paragraph in which that phrase was originally used, testing their reactions to it in the context in which Mrs

74%Disagree

16%Agree

“There is no such thing as society”

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements?

25%Disagree

63%Agree

Source: Ipsos MORI April 2013, Base: c. 500 GB adults 18+

“We've been through a period where too many

people have been given to understand that if they

have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with

it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the

government must house me.' They're casting their

problem on society. And there is no such thing as

society. There are individual men and women, and

there are families. And no government can do

anything except through people, and people

must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after

ourselves and then, also to look after our

neighbour. People have got the entitlements too

much in mind, without the obligations.”


54 55

Thatcher said it, in a magazine interview; as a control, a matched sample were simply asked their opinions of the phrase itself.

The results, as we had expected that they might be, were dramatically different: 74% disagreed that “there is no such thing as society”, yet 63% agreed with the longer statement and only 25% disagreed. While we would not suggest that the experiment was perfect (perforce, we had to ask respondents to listen to and absorb a far longer statement than we would normally use in a poll), it certainly offers food for thought. But much of the way the public receives and understands what politicians say is highly dependent on what they already think of them, and if Mrs Thatcher’s opponents took from the phrase “there is no such thing as society” a meaning that she did not intend to convey, it may have been partly because they were already attuned to supposing that this was exactly what she did believe.

In those later years of her premiership, Mrs Thatcher was very much the dominant personality in British politics, but it is interesting to remember that it didn’t start out that way. In the run up to the 1979 election (when MORI, as we then were, had just started to publish regular political polls), her opponent Jim Callaghan was better known, and better-rated by the public on a host of key image indicators, and well ahead of her on being considered the most capable Prime Minister. It was only when the questions compared the expected likely performance of a future Conservative and Labour government, rather than what the public thought about the leaders, that the ratings reflected the Conservative lead in voting intentions.

She came to be more widely respected – the month that the Falklands War was successfully concluded, three-fifths of the public were satisfied with the way she was doing her job as PM – but she was never widely loved. When we asked people whether they liked her or not, those who didn’t were always in the majority. That is reflected in our finding that these days only 39% agree that ‘I wish more politicians today were like Margaret Thatcher’, despite the larger numbers who think her period in office was good for Britain; 51% disagree we now need politicians like her, and indeed 35% ‘strongly disagree’. Good or bad in the 1980s, the world has moved on and our current politicians face new challenges in new ways; but our world is still one moulded by the Thatcher governments.

To get in touch with Roger, please email [email protected]

The NHS at 65by Anna Quigley Research Director Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

The NHS at 65 Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

The NHS at 65 Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

58 59

should be, while four in ten do not. At a time of austerity, they are aware that it is one of the areas of greatest spend for the government, but the vast majority want it protected from cuts – it is the sacred cow in government spending.

There is some recognition – and acceptance – that the NHS needs to change the way it delivers services. While roughly equal numbers agree and disagree the NHS is changing, there is wider acceptance (in theory) that moving more services into the community is a good thing. But the prospect of closing or ‘downgrading’ a local hospital is still one that has the power to get the public marching on the streets. As an example, around 40,000 people are said to have marched recently to ‘save’ services at Stafford Hospital, whatever the Francis report said about it.

We are also starting to see early signs that the public recognise that our relationship with the NHS may have to shift in the future. If resources are squeezed, it is possible that the public will become less willing to see the NHS spending its money on people with unhealthy lifestyles – the ‘undeserving unhealthy’. Already, two-thirds agree that it is the individual’s responsibility to look after their health rather than that of the NHS. Around half go as far as to say that the NHS should be able to limit the treatment it offers for free to people who do not take responsibility for their health (just one in three disagrees) – but of course, they may well feel very different if they or their family are one of those people!

So, at 65 years old, the NHS is at a crossroads. It’s normal to say this about the NHS, and we have generally muddled through, but the winters of 2014 and 2015 are going to be

At 65, the public love the NHS as much as ever, whatever the media may say. Almost half of the public say that it is what makes them most proud to be British, higher than the Royal Family or the Armed Forces. Around seven in ten say that the NHS is one of the best health services in the world. We’re generally happy with the services when we use them; two in three patients say they are satisfied with the NHS.

But simultaneously, the NHS is under scrutiny and under pressure (as is often the case). The NHS portrayed in the media recently is far removed from the treasured institution celebrated by Danny Boyle at the Olympics. Instead, in 2013 we have heard about poor standards, failing hospitals and missed A&E targets. There are signs that this is starting to enter the public consciousness; almost one in four people say that most NHS hospitals have problems similar to those seen in Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. This has yet to translate into a general perception of malaise, but we are seeing a rise – for the first time – in those saying the NHS needs fundamental change (up from 21% to 30% this year).

Can an institution set up in 1948 still provide the health service we need in 2013? When Aneurin Bevan embarked on “the biggest single experiment in social service”, we were a much less diverse and a much younger society, with lower expectations – which have risen massively since 1948.

The public recognise the challenge and they worry about the level of resources available, with almost nine in ten thinking that the NHS will face a severe funding problem in the future. However, opinion is more divided as to whether there should be limits on what is spent on the NHS – six in ten think there

46% of Britons say they are saving at least some money, which is above the European average

The NHS at 65

60


pivotal in terms of government credibility and possibly the credibility of the NHS itself. As with other public services, there are still huge savings that can be achieved, huge technological possibilities, but given pressures on public spending, these need to now be realised quickly. If not, the public will punish whoever they hold responsible if services tip beyond a certain point.

To get in touch with Anna, please email [email protected]

Europeans and the end of the crisis - Ipsos for Publicis - April 2013 Fieldwork for the Ipsos/CGI - Publicis survey was conducted online between 14 March and 7 April 2013. A total of 6,198 respondents were interviewed in six European markets: France (1,021), Germany (1,013), Spain (1,059), Great Britain (1,040), Italy (1,009) and Poland (1,056). http://www.ipsos-mori.com/newsevents/latestnews/newsitemdetail.aspx?oItemId=1406

Looking back to look ahead to 2014

by Ines Nadal Head of Trends and Futures Ipsos MORI

What will 2014 look like? As Nils Bohr famously said, “prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future”.We do not believe in predicting the future. After all, Philip Tetlock reported that after surveying 28,000 predictions by more than 280 experts, “a dart-throwing chimpanzee could have done as well”19. To us, the future should be treated as a set of possibilities, but in order to imagine the world we will live in, it is key that we look back at the past and understand the present. In that light, and thinking about the immediate future, here we have picked three key trends that shaped our lives in 2013 and what they could mean for 2014 and beyond.

If 2012 was finally the year of mobile, with smartphone penetration reaching over 50%20, 2013 has been the year of mobile moments. With the average smartphone user in the UK spending nearly two hours on their mobile device every day21, more and more consumers are using their phones to

Looking back to look ahead to 2014 Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

63

Looking back to look ahead to 2014 Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

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Up until now, most of the Big Data debate has looked at the value to companies of those enormous amounts of data and how that can give them a competitive advantage. This is starting to change as consumers demand ownership of their data and require companies to proactively offer them something in return for sharing their lifestyle information. In 2014 we will see brands using data to offer more valuable and personalised services to consumers, promoting a collaborative culture that puts the consumer at the centre of their business and moving away from a ‘Big Brother culture’.

Collaborative consumption (organised sharing, lending, swapping or gifting of products, goods or services) is hardly a new concept, but it has emerged as a strong force. This is driven by a number of factors including pressure on incomes, a demand for increased sustainability and a desire for simplicity and transparency. It is further fuelled by the unstoppable growth of mobile internet and social networks. With only 16% of the British24 now believing that success is measured in the things one owns, collaborative consumption can be a compelling alternative to the traditional forms of ownership.

Collaborative consumption not only gives people the benefits of having access to and enjoying goods and services at a reduced cost and with lower environmental impact, but more importantly it gives them power to negotiate on their own terms, cutting out the middle man. Zipcar and Airbnb are probably the best known examples of collaborative consumption, but in the past year we have seen many successful examples across different areas, such as

make the most of every single moment in all aspects of their busy lives, from helping them decide where to go, what to do, what to buy, often all at the same time. We can discover points of interest in a new city with Field Trip, anticipate wait times and find the best airport food with GateGuru, hail a cab from indoors using Hailo, get discounts as we walk into a store with Shopkick and even upgrade our seats while at a game with PogoSeat. We expect to see more apps to help us live life to the full in 2014. As we become used to a mobile-driven life, we are already starting to look for more integrated experiences that won’t even require us to take out our phones and launch an app. Wearable technology such as Google Glass or Smartwatches has the potential to take our mobile moments to the next level.

We have embraced this revolution, but that has come with a price; our privacy. After a year plagued with scandals such as the NSA surveillance report, people are becoming increasingly concerned about privacy. In the UK nearly 70% of people22 are concerned about how information being collected about them when they go online is being used by companies. There have been some movements aimed at encouraging consumers to embrace a ‘social sharing free’ life, or to create fake profiles on social networks to protect their privacy. There were also a large number of ‘virtual identity suicides’ and ‘social media holidays’ reported early this year, particularly on Facebook23 – but we have not seen a mass exodus from the online world. Instead, we are seeing consumers demanding more control of their data and wanting directly to benefit from the use of their data by companies.

The British are the most willing to retire one or two years later in order to help their country “overcome the crisis more quickly” (58% versus a European average of 41%)

Looking back to look ahead to 2014

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MeMeep, connecting people on the move to people that have things to move, Landshare, bringing together those with land to share with those who need it to grow food, or SpaceOut, connecting people looking for storage space with those who have spare room.

Finally in 2014, we expect to see big brands trying to get involved in this new economic model, based on trust and a sense of community. It might seem a contradiction, given the anti-corporate ethos of collaborative consumption, but there is a clear opportunity for companies to draw upon these values to get closer to and engage with consumers.

Most forecasts are wrong but we think these are worth looking at. For more trends go to www.ipsos-mori.com/trendsandfutures

To get in touch with Ines, please email [email protected]

Europeans and the end of the crisis - Ipsos for Publicis - April 2013. Fieldwork for the Ipsos/CGI - Publicis survey was conducted online between 14 March and 7 April 2013. A total of 6,198 respondents were interviewed in six European markets: France (1,021), Germany (1,013), Spain (1,059), Great Britain (1,040), Italy (1,009) and Poland (1,056). http://www.ipsos-mori.com/newsevents/latestnews/newsitemdetail.aspx?oItemId=1406

Public services surpriseby Ben Page Chief Executive Ipsos MORI

Public services continue to surprise. When budget cuts were first laid out three years ago, there were plenty of people forecasting that, by now, we would be seeing massive strikes and demonstrations – and earlier this year one of our surveys found 48% of people agree that ‘budget cuts have gone too far and threaten social unrest’. But when our very same survey asked people whether they had personally noticed a change in the quality of their local services, 65% said they had not (and indeed a quarter agreed with both statements!).

The level of satisfaction with some councils is even going up: 74% of people now say they are satisfied with the services delivered by Hackney Council, formerly the epitome of loony local government – a rise from 23% in 2001 and 53% in 2006.

That is quite impressive when you consider that the average local council will have seen its budget cut by more than

Public services surprise Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

69

Source: Ipsos MORI, Base: Base: Hackney Residents Survey all respondents (1,016). Fieldworkdates 5 January – 6 March 2013; Inner LB Residents Survey (1,153, 16+, face-to-face ).Fieldwork dates 18 April - 28 June 2011; 2011 Ipsos MORI National Capibus, (875, 15+ face-to-face).Fieldwork October 2011.

Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the way Hackney Council runs things? (% satisfied)

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

23

53

74

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

Source: Institute for Fiscal Studies, July 2013

Impressive reductions in spendingReal budget increase 2010–11 to 2015–16

International Development

NHS (Health)

Transport

Energy and Climate Change

Education

Defence

Total DEL (Departmental Expenditure Limit)

Home Office

Business, Innovation and Skills

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Justice

CLG Local Government

Work and Pensions

Culture, Media and Sport

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

CLG Communities

35.5%

4.2%

0.3%

-4.8%

-8.4%

-8.9%

-10.3%

-21.4%

-25.9%

-33.6%

-34.1%

-35.0%

-38.3%

-45.0%

-55.1%

-60.6%

Public services surprise Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

70 71

25%, after inflation, by the end of next year. The number of people working in local government has also fallen dramatically. Only DFID has seen major rises in spending (ironically the most popular department for cuts), with most departments experiencing major reductions, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis of UK government spending in 2010-2015 shows.

The pattern is similar across public services – satisfaction with the NHS has broadly held up, similarly with policing, parks and a range of services subject to real reductions. The public as a whole are most noticing a rise in potholes in the roads, and recipients of social care services are really the only group to express consistent views of deterioration. Why? As always there are a mix of reasons. One answer – favoured by the right – would be that there was even more fat to cut in the public sector and local government than people thought. Councils were spending money on a range of ‘nice to haves’ rather than ‘essentials’.

Another hypothesis – which politicians on the left might go for – is that public services have been good at concentrating cuts on a relatively small share of the population. On this view, the pain is there, it's just being not being felt by the majority – so far.

You can't cut spending forever without hitting the quality of services, but after a period of rising spending, you can certainly have a period of getting the same for less. Indeed, the likes of Hackney actually seem to be delivering more.

As last year then, the issue is what happens next. What managers responsible for public services know, but the

71% of residents think there are more potholes and damaged roads than a year ago

Public services surprise

72


public is only gradually getting used to, as headlines talk about the recovery, is that we are in for another decade or more of austerity and continued reductions in public services. Local government and the NHS are very worried about the next 24 months. No. 10 is worried about a possible winter crisis in the NHS – we saw a 31,000 rise in ‘excess’ (above trend) winter deaths last year, according to ONS, and two bad winters for the NHS might be enough to seriously damage the Conservatives in the run up to May 2015.

So as last year, one could say so far so good. The challenge is that the tipping point may be approaching. Then the public at large may soon need to start accepting bigger changes – and changing their behaviour quite dramatically in some cases. Either way, this is when things start to get very interesting indeed.

To get in touch with Ben, please email [email protected]

The National Highways and Transport Survey - Ipsos MORI received 53,676 questionnaires from a random sample of British adults across 70 local authority areas in England and Scotland between 2 July - 16 August 2013

The trouble with numbers: An interview with Nate Silverby Ben Page Chief Executive Ipsos MORI

The trouble with numbers Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013


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know, ‘On Bullshit’ – where it’s not that you’re lying, so much as you’re entirely indifferent toward whether you’re accurate or not.

BP: I read you as somebody who’s big on Bayesian statistics. Tell us about Mr. Bayes.

NS: So Thomas Bayes was an English reverend and kind of a pioneer in the theory of statistics, and – this was 250 years ago – his basic insight is something called Bayes’ Theorem, which is a simple algebraic equation. It says, first of all, you have a probabilistic view on the world – and it’s by the way not a metaphysical statement, it’s not saying the world is uncertain, it’s just saying our knowledge of the world is uncertain. The other thing is that it assumes you start out with a prior belief – a presumption or a bias – and you weigh new evidence against that.

BP: I guess there is still an element of subjectivity or judgement involved in the things you’re doing?

NS: I tend to see subjectivity as intrinsic to the way human beings view the world: we all have one narrow lens through which we perceive the shared ‘objective’ reality, and running hypotheses and experiments and making predictions is a way to verify whether our subjective view matches this reality, which is hard to do.

BP: I’m interested in just how good both ordinary people and decision-makers in business and in government are at dealing with probabilities.

Ben Page, Chief Executive of Ipsos MORI, interviews the writer and statistician Nate Silver for Tank Magazine, examining why meteorologists are better than economists, the best nights to go on dates, and why people are so bad at probabilities.

BP: Survey research is mostly about asking people questions and adding the answers up, and then trying to interpret what they say. Increasingly, it’s moving into passive measurement as well. You have become one of the aggregators-in-chief of surveys. What do you find most interesting these days? Are you going to try and forecast the US job market?

NS: Probably not! The evidence suggests that economic forecasts are not very good, and have not been getting any better.

BP: The meteorologists claim to be better than the economists.

NS: They are; the meteorologists are kind of the heroes of my book [The Signal and the Noise]. There are a few things that help: one is that we have a good physical understanding of the dynamics of the weather system, so they’re actually building a simulation of the atmosphere – it’s not really statistical. It’s been a success story where hurricanes now are forecast about 250% more accurately than 25 years ago. Hurricane Sandy was predicted almost exactly five days in advance. The sports gamblers are also very good. Part of it is that if you’re putting money on the line; it has a disciplining effect. A lot of people in American politics in particular are just pontificating – kind of like in the essay, you


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of this data is that it’s big, but it’s not structured. It’s about understanding, you know, when are you really in a data-rich environment, ’cause it’s not just the number of observations you have. The credit rating agencies in advance of the crunch had millions of observations on individual mortgages, but all from a period when housing prices were increasing. Part of the issue with social media metrics, for example, is you’re collecting data that’s only a couple of years old. Google had a product, Flu Trends, which is meant to look in real time…

BP: This is people typing in ‘flu’ and they can predict actual influenza cases.

NS: They say they can, but they considerably overestimated the flu in the United States last year. My hunch is, you build a model that accurately describes what search terms people were using in, say, 2008 to 2010, but people change their search habits. Now that you have Google auto-complete, that will suggest different queries to people than you might have had, and when people are typing on mobile phones you tend to have shorter queries, so that will change things. Three years is a lifetime in social media.

BP: We know people aren’t rational: Nudge [by Thaler & Sunstein] is very popular here, as it is in US policy circles, but what’s your advice to the average human being? Most people’s financial planning, for example, seems to involve them dying at about 70, when actually they should know it’s very unlikely to happen.

NS: People apply a lot of attention and a lot of bandwidth to where they’re going to go for dinner – and I’m a foodie, so I

NS: Yeah, people don’t have an intuitive grasp of that at all. They think if you say something is 80% likely to occur, it’s tantamount to saying it’s guaranteed to occur, when obviously it’s not. If you woke up every day and you had an 80% probability of not being stabbed, you wouldn’t survive very long. Those 20% outcomes occur quite a bit. If you follow sports as I do, or especially playing poker, where you’re on the losing side of that 20% enough, your intuition for probability is better. There were a couple of years where poker was my main source of income, and...

BP: You’ve stopped this now? You’ve found the blog is better, the writing is better?

NS: Well, the poker’s worse! In 2003 you had a kind of fat accountant slob named Chris Moneymaker, this everyman character – nice guy – who won the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. He’s an OK player, but basically got very lucky. And ESPN would edit out all the hands that he would lose or play badly. That deceived people as to how easy it was, so for a while there was a lot of dumb money in the poker economy – but now it’s gotten very, very competitive.

BP: People talk a lot about Big Data. To me, some of that is like – there was a great quote by a guy from Google about social media: “Social media is like teen sex: lots of people talk about it, lots of people look forward to it but when it’s finally achieved, most people are disappointed.”

NS: If you read the Harvard Business Review, every other ad is about Big Data. They’re pitching this as this magic serum: that’s always dangerous. The problem with some


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NS: I think you’ll move toward kind of a dual model where you have big, expensive telephone polls occasionally, and then polls that are done online at a higher frequency. In theory now, 90% or something of people access the internet regularly, whereas in the US, only 65% have a landline phone. So you’re actually missing a much larger universe without that.

BP: And what criticisms would you make of pollsters, just out of interest, if any?

NS: There’s this idea of having Democratic pollsters and Republican pollsters, which is inherently very strange…

BP: I went to a global meeting on immigration, and Americans were saying: “Yeah, I’m a pollster and I do polls in favour of immigration.” How does that work? The American situation is different than the British in my experience! There was a great piece – I think it was in an Ohio newspaper – ‘The Death of Facts’. It said, Facts has been ill for some time, but he finally succumbed during the 2012 election campaign: poor old Facts has gone! Does it feel like that to you?

NS: That is an American thing I think Republicans have. It’s not a very conservative attitude in fact, it’s quite radical and avant-garde to say that we can manipulate reality in the way that we want it, and there’s no absolute truth.

BP: Well, in the UK, pollsters – certainly the reputable ones – will be trying absolutely not to ask biased questions. The industry has a pretty good record of transparency and self-regulation.

don’t begrudge that entirely – but those heuristics don’t work as well for things like career or educational planning, where you have to be more detached. One thing we’re seeing now is that once you’re unemployed for more than about six months it becomes very difficult to find a job again. Employers begin to assume, “A lot of other employers have passed on this person, there must be something wrong with them”.

BP: So the advice is if you become unemployed, take any job, don’t wait for the right job? OK. Any other examples for people?

NS: There was a column I did in the Sun the other day – slightly embarrassing! But there’s a dating website called OKCupid that analyses a lot of data, and a couple of years ago we looked at which is the best night of the week to go out to meet someone. They looked at what percentage of people had updated their status to say, “I wanna get laid”, basically, and the percentage peaks on Wednesday night. We think the issue is that early in the week, people go out to drink; then Friday, Saturday everyone goes out with their friends, it’s kind of amateur hour. But Wednesday and Thursday… The headline of the Sun article was ‘Maths Can Be Fun!’.

BP: Very good! More seriously, in terms of governments’ use of data, in Britain – surveys are expensive, people are more mobile, there’s higher refusal rates – one current argument is that you could just move to using a whole load of databases of credit data, passive measurement data, official records, all sorts of other data, link it all together and you’d build a pretty good view of the population – what’s your view?

58% of the British public do not believe that crime is falling, when the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that incidents of crime were 19% lower in 2012 than in 2006/07 and 53% lower than in 1995

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NS: I think that’s true in general. In some ways, these are two very opposite functions: opinion measurement vs. opinion shaping, or manipulation, but that’s the way it’s going...

Nate Silver is an American statistician and writer who analyses sports and elections with considerable accuracy. He first gained public recognition for developing a system for forecasting the performance and career development of major league baseball players in the US. The accuracy of his November 2008 presidential election predictions – he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states – won him further attention. In April 2009, he was named one of The World’s 100 Most Influential People by TIME. In the 2012 United States presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, he correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states. His book, The Signal and the Noise, is a New York Times bestseller.

Ipsos MORI carried out 1,015 interviews online with adults aged 16-75. Fieldwork took place between 14th – 18h June 2013. Data are weighted to match the profile of the population.

For the first time, most of the world's populations live in cities. Rapid growth in air travel means even more people will be visiting them in the future. So where does the world want to live, visit or do business? Ipsos MORI surveyed more than 18,000 people in 24 countries early in 2013 to find out. The most striking finding from the Ipsos Top Cities research is that there are a handful of ‘superbrand’ cities. New York is the clear leader, but London and Paris, in joint second place, do very well indeed, chosen by large numbers of people as places they want to go.

But the world's public don't just think about America and Europe. The United Arab Emirates may be home to the tiniest fraction of the world's population, but punches far above its weight in terms of profile, as witnessed by Abu Dhabi's fourth place as somewhere to visit. Meanwhile, Sydney's claims to truly be a ‘world city’ are confirmed.

What’s the best city in the world?

by Simon Atkinson Assistant Chief Executive Ipsos MORI

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It's clear that the global public is quite discerning and knows the cities well enough to avoid having to make hasty generalisations. New York is the place to make money. Paris is the best place to spend it. But for us, the surprise star is Zurich, which beats all its rivals in being the place the world's public would most like to live. Some may wonder why? Clean, safe and green, but perhaps a little dull? True if you live in Paris, but if you are in smoggy Beijing, Mexico City or São Paulo, those virtues start to become all the more attractive.

London receives a global vote of confidence. It is a genuine all-rounder, appearing in the top five for each question, an achievement only matched by New York. If we restrict our focus to the young, it is London, along with New York, which is the most popular place to live for the world’s under-35s. And when we look at the views of the 11 European countries, London is the continent's most important city. Together with positive signs for the UK economy generally and in the wake of London 2012, this is both a sign for celebration by Boris Johnson and a prompt: what now needs to be done to ensure London continues to punch above its weight? Will all the people who want to move to London be welcomed or even housed?

Three hundred miles away from London, Paris will not be too downbeat. The capital of the world's most visited country (and our HQ) is the clear winner as the world's favourite place to visit, whether you live in Argentina, Australia or Canada. But Paris falls down on its reputation as somewhere to do business, and this will surely worry French policy-makers as they debate what needs to happen to get France's economy moving more quickly. Just 7% see Paris

as one of the world's top business locations. It is beaten by Washington, D.C., a city not normally associated with the commercial world, as well as Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing and Shanghai. Rome is in a similar position, with just 2% seeing it as a business centre, only a tenth the number who rate it a top place to visit on holiday.

At the other end of the spectrum are Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, which perform strongly as places for business, but are not seen as attractive places to live.

There are also questions to be asked in those cities which, despite their status, size, history and other attributes, have a relatively low profile, at least when looked at on the world stage. Cities in this cohort include Madrid, Istanbul (fieldwork was conducted before this summer's protests) and Bangkok. President Putin may be disappointed to see Moscow ranked alongside Brussels, in 31st place – if he wants more tourists he has lots to do.

Finally, there are the cities that are just not popular at all. Tel Aviv, Tehran and Karachi are anchored to the foot of the table, and barely trouble the scorer. Some will be surprised to see Budapest, Casablanca and Warsaw occupying the places just above them.

What of the future? Well, this is the first survey Ipsos has conducted of this kind, and we look forward to tracking our cities' progress, perhaps adding a few more (such as Dubai) to the field as well. One thing to watch will be the perspectives of different generations, and how they evolve. At the moment, there is a broad consensus between

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younger and older people on the best places for business and best to visit. But on the best place to live we have an entirely different pattern: for the world's 50- to 64-year-olds, it's Zurich, Sydney and Toronto which occupy the top three places. But among the under-35s, it's London, New York and Paris. Can London hold on to its top slot as this younger generation get older? Time will tell.

To get in touch with Simon, please email [email protected]

New York

Work

Rest

Play

Abu Dhabi

Hong Kong

Tokyo

London

Zurich

Sydney

London

Paris

New York

Paris

New York

Rome

London

Sydney

30

22

21

19

18

21

20

17

17

16

28

22

20

17

16

1.

NewYork 68

IpsosTopCities

2.

London 52

3.

Paris 52

4.

AbuDhabi 47

5.

Sydney 44

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The Ipsos Cities Survey was conducted on line in 24 countries around the world, during February 2013. A total of 18,147 people were asked three questions: “Based on what you have seen yourself, or heard about from others, which three cities in the world do you think are the best to...(a) do business in (b) live in (c) visit?”

We think more than behavioural economists think we do

by Oliver Sweet Head of Ethnography Ipsos UU

“We think far less than we think that we think”. The premise of behavioural economics is that we often act without thinking, and then try to justify or rationalise what we just did. In fact, we conduct around 95% of our daily lives on autopilot.

If someone throws you a ball, you catch it. You don’t think about it, because there is a ‘reptilian’, ‘System 1’, ‘instinctive’ part of your brain that kicks in. Making a cup of coffee every morning is the same – we do it on autopilot and actually remember very few details about how we did it.

The obvious researcher’s challenge is how to understand and interpret automatic behaviours when, as an industry, we’re focused on asking questions? As an ethnographer, I believe in the power of observation. Only by seeing what people are doing, and the ritualistic natures of some of these automatic, unarticulated behaviours, can we understand the importance placed on products, communications and even packaging (later on in this

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edition, my colleague Deborah McCrudden will look at how neuroscience techniques can help us better understand these seemingly innate System 1 reactions).

There are several models of behaviour that researchers use to understand consumer behaviour better – from Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 to Daniel Ariely’s Predictably Unpredictable or Professor Michie’s COM-B. Over the last few decades, the behavioural economists have opened our eyes to our own automatic behaviours.

But, most importantly, we then need to use behavioural economics to identify how we change these behaviours.

Most of our automatic behaviours were once learned. The first time we tried to catch a ball, we missed it completely, and the second time it hit us on the head. The first time we made coffee, we had to think about how to do it, as we did on the second and third occasion, until at some point we started to automate the process.

Many of our reported automatic behaviours broadly relate to how we would like to do things, even if we haven’t thought about them for a while. So if I tell a researcher my coffee-making routine, it may not accurately reflect my behaviour (and there may have even been a gorilla in the room at the time that I didn’t notice), but my description is not a million miles away from the truth. As researchers, we can learn from what people tell us, as long as we watch them as well.

Automatic behaviours can also be leveraged through communications. In 1989 Adamski, the DJ of the moment,

released a track called NRJ featuring a Lucozade bottle on the front. This was the start of quite a seismic shift for the Lucozade brand that historically had been associated with the drink that you consumed when recovering from an illness. Disrupting consumer perceptions of the brand by getting consumers to think of it alongside a provider of energy, potentially whilst in an elated mode and dancing, was the start of a slow shift for Lucozade from a convalescent drink to one associated with sporting activity. Here, the behavioural economists would point to the power of the messenger affect and salience.

Our brain will override our automatic functions with more reflective thinking when needed. Ever tried throwing someone a rotten apple? The person will automatically go to catch it, but then pull away at the last second because their rational reflective brain realises it is rotten and overrides the automatic urge to catch it. This is the point at which behavioural economics becomes behaviour change.

The tiny portion of brain power that goes into reflective thinking appears to be a safety net for some of the stupid mistakes the automatic brain makes. Finding ways of interrupting automatic behaviours means that we can prompt people to think in a reflective manner about the choices they are making. Try an experiment. Choose something that you don’t want to spend money on, or a food that you don’t want to eat too much of. Then create a prompt to make you think in a reflective manner – fold a piece of paper around your credit card, or wrap the cheese up in a tea towel in the fridge. The next time you automatically reach for your credit card or for the cheese you will think, in a rational and reflective manner,


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about whether you want to do it. You may still engage in the behaviour, but it won’t be so automatic.

The same works with products. When PG Tips changed their teabags from square to round, they interrupted the process of making a cup of tea; a process most British people do instinctively. It allowed consumers to think for a moment about the bag they had just pulled out of the box (it’s important that the box remained the same) and watch in a reflective manner how the bag fell seamlessly into the cup, sitting neatly at the bottom. Just like the first time they learned to make a cup of tea, they had a moment to think about how to do it. PG Tips learned this through observing what people were doing – making tea in a mug instead of a pot – and got consumers to think about what was happening in the moment. It was an innovation through marginal gains that disrupted one of the most powerful of the behavioural economists’ tools, ‘anchoring’.

Barclays have recently taken the opportunity to disrupt the otherwise automated process of ordering a new bank card, with a reflective moment where you can add your own photo to your debit card. This means consumers are actively choosing which ‘affect’ they would like to link to the tool for spending. They could either choose a loving picture of the family (encouraged by Barclays) or a picture of a new car that they want to save for. Lloyds TSB have added their own reflective element to all current accounts by offering an engaging budgeting tool that links to your account, telling you how much you need to put aside each week if you want to save enough to hit a target. Lloyds TSB are asking consumers to choose their own ‘default’ that would have previously been chosen for them.

Behavioural sciences have given us much better insights into how the brain is hard-wired. It highlights that most of our behaviours are carried out on automatic function, and offers us ways to change the automatic choices and miscalculations we make, to help ‘nudge’ people in the direction we want them to go.

In the public sector, changing ‘choice architecture’ is gradually becoming a mainstream way of thinking about consumer behaviour, as stretched services seek to encourage people to save more, pay fees on time etc. In the private sector, as behavioural economics develops and brands start to realise its application, a key challenge will be using the same approach to encourage people to change their automatic behaviours by introducing elements in marketing, communications and product innovation that induce more reflection and bounce people out of their autopilot modes in so many of life’s routines.

To get in touch with Oliver, please email [email protected]

The Brits aren’t coming: Syria and the legacy of Iraq

by Tom Mludzinski Deputy Head of Political Research Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

2013 was the year when the decision on whether or not to go to war – or to take military action as it is now referred to – was apparently made on the back of public opinion. Public opinion and the ‘concerns of constituents’ were invoked by many MPs in the parliamentary debate over Syria. The Prime Minister’s immediate reaction to the vote against taking action was to hand victory to the public: “it is clear to me that the British parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action.”

Earlier in the debate Mr Cameron had conceded that “public opinion was well and truly poisoned by the Iraq episode”. Looking back through the archives of Ipsos MORI polls before and after the ‘Iraq episode’ there is an apparent increase in trepidation among the British public about taking military action abroad, seemingly backing up the Prime Minister’s claim.

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Of course, no conflict is the same, and public opinion may differ based on a number of factors, such as historical and cultural connections with Britain; proximity; images played out in the media; the type of military action being proposed; the potential exit strategies; economic climate; national interest; motives and objectives; and the involvement of international organisations. Nevertheless, a comparison of public attitudes across a number of conflicts is revealing.

Looking back to 1991, there was a high level of support for the use of force against Saddam Hussein’s troops before the First Gulf War had begun. Three quarters (75%) of British adults supported the action, and high approval levels were maintained throughout.

Military action in Bosnia and Kosovo also carried popular support, with 52% supporting armed conflict in Bosnia in 1995 and 59% supporting air attacks. In 1999, the British public was strongly supportive of taking action in Kosovo with three quarters (76%) saying Britain was right to join NATO in taking action.

In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, around two-in-three (67% in October 2001) Britons supported Britain joining in military action against Afghanistan. However, by 2009 just four-in-ten (38%) believed the action to have been effective. So perhaps it wasn’t just Iraq that ‘poisoned the well’ – drawn out military involvement in Afghanistan has also played its part.

Public opinion on Iraq was complicated from the start. For many, support for taking action relied on UN approval. A

quarter of Britons – the most hawkish among us – supported Britain taking military action even if weapons inspectors did not find proof that Iraq was trying to hide weapons of mass destruction, and the UN security council did not vote in favour of military action. But support for taking military action rose to three-quarters (74%) if that proof was found and the UN voted to approve the action.

With the Libyan crisis in 2011 public opinion was split exactly in half on support for action. The crisis also revealed some conflicting attitudes among the British public. While six in ten (63%) Britons agreed the allied forces should try and remove Muammar Gaddafi, half felt we should not interfere in Libya’s problems. And despite some appetite to remove Gaddafi, there were worries about the financial cost, with eight in ten Britons feeling that we could not afford to get involved.

The Syrian crisis revealed similar anxieties for the British. While six in ten felt we should not interfere in Syrian affairs, there were concerns that doing nothing would be worse than taking action (40%) and that by not taking action we might be encouraging other countries to use chemical weapons (48%). There was also a real apprehension based on the fear of reprisal attacks, with almost eight in ten (77%)believing that taking action in Syria would encourage attacks on Britain and the West.

The lack of UN approval also played a role in the public’s reluctance to back military action in Syria. Just 6% supported action in Syria without UN backing, while 34% supported it if the UN were to approve. The involvement of international organisations perhaps also goes some

34% of the British public strongly support capping the total amount of benefits that any household can receive a year (a further 40% tend to support it)

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way to explaining higher support for action in some previous conflicts.

So, what damage did Iraq do to the public’s willingness to see Britain get involved in foreign conflicts? Only around one in ten Britons believe our global reputation was improved by the Iraq War and just 12% believe it made the world a safer place. Four in ten think we now live in a more dangerous world as a result of the war in Iraq.

Perhaps most telling is the way the British public view the role of our armed forces, with very few wanting Britain to be the ‘world’s policeman’ or the ‘guardian of liberty’. Ten years after the beginning of the war in Iraq, three in ten (31%) Britons now say British armed forces should intervene abroad when other people’s rights and freedom are threatened. But most are more isolationist, with 44% saying we should only intervene when British interests are directly threatened and a further 21% believing British armed forces should only be used to defend British territory.

The reluctance to back intervention in Syria does not mean the British public will never again support intervention. But bloody and uncertain conflict in Iraq (and austerity) has made the British think twice and is likely to do so for some time to come.

To get in touch with Tom, please email [email protected]

Ipsos MORI interviewed a sample of 2,017 British adults aged 16-75 between 31st May and 5th June 2013 on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions. http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3194/Benefit-Cap-popular-with-public-but-what-impact-is-it-having-preimplementation.aspx

The new individualists?by Suzanne Hall Research Director Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute

The idea that each generation is distinct in its outlook is almost as old as history and every generation believes it is unique. In Douglas Coupland’s landmark novel, one character says about his parents’ generation:

“Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we’re pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You’d last about ten minutes if you were my age these days.” Generation X, 1991

One of the most interesting themes in our research of the last few years has been noticing that big, aggregate changes in attitudes across our society are, when you break them down, actually a shift in views from one generation to the next. The proportion agreeing that the government should spend more money on welfare benefits for the poor, even if it leads to higher taxes, has halved over the past quarter of a century.

Breaking these headline figures down, it would be easy to assume that declining support for the welfare state is

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simply an effect of older generations, who believed in the collectivist ideal, being replaced by younger hard-hearted individualists who came of age in the Thatcher years.

To say that Generation Y are the new individualists, however, is to miss the story behind the numbers. Firstly, there has never been universal support for the modern welfare state as conceived by its architect, Sir William Beveridge. Even in 1942, in a country ravaged by war, one middle aged man told a Mass Observation researcher that “if people stand here for the trades unions putting this bloody Beveridge scheme across, they deserve to lose the sodding war”. In a survey commissioned by the BBC in 1956 entitled ‘Britain in Decline’, two in five (39%) believed that the British way of life was deteriorating and the most common reason given for this was ‘too much welfare state and care’ (followed by mass entertainment and American comics).

Evidence also points to the fact that, when it comes to spending priorities for welfare , Generation Y aren’t just thinking of themselves; half mention pensions as their key area for investment, the second most popular answer behind retaining child benefit. This is because spending on the elderly reflects their values – our research has shown that they are wedded to the idea that if you put in to the system, you should get something out of it.

However, the data does suggest that there is a disconnect between Generation Y and the welfare state. When it comes to spending money on the poor, our research suggests that this decline in support is driven by their disillusionment with the welfare system and how it works – views which are formed by, of course, what they learn from the media but also what they themselves experience. Right now, what

young people are experiencing are high levels of youth unemployment and, for those in work, wages that aren’t keeping up with prices. Generation Y are not feeling the effects of a functioning welfare system - so are perhaps less willing to spend any more on it.

How Generation Y answers this question is also contingent on how they interpret the term ‘poverty’. Talk to those from older generations, and they talk in terms of absolute poverty and hardship: “poor is if you go back to when I was a kid, when you used to see the kids coming to school and their backside was hanging out of their trousers, or they wore the same shirt all week, or if they had holes in their shoes”. For Generation Y though, poverty is more nuanced and for some, it’s their lived experience. Generation Y are much more likely to identify themselves as low income – three in five describe themselves as this, compared to a third of baby boomers. Of course, that they do so could simply be a reflection of the fact that, as they are younger, they have not yet progressed up the pay scale of their chosen profession and things may change in the future. But nonetheless, this colours how they see redistribution of income; it’s less about Robin Hood, and more robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Individualism and pessimism about the future may also be two sides of the same coin. For instance, when you ask the public ‘who do you think should be mainly responsible for paying for the care needs of elderly people living in residential and nursing homes’, Generation Y are twice as likely to say it is their own or their family’s responsibility than both pre-war and boomer respondents.

However, in our discussions with Generation Y it emerged that they felt that they would have to be responsible – not

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that they felt they should – because, in the main, their experience of welfare was having what they were entitled to taken away by the government, rather than it being protected. They therefore had no reason to believe that spending on the elderly would be any different and believed that making provision yourself was better than relying on an untrustworthy government for help and support.

This despondency about the future is also evident when we ask people ‘to what extent, if at all, do you feel that your generation will have had a better or worse life than your parents’ generation or will it have been about the same?’ Only two in five (42%) of those from Generation Y say they will have a better life, while three in ten (29%) expect it to be worse. Compare this with the pre-war generation: four in five (79%) believe their lives will have been better and only one in twelve (8%) worse than their parents.

Therefore, while it is perhaps not entirely true to say that it is thanks to the individualism of younger generations that support for the welfare state is waning, it does seem as though Generation Y face unique challenges and their needs aren’t being met by the help and support they’re provided with from the state. This, in turn, is causing them to turn away from it. Whether support for the welfare state will return if living standards remain under pressure is fascinating. Recent data suggests a small uplift - but it is also clear that the institutions founded the last time we really were ‘all in it together’ - World War Two, are going to have to change radically in the years ahead. How they change and their impact on society will affect all our lives.

To get in touch with Suzanne, please email [email protected]

Business and

Consumers

“Big Data is like teenage sex, everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it…”

Big Data has been ‘the next big thing’ for the last few years. It’s certainly BIG, not only in terms of the terabytes of storage space it can require and the myriad of opportunities it presents, but perhaps most noticeably in the number of people talking about it!

There is an assumption that Big Data is a Brave New World, but most models being used in practice are actually fairly basic, and they leverage techniques that have been in existence for years. We’ve been working with our clients to mine their data sets for well over a decade and have recently conducted a range of innovative studies for clients as diverse as Google and HMRC. In our work with HMRC,

Are you a closet Big Data virgin?

by Claire Emes Head of Digital Research Ipsos MORI

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changing. We wanted to understand whether location matters to mobile online use and, if so, what specific activities offer the optimal benefits. Over a 17-day period during the 2012 Olympic Games, we analysed aggregated and anonymised online mobile population data from a mobile operator’s customer base. We identified a group of Olympic attendees, then analysed their online activity over 3G whilst they were at the Olympic park (as well as three hours either side to understand any before and after effects). We compared against control locations and time periods to create benchmarks; analysing a total sample of 789,000 including both Olympic and non-Olympic attendees.

We were able to demonstrate and quantify that live attendance at the Olympics was linked to higher mobile online use. But we also found that those not attending also displayed changes in online mobile behaviour in reaction

for example, we created predictive models from a range of data sources to help understand the attitudes, needs and behaviour among 40 million tax payers. This provided HMRC with the tools to inform better communication strategies and services to drive desired behaviours, improve customer communications and save money.

But the subtle difference with Big Data is the depth and breadth of the information available. Big Data is about scalability and speed; it brings the opportunity to interrogate data from a much more diverse set of sources that could not previously be analysed with conventional analytical tools. This often leads to a focus on IT, infrastructure and algorithms – the rise of the machines! But human input is required to marry the art and the science. Market research is well placed to offer the analytics to extract value from these Big Data sets, but crucially also the narrative to help draw out and effectively communicate the story.

It does need a new breed of analyst or data scientist with a hybrid of skills: one who is prepared to invest the time and effort in getting familiar with (often) unstructured data sources and who is comfortable with an iterative and exploratory approach. Unafraid by the volume of Big Data, they use their understanding of the client’s business to separate the ‘signal’ from the ‘static’ and focus on the data that is of real value – drawing out valuable insights from what might appear to be ‘noise’ to an untrained ear.

These techniques were applied in an early project we conducted with Google where we set out to understand how our relationship with the internet out of the home is

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Indexed data. Data is aggregated and anonymised. Only sub-groups above 50 are shown. Total sample size for surveys on 20-23 July and 27-13 August was 30238. Source: Ipsos/EE UK smartphone activity analysis, 2012. Control locations: Westfield Shepherds Bush (London-shopping mall); Oxford Circus (London-city centre shopping); Camden (London - shopping and entertainment); Thorpe Park (theme park near London)

Smartphone visitors to bbc.co.uk at OlympicPark during 4th August 2012

Men’s Fours

Usain Boltwins 100m heat

Robson & Murraythrough to mixeddoubles semi-final

Women’s TeamPursuit

Greg Rutherford Men’s Long Jump

Jessica EnnisWomen’sHeptathlon

Mo Farrah10,000m


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to high profile events within a relatively fast 20 minute timeframe. This suggests an opportunity for advertisers to place messaging in real time to benefit from these usage peaks. We’re using the same approach to learn how people are using their phones in other situations, for example while travelling or shopping, providing us with valuable insight into show-rooming and ROPO (research online purchase offline) activity. We found that 7% of consumers at Oxford Circus, for instance, visit retailer websites on their mobile phones.

In other studies, we use video or passive meters (with respondent consent) to discreetly measure behaviour. This can be tracked over long periods of time; though beware. Passive data grows very quickly and is a lot easier to collect than analyse! On one project we are looking at one billion rows of data an hour. Our experience has demonstrated the benefits of passive measurement over traditional recall when measuring behaviour. For example, in one study we found people recall accessing the internet via their mobile three times a day but passive meters show it is actually four times that often. So, why bother asking people anything anymore? For a start, passive measurement is only accurate if we view the complete picture of behaviour, so if we’re interested in online activity, we need to be monitoring all the devices that someone uses and we need to be sure that they are the one using them (tablets, for example, are often a shared device). Further, only by asking can we truly understand why people behave the way they do – this is where we see value in combining server and survey data. In fact, our experience suggests that far from replacing survey research, Big Data raises as many questions as it answers.

There is another reason why market research is in a prime position to lead the Big Data charge. Collecting, analysing

Source: Ipsos MORI Political Monitor, Base: 1,004 British adults 18+, 12th -15th October 2013

Significant concerns about privacyIf you found out a company you are a customer with (for example your bank or your main supermarket) was doing any of the following, which if any, would make you seriously consider not using this company again?

Paying senior executives a large bonus/salary

Damaging the environment

Charging higher prices than competitors

70%

56%

53%Exploiting overseas workers

51%

Selling anonymous data about customers toother companies

49%

Failing to keep safe or losing my personal data

40%

and reporting on Big Data (especially behavioural data) requires serious consideration of individuals’ privacy. Customers say they are more likely to leave a supermarket or bank for selling anonymous data about them to a third party (56%) than they are if they damage the environment (49%) or pay bosses huge bonuses (40%). These concerns highlight the importance of transparency around what data is being shared and for what purpose. The research industry is well placed to address the weighty issues around privacy and data protection because anonymity and respect for the individual are core considerations in all aspects of our work.

So, don’t be intimidated by the term or fooled by the hype, as with many things, Big Data will come naturally if you find the right partner – who understands the issues – and the real challenges.

To get in touch with Claire, please email [email protected]

In the moment mobile research

by Phil Shaw Director Ipsos ASI

What would you say if someone offered you $3 billion for two years’ work? While most of us might give our answer from the Caribbean island we just bought, in November this year Evan Spiegel, the 23 year old founder and CEO of Snapchat, decided that Facebook’s $3 billion valuation of his company wasn’t enough and turned them down.

Cue much head scratching. Why did Facebook offer so much for an app that makes almost no money? Why did Spiegel turn them down? Was this a sign of a new tech bubble or a fair reflection of the potential of ‘in the moment’ mobile technology?

The concept behind Snapchat is very simple. Users can send photos or videos to each other’s phones and choose whether they can be viewed for between one and ten seconds, after which they’re permanently deleted. Facebook’s attempt to buy Snapchat followed its $1 billion

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acquisition last year of Instagram, another app that captures moments, in this case standard photos that can be shared with other users.

The ‘always on, always with us’ nature of mobile phones is facilitating many changes in behaviour, while enabling new companies to realise ideas that are challenging the ‘old’ internet businesses that originated on desktop PCs. It’s also creating new opportunities for research.

Historically, we’ve been limited to asking people about what they remember and relying on the varying accuracy of this recall. With mobile apps, we have a data collection tool in people’s pockets, enhancing our ability to connect with respondents when it’s relevant.

Ipsos ASI has developed an approach called Brand Shout, where we ask people to tell us about all their experiences with a set of brands over the course of a week. Respondents download our smartphone app and answer seven quick questions about the experience and take a photo. Each of these ’diary’ entries takes around 60 seconds and can be done even when they don’t have a 3G/4G or a wifi connection (data is stored and sent later).

These ‘experiences’ can range from seeing an advertisement to having a conversation about the brand, and can occur on-premise (in stores, bars, banks etc.), on social networks or in-home.

What do we learn? We learn how people react to brand touchpoints as they’re experienced. We don’t need to rely

on memory or risk post-rationalised responses. We find that people make different purchase decisions in-store when they are under time pressure, and can measure the extent to which people in bars are influenced in their choice of drink by their friends, bartender recommendations or their mood. These are things it’s very difficult to understand when a respondent is asked about them on a rainy Monday evening while they’re indoors answering questions on their laptop, days later.

We also learn a great deal about the immediate and emotional reactions to advertising and can run Brand Shout studies during the first week of a campaign to give realtime feedback that can inform current or forthcoming activity. Another advantage is that we gather all this information for competitor brands too and, by using smart-routing, can cover over 50 touchpoints for up to ten brands. Imagine trying to do that in a traditional survey…

The potential for mobile research is vast. Aside from providing ‘in the moment’ feedback, it also has other advantages:

• It fits young people’s digital lives – it’s increasingly tough to get young people to join panels and answer long surveys, whereas they find smartphone apps highly engaging.

• It allows us to gather multi-media responses including photos, videos, voxpops and sound that give more insight into real-life experiences.

• Mobile even has the potential to be more representative than online or face to face. In emerging markets, many

Dealing with immigration is the key to solving the economic crisis,

according to 55% of the British

public

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people have skipped online and gone straight to mobile. As our mobile research is not confined to being purely app based we can use simpler technology to survey people using basic phones in places like rural India and China, which is much more cost effective than sending interviewers to remote locations.

It also requires new disciplines. Surveys of more than seven minutes see rapid drop outs on mobile, and long image grids or multi-choice questions don’t work. We see this as a good thing. It forces us to be disciplined - to simplify and focus on what really matters and apply heuristic principles to cut out unnecessary questions.

Mobile phones now out-number people. Technology is giving us fewer opportunities to be bored and, in research, it’s giving us a lot of reasons to be excited.

To get in touch with Phil, please email [email protected]

Europeans and the end of the crisis - Ipsos for Publicis - April 2013 Fieldwork for the Ipsos/CGI - Publicis survey was conducted online between 14 March and 7 April 2013. A total of 6,198 respondents were interviewed in six European markets: France (1,021), Germany (1,013), Spain (1,059), Great Britain (1,040), Italy (1,009) and Poland (1,056). http://www.ipsos-mori.com/newsevents/latestnews/newsitemdetail.aspx?oItemId=1406

The High Street is dead. Long live shopping!

by Stephen Yap Head of MarketQuest Ipsos Marketing

For those of us who still indulge in the quaint habit, it’s hard to pick up a newspaper nowadays without encountering a story or opinion related to the future of the High Street.

In the UK, retail employs almost three million people and accounts for more than £300 billion of turnover, a third of all consumer spending. The High Street occupies a special place in British hearts – for generations it has been the focal point of our towns.

The omnipresence of chain stores, and in particular the massive expansion of the Big Four grocers, started raising hackles in the 1990s among critics who lament the decline of independent shops and the perceived homogenisation of the urban landscape. Protests against the opening of new supermarkets are still a regular occurrence; the massive buying power of national retailers is perceived by

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many to be unfair to suppliers as well as other retailers; the horsemeat burger scandal is still fresh in our collective memories. In a sense we are cognitively polyphasic about the big supermarkets - we use them and contribute to their growth and then bemoan the impact on small retailers and high streets - we want it both ways. But almost three-quarters (73%) of us believe that the High Street is in decline.

However, those aged 18-24 are considerably more optimistic (47% agree that the High Street is declining). Perhaps as they do not have memories of the past and the High Street’s heyday this is just the ‘new normal’. Young people today are as passionate about shopping as ever – 53% of 18-24s admit that they enjoy shopping (compared with a national average of 43% and just 35% for men). So are they just more open to a new and different definition of shopping?

Much is written about the ‘digital natives’, the new always-on generation who have never known a world without broadband or smartphones. Those for whom virtual spaces are as equally meaningful as physical ones are likely to embrace the possibilities afforded by online shopping, just as older or analogue people lament the closure of bricks and mortar stores and consider online to be more of a threat than an opportunity.

Some 29% of 18-24s enjoy sharing photos of new purchases on social networks, more than double the national average (14%), and 40% of 18-24s have indulged in the practice of ‘showrooming’ – using a smartphone to browse information about products and brands while standing in a store.

Not surprisingly, 18-24s lead the way in demanding free wi-fi in stores (49%, compared with 31% overall). The digital generation consume content and access social networks seamlessly across multiple screens, but are entirely comfortable mixing and matching virtual and physical retail, and indeed will sometimes experience both at the same time. The challenge for retailers is how to make physical stores attractive - as Apple has managed - and part of a mixed business of clicks and mortar. Successful retailers who look like they will be around for a long time - like John Lewis - do just that. Those who don’t marry digital and physical selling need to either be amazing places to spend time or get ready to be smaller.

To get in touch with Stephen, please email [email protected]

The 40th anniversary of the mobile phone

by Tom Cross Research Manager Ipsos MediaCT

7.30am – your mobile phone wakes you up. It reminds you that today is your friend’s birthday and provides you with a link to her Facebook page to send her a message. It informs you that until 11am it is going to be raining heavily so you make a mental note to take an umbrella. While you’re getting dressed you get a warning message telling you that the tube line that you normally take to get to work is down, and your mobile phone offers you an alternative route. Finally as you are making your coffee, it tells you that in order to make your 9.30am meeting you will need to leave the flat by 8.45am. The year? 2013.

It is striking to reflect on the 40th anniversary of the mobile - born on a spring day in 1973 when Motorola engineer Marty Cooper made the first known mobile phone call in New York. In the 40 years since that day, the device has evolved from a somewhat conspicuous plaything of a handful of yuppies in the 1980s to a situation where they now out-number humans on the planet. But if mobiles are middle-aged, they are only

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just getting into their stride: the most far reaching changes have come in just the last five years, with the increasing sophistication of the smartphone.

Our Technology Tracker shows 55% of the adult population in Great Britain now own a smartphone. This figure was 37% only two years ago. There is an increasing normality in using the device for things unimaginable to Marty Cooper in the 1970s. If you have lived in a city and taken public transport to commute to and from work for the last five years, the evolution will have been obvious.

Younger generations are growing up in a world where any information they desire is a swipe or two away. They expect content immediately and do not expect to wait. The smartphone has made this possible. The device, fused with the increasing popularity of social media, is encouraging a level of spontaneity in communication that is completely novel – and we are still learning to live with it. Handshakes evolved as a way of showing your right hand wasn’t carrying a dagger – and we still have some way before what is acceptable in text/online communication becomes ‘normified’. Nearly all of us have created indelible messages out there, somewhere, that we regret - and mobiles let us do it more easily than ever.

Mobiles literally are now our main communication device. This is particularly true for teenagers who are increasingly embracing instant picture messaging sites like Snapchat, and sharing ‘selfies’. Some 50% of the adult population are visiting social networking sites, and these social media users are more likely to be smartphone owners too. Among Facebook users 77% own a smartphone, rising to 90% of

Twitter users. Sites like Twitter and Instagram are designed with the smartphone in mind, given the immediacy that they encourage. As social media users continue to reach for their smartphone rather than their laptop, and 4G technology becomes more accessible, they will be the main way to look at the web.

As mobiles mature they will further embed themselves in our lives. They will be less a device simply for communication, and more a remote control for our everyday lives. Paying by mobile will be normal (they are already associated more closely with paying in emerging markets such as India and Africa), and will be synchronised with a multitude of devices, inside and outside the home. Smartphones are becoming our second memory, replacing notebooks, address books and encyclopaedias – a kind of ‘exo-brain’. Does this change us as people? Biologically, certainly not, but they will continue to change our behaviours in ways we can only begin to imagine.

To get in touch with Tom, please email [email protected]

28% of British Mums never imagined they’d visit a UK holiday camp before they started a family and 22% never expected they’d wear comfy shoes

Women feel they are at least as good as men on a whole range of characteristics, including leading a team (70%) and using technology (58%)

The Ipsos Marketing-Bounty poll interviewed a representative sample of n=1023 new and expectant mums across Great Britain between 17-20th December 2012.

Source: Women, Power & Money Wave 5, Seizing the Future. Ipsos for FleischmanHillard/Hearst Magazine. The study was conducted via quantitative online interviews during February 2013, among 1,008 women in the U.S. aged 25-69 with an annual household income of $25,000 or more. Wave 5 was broadened internationally, including some 750 interviews with women conducted in each country including the UK (n=761), France, Germany and China. http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3193/Women-Power-and-Money.aspx

Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

The rise of the tabletsby Sarah Gale Head of Insight Ipsos MediaCT

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Late last year, the Chartered Institute of Physiotherapy reported a significant increase in the number of people with shoulder and upper back pain. Dubbed ‘iPad arm or shoulder’, these increases were linked to the growing amount of time that we now spend glued to our smartphones and tablets.

However, this health warning did nothing to deter shoppers last Christmas from flocking to buy tablets for friends and family: ownership levels doubled, resulting in one in four British households owning a tablet by the end of March25. Ownership levels continued to steadily rise over the course of the year, to nearly 30% in the third quarter of 2013.

With one in three households in Britain now having access to a tablet, they are becoming a mainstream household gadget. But which groups are driving this growth? Although both men and women are equally likely to have a tablet, Ipsos MORI’s Tech Tracker (Q3, 2013) indicates that those aged between 35-44 and those who have children living at home are more likely than other groups to be tablet households, with ownership rising to nearly one in two of these groups. Families may also be tiring of sharing their precious tablets with each other, of having countless different apps installed and sticky fingerprints across the screen, as those with at least one tablet have the highest intention to buy another one.

But are we just substituting time that we might have spent on another device for time on a shiny new tablet? It appears not. Last year, Ipsos MediaCT worked with Google to examine how multi-screen consumers who owned smartphones, tablets and PCs, used each of their devices26. Using passive

data collection to measure what people were actually doing, we found that tablets account for around 16% of all screen sessions and, when we asked whether these sessions could have been carried out using a different device, we found that 10% of all sessions were unique to the tablet. So it would seem that tablets are adding to our online use, driving even more time online and supplementing rather than replacing other devices like PCs.

Tablets are becoming part of our domestic routine – used to supplement TV viewing, with nearly six in ten tablet users claiming that they use their tablet while they watch television at least once a week. Around half of people who use tablets during television programmes are using social networks such as Twitter and Facebook and around a quarter are shopping online. What is emerging is a new form of leisure activity where we are multi-tasking, commenting on TV programmes to our friends electronically, leading not to the decline of TV, but in fact, more interest in it. Our engagement is heightened if this activity is either triggered by or leads to an activity on our tablets and smartphones. For example, if a comment on a social network points to an interesting piece of content on television, or if we are compelled to comment on a programme on Twitter as a result of seeing it on TV, our engagement is likely to be higher.

So tablets are becoming a leisure device of choice for a large minority of the population and this is rapidly growing. We believe the future is likely to include some or all of the following elements:


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• Further expansion and domination in the market if a device emerges that combines portability with telephony and a screen large (or expandable) enough for clear content consumption. Whether this is a realistic wish list remains to be seen, but phablets (a cross between a phone and a tablet) and screens with a detachable keyboard are finding their way onto the market which may pave the way for flexible, foldable screens offering the same functionality as a tablet.

• An evolution of mobile data allowances and payment models with consumers receiving simplified data tariffs that allow us to use one provider across all of our devices including TV, continuing a trend we have seen of media convergence (BT offering football, Sky offering broadband etc).

• The use of tablets in business is likely to become more common, with tablets already being used to present wine lists or menus and to manage bookings in bars and restaurants. We are also likely to see more hybrid tablet/PCs, replacing laptops in offices.

• With the development of operating systems and cloud computing, consumers will be able to seamlessly switch between devices with zero impact on the content they are consuming (such as switching their gaming experience from smartphone to tablet with no interruption to game-play).

• More accessories being developed that link tablets to the world around us. We have already seen camera

lens accessories that allow us to improve the quality of a tablet camera and hardware that links a tablet to a musical instrument, allowing the tablet to act as an amplifier. But in the future, the tablet may be able to connect with sensors and tell you when the food in the oven has reached an optimal temperature or analyse data from medical devices to give health advice.

Whatever the future holds, it is likely that tablets – and their baby brothers, the smartphones – will help us to organise and control our lives, linking all the data we need, both professionally and personally, in ways we are only beginning to envision.

To get in touch with Sarah, please email [email protected]

Motherhood is not universal

by Victoria Guyatt Deputy Head of Ethnography Ipsos UU

“I’m thinking of having kids.” Say this to friends and colleagues and they will regale you with stories of vomit stained shirts in meetings, catfights in Mothercare, months of sleepless nights, not to mention the harrowing tales around childbirth... Yet the world over, there are babies and children. Everywhere.

The experience of motherhood varies dramatically across the world, and understanding it is vital for marketers and policy makers worldwide. Looking at our in-depth ethnographic studies in China, Indonesia, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya there’s one thing I’ve found interesting (beyond what looks like an overwhelming international urge by ALL children to make fun of their siblings).

Ask women what makes a ‘good’ mum and they will say time and love. They will say it in different ways, but almost all

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of the time it will come down to these two things. Ask what makes a bad mother however and you will get a multitude of answers, replete with granular detail and examples. We know the rhetoric around being ‘good’ mums, but the reality of everyday life means women struggle to do it. The other thing that struck me was how culturally specific being a ‘bad mum’ was. In Kenya for example, you’re a bad mum if you’re not god-fearing, Saudi Arabia it’s not listening to your husband, Turkey it’s not baking cakes for your guests, and in China it’s not giving your child the very best education. While all 40 women in our global study were mums, the cultural contexts in which they operate influences their behaviours in vastly different manners.

The collation of positive feelings around motherhood is often used to formulate stereotypes that guide companies’ marketing to mothers. As global brands continue to move into emerging markets and develop strategies that really talk to local populations, this homogenous ‘mum’ – time and love – is not working. Undoubtedly mothers want to give their children time and love. But they have other factors competing for their attention (education, religion, friends, children, partners), all with varying levels of importance across countries.

Many global brands who have historically adopted the dominant Western discourse of mothering have recognised this dissonance, and to be successful across the world they need to have a better understanding of the factors that influence mothers in different cultures.

“Don’t you think I know what I’m doing!?” I am scolded by Fatima. Ever been scolded by a Nigerian mother as she hand-washes laundry for her family of seven? I shut-up and pretended to fiddle with my camera. I (stupidly) asked if she struggles to remove stains. I have spilt red wine on my carpet in South London and three years later it still mocks me. Yet Fatima (the Nigerian stain destroyer) is removing oil, grease and food stains with a $1 bar of soap with ease. I had failed to recognise two things:

1. Having no washing machine is not all bad.

2. Stain removal is her equivalent of smart new shoes for her kids.

Fatima, like many of her friends, does not have a washing machine and does not have money to spend on expensive laundry products. Yet she removes the equivalent of my ancient wine stain, daily. Washing machines don’t get stains out, elbow grease does. In Nigeria and Kenya we found little appetite for stain removal products among people without washing machines. People who use washing machines use stain removal products. But for the rest, hand washed laundry is a matter of pride. It’s the clothes her children wear outside of the home to ‘advertise’ her mum skills (à la West London’s new trendy shoes for the kids). Understanding the meaning of laundry is intricately bound in social norms, national infrastructure and an understanding that washing products aren’t needed to remove stains.

I went to Saudi Arabia. As a Western woman not used to wearing a full abaya and hijab, I was apprehensive.


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make motherhood differ dramatically – not just in widely understood ways. I saw that while ‘love’ and ‘time’ was something all mothers want to give to their children, they subscribe to it in very different ways – observational research across these very different countries has really reminded me how easy it is to assume cultural contexts we know best simply do not apply in so many parts of the world. Despite globalisation, despite some brands’ global dominance, we still need to do much more to really understand very different cultures’ needs.

To get in touch with Victoria, please email [email protected]

One afternoon, I spent some time roller-skating around a compound with three nine-year old girls (afterwards, we were all told off for leaving marks on the tiles). The girls spoke of wanting to find husbands and having children and being ‘good’ wives, heavy concerns for those so young (when I was nine I simply pondered the skills of Cat Woman over Wonder Woman). For these girls and their mothers, preparing for family life is of fundamental importance. In a society where there are heavy restrictions on women, taking meaning from motherhood (the one thing they have over men) is amplified - products related to the home and caring for her family are anchored more heavily in personal status.

When I went to China I saw remote-controlled vacuum cleaners and arrangements of mops that looked like sets of golf clubs. China’s cultural context makes a nice point of comparison to Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. With an influx of Western Media, the One Child Policy, and a highly competitive labour market, motherhood is about competing with a career and personal betterment in a way that does not feature in other markets. Products that make Chinese mothers’ jobs easier and give them time to make it to yoga class before picking up the kids from school, speak to their very busy reality of being a mum.

Will I be a ‘good’ mum? What will that look like here in the UK? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I know that my experiences will differ to the mums in this study. Brands and products that speak to this difference and recognise why this is, will be at an advantage. As I went around the world in 2013 and saw how religion, gender, politics, home size, weather, history and traffic -

More than just the tip of the iceberg

by Deborah McCrudden Managing Director Ipsos ASI

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Our industry is still in thrall to the discovery that 95% of brain processing occurs below the level of consciousness. This has led, especially in consumer research, to a wide variety of approaches that attempt to assess sub-conscious thoughts, feelings and emotions, as typified by Daniel Kahneman and the concept of System 1 and System 2 processing in his Nobel prize-winning book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’:

System 1 – fast, effortless, non-conscious and involuntary, driven from the emotional centre of the brain;

System 2 – slow, effortful and controlled, driven by the prefrontal cortex – your conscious mind.

Most of the decisions we make are made via System 1. If they weren’t, we’d never get anything done. Putting on socks – we don’t think about it too much. In shopping, a low risk, automatic choice might be the choice of a brand in any particular supermarket aisle.

Traditional market research techniques, revolving around asking questions, applied properly, are great for probing System 2 choices. These are the ones we think about, but new techniques like ‘neuroscience’ help us get a much better understanding of System 1 involuntary or non-conscious thoughts and feelings.

Take, for example, biometrics. By using sensors applied to the chest and fingers, we can measure the non-conscious, emotional response to advertising or other stimuli or ideas,

such as changes in heart rate and respiration. Properly applied, it provides irrefutable evidence that emotional engagement has occurred – if it does not, the advertising has very little chance of influencing the viewer. We know this because biometric responses correlate highly with survey measures known to be predictive of in-market success. This is particularly true when a viewer’s engagement peaks towards the end of an ad, typically around a key branding moment. However, biometrics does not tell you why that engagement has occurred, or whether the emotions felt are positive or negative – and it won’t tell you what difference has been made for the brand.

Similarly, facial coding – the automatic recognition of changes in facial expression, from footage captured via webcam as part of an otherwise normal online survey – can help differentiate between emotions. It helps us understand, for example, which ads are generating happiness or surprise – those that evoke emotion are more likely to be successful because, as with biometrics, they have engaged the consumer.

Implicit association will tell you what difference has been made for the brand. By measuring not just whether a person endorses a brand for a desired attribute, but how quickly, we understand whether that association is implicit – that is to say, a deeply held connection, likely to be evoked when considering brand choice. We can understand which associations are the key drivers of equity for a brand, and then assess whether those associations are more implicit where there has been exposure to advertising.


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All these developments in both technology and neuroscience over the last few decades are now starting to give us two things:

• Meaningful performance indicators for companies, brands and advertising, validated against market share and sales trends – based around sound survey research principles such as not asking people to answer questions to which they can’t possibly know the answer.

• But from Kahneman’s System 1 – we get implicit associations to help gain a better understanding of the deeply held emotional connections between people and brands, and techniques such as facial coding and biometrics to help understand the involuntary engagement and emotional responses which might be helping to strengthen them.

In the meantime, we know that:

• Biometrics gives us the most reliable indicator of whether emotional engagement has occurred.

• Facial coding can help us understand which emotions are being felt at different times, and by extension, whether these are useful and appropriate.

• Implicit associations can help us understand not just whether people believe something about an ad or a brand, but whether this is a deeply held implicit association – one felt with the heart, not just thought with the head.

Finally, remember that comparing both traditional and neuroscience findings will most likely provide more enriching results. By measuring different things we are getting to the heart of why we sometimes find it difficult to make some decisions – as the saying goes ‘I’m in two minds about it’. Now we can see why – as we are comparing emotional and non-emotional rational responses.

To get in touch with Deborah, please email [email protected]

How to be brands and influence people

by Gareth Jones Director Ipsos ASI

Brands used to have it so much easier. ‘Build it and they will come’ was the motto of the day. Companies put their latest product into stores and into supermarkets, hired the team from ‘Mad Men’ to create a glitzy advert to persuade the masses to buy it, and before they knew it the tills were ringing.

Of course, things were never that simple. However one thing was certain; the brand was in control. Fast-forward to 2013 and the world has changed beyond recognition.

Borders have broken down. Globalisation has meant that competition and choice have exploded. Want the latest smartphone? Pop to the Carphone Warehouse. Or pick it up whilst doing the weekly shop in Tesco. Or order it online and have it delivered via Amazon. Today the power lies firmly with the consumer. They have never been more knowledgeable and more switched on. They can find out about and

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compare a brand in seconds. They can share their opinion about a brand with friends and strangers at the tap of a keyboard or the click of a ‘Like’ button.

As a result, people no longer settle for second-best. Brands have to work much harder to keep hold of customers and to win new ones, and now influence is becoming more and more the driving force behind maintaining customer loyalty and market share.

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” Dale Carnegie ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People.’

Influence can be a tricky thing to pin down, but brands like Google have it. To understand brand influence at its most basic level it can help to think of a brand as a ‘friend’, as cheesy as it sounds. You want a friend who makes you feel good, who understands you, who interests and excites you, or cares for you. A brand is no different. People do not want to use a brand that they do not like or have nothing in common with. An influential brand contributes something meaningful to the consumer, be that making their life easier, more comfortable, more interesting, or completely changing what they do or how they see the world, with a personality all of its own. And it’s something that few brands can consistently claim to be achieving.

Ipsos MORI’s research into the most influential brands shows five key dimensions that can define and drive brand influence with consumers. Brands which are seen to be doing one or more of these successfully are more likely to be seen to be influential:

Trust. As with friendships, trust is the key quality required to maintain a strong relationship. People need to feel confident that a brand is reliable and has a consistent quality. Brands with high levels of trust are influential as they are more likely to be recommended to others and foster stronger loyalty.

Engagement. A brand can be engaging in a number of ways, but a true two-way relationship of engagement can be hard to achieve. This engagement could be a reputable source of information that the consumer comes back to time and time again, or it could tap into the ‘entertainment’ factor by producing content such as advertising which is shared and discussed with friends.

Leading edge. Brands which are seen to be ahead of their time and innovative are often influential – they shape consumer behaviour, can alter markets and create new ones. They are trend-setters and stand out from the crowd, and are the rare beacons which other brands follow and aspire to be.

Corporate citizenship. Most consumers aspire to be good citizens and this extends to the brands they choose. Brands can be influential to consumers by reflecting values of social or environmental responsibility and showing that they care about the world around them.

Presence. A brand can use sheer muscle-power to gain influence purely by being ever-present in the consumers’ everyday lives, either physically or through pervasive advertising.

49% of the British public said it was likely that Andy Murray would win Wimbledon in 2013 (43% said unlikely)

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Source: Ipsos MORI Political Monitor 1,015 adults aged 18+ across Great Britain, 12th – 14th January 2013 www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3116/Predictions-for-2013-poll.aspx

In 2013 we found Google was the most influential brand in the UK. No surprises there then. Google covers all of these bases. What was really interesting from the research that we’ve done at Ipsos MORI is just how far the power lies with the consumer. Brands like Amazon and eBay are among the most influential in the UK by virtue of tailoring their products and services to individuals’ needs. Even more reason to put the consumer at the heart of every brand strategy.

The top 10 influential brands

1. Google2. Amazon3. Microsoft4. BBC5. eBay6. Apple7. Facebook8. Marks and Spencer9. Royal Mail10. Visa

www.ipsos-mori.com/ukinfluentialbrands

To get in touch with Gareth, please email [email protected]

Employee myths and workplace realities

by Jonathan Nicholls Head of Employee Research Ipsos Loyalty

Five years ago the global economic crisis changed the world we live – and work – in. How has it affected the mindset of UK employees? Are we really as unappreciated, underpaid and under pressure as many would have us believe? Using the Edenred -Ipsos barometer27 – a five-year survey of 7000+ employees across Europe – we explore the surprising myths and realities of employee satisfaction and motivation in a post-crisis world.

Myth 1: Employees are less motivated in their jobs Actually, we’re not. The past five years have seen an upward trend in employees claiming that their motivation remains stable. Whilst we’re not necessarily becoming more motivated, a smaller proportion of us are becoming de-motivated (even if it is because we want to keep our jobs!).

Employee myths and workplace realities Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

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Employe myths and workplace realities Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

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In addition, our satisfaction with our general professional situation remains stable (61% of UK employees claimed to be ‘satisfied’ in 2008 and the same is true in 2013).

Myth 2: We’re more and more pressured to spend time at work No – this too is stable. Around half of all employees in both 2008 and 2013 (51% and 49%, respectively) claim to devote too much time to their work ‘from time to time’. Although this may not be a great reflection on our work/life balance, there’s no real change here.

Myth 3: Loyalty is a thing of the pastPerhaps, but we’ve seen no noticeable change over the past five years. Although a higher proportion of us are now considering leaving our jobs, the percentage that is actively looking for a new job or often considers leaving is only two points higher now than it was in 2008 (46% to 48%). What’s more, the proportion of us who have ‘never’ considered leaving is one percentage point up. Job tenure is actually remarkably stable given all the upheavals, averaging nine years for men, and rising gradually to eight years for women over the last decade.

Myth 4: We’re less happy and fulfilled at work This is categorically not true; our pride in our work and our happiness and fulfilment at work are basically unchanged. This is not to say it’s off the charts, but in both 2008 and 2013, 88% of us claimed to feel proud, either often or from time to time. Our happiness and fulfilment levels differ by just one or two percentage points and, in both cases, they’re on the up.

So, what are the realities in 2013?

Reality 1: We’re worried about our purchasing power and real wagesSadly, this is true. In 2012, just over half of us (51%) claimed to be satisfied with our purchasing power. Now, this is true of just 44% of employees, representing a significant decline. The ONS reports that real wages are now effectively the same as in 2003 – one of the longest periods of no real wage growth in living memory.

Reality 2: We don’t think it would be that easy to find another jobIn 2012, 40% of us believed we could easily and quickly find a comparable job if we were to lose our current one. Now, only 35% of us have the same confidence. Although there hasn’t been a proportional increase in the number of employees saying it wouldn’t be easy, there’s clearly a growing uncertainty about the job market – and given some of the increased competition we face as an economy, and the hollowing out of even middle class jobs, we may be right.

Reality 3: The British are more like the Germans than the FrenchFrom an employee perspective, we are far more aligned with the Germans than the French. In 2013, 42% of Germans and 40% of Britons gave their quality of life at work an eight out of ten or higher; only 23% of French employees felt so magnanimous. Looking at the key factors that impact our professional satisfaction and the perceived inadequacies of our companies, the British sit much closer to the Germans than the French on most issues - including relationships with

47% of British employees feel that salary level is their main professional concern compared to job security (31%) and time devoted to work (22%)

Employe myths and workplace realities

158 159


their managers, workload, and opportunities for growth. In fact in some areas, such as internal communication and recognition of involvement, the British and the Germans were the most positive of all countries surveyed, whereas the French were at the back of the pack.

Although we may be starting to see the economy turn the corner, it’s clear that many of us are reluctant to take a risk and take a job somewhere else. But there’s something more positive here too: British employees are generally happy with the quality of their working life and feel positive about where their company is headed – something which UK Plc can build from.

Read the full report at www.ipsos-mori.com/edenred2013 to understand more about what your staff are likely to be thinking.

To get in touch with Jonathan, please email [email protected]

Edenred -Ipsos Barometer 2013. Online survey conducted from February 18 - March 15 2013 in a panel of 800 UK employees 18+. www.ipsos-mori.com/edenred2013

The Business Elite: the secret to their sucess

by James Torr Head of International Syndicates Ipsos MediaCT

Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013The Business Elite: the secret to their success


162 163

The Business Elite: the secret to their success

are accessing more news via their tablet compared to 12 months ago.

However, while they’ve adapted to digital, it’s complementary to their use of more traditional media – 83% watch TV daily and 93% still read print media. Interestingly, one thing that hasn’t changed is their loyalty to media brands. Their digital consumption of these brands merely adds to it – the reach of a particular media brand across all its platforms has on average increased by 5% year on year.

So they are better connected than ever, busier than ever, and keen to invest in technology as we come out of recession. More positive signs from our annual survey of these key decision makers: we will continue to track their attitudes as recovery gathers strength.

To get in touch with James, please email [email protected]

For many of today’s most successful companies, 2008 is like the Dark Ages. For people running the largest businesses, about 0.2% of the population, change moves faster and faster. Charles Darwin said “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”.

We are tracking these people’s hopes, fears and consumption via our annual Business Elite studies and we’ve seen that, as with the public, they are becoming more optimistic, adapting their companies’ strategies as the economy recovers. In 2010, 77% cited managing economic uncertainty as one of the biggest challenges facing their company, now this has fallen to 60%.

At the same time, the number mentioning the importance of technical advances in their business has more than doubled to 36% in 2013. Technological innovation is key to the profitability of companies. But it puts more pressure on people. Almost four in ten say they are working longer hours and say that ‘my job is becoming more complex’. Only 6% say they are working less. Long lunches and decisions on the golf course appear to be a thing of the past.

Less time makes it difficult for them to remain informed and keep up-to-date with what is happening around the world. Getting real-time, succinct packaged news and management information becomes more and more important. Here the mobile data revolution is ongoing. New technology is endemic – 85% own a smartphone, and almost two thirds own a tablet – over twice the comparable figure for the general population at 30%. Six in ten say they

How to turn your reputation on its head – let your people be real

by Milorad Ajder Managing Director Ipsos MORI Reputation Centre

All companies want to be loved, but failing that, the desire to be trusted comes in a strong second – trust is at the heart of all good relationships and brings with it a sense of permanence and stability. From a commercial point of view, it translates into benefits that impact the bottom line – from increasing customer loyalty to people giving you the benefit of the doubt when times get tough. But a recent Ipsos Global @dvisor study shows people find it harder and harder to trust companies. A majority of consumers now don’t trust CEOs to tell the truth and want businesses to be more regulated. The problem is especially acute for certain sectors. The problem is that trust can only emerge if people have a clear sense of what companies are and what they stand for. Without this kind of saliency, they will be perceptually lumped in with everyone else.

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166 167

When you look at sectors such as banking, energy and transport you can intuitively grasp the size of the challenge some companies face in differentiating themselves. In most cases the popular sentiment is ‘they’re all the same’ – or, worse, ‘a plague on all their houses’. Although this kind of corporate homogeneity may be at its most acute in those sectors, it’s by no means restricted to them – companies in many sectors struggle to create an individual and unique connection with the consumer. So the sixty four thousand dollar question is this: given the millions companies spend on communications, how can they cut through the generalisations about their sector and communicate in a way people can genuinely relate and respond to?

Part of the answer lies in an anecdote I heard at the European Communications Summit in Brussels in July. It was about Deutsche Bahn, a German train company, and the way they communicated with one of their customers through social media. The gist of the story was that a frustrated passenger waiting for the umpteenth time for a late train sent a message to Deutsche Bahn where she assumed the role of a long suffering girlfriend who had just about had enough of her unreliable boyfriend. The message ended with news that she had found a new man in her life called Opel and was breaking up with Deutsche Bahn.

The way the passenger used humour to make a serious point impressed me – but what impressed me even more was Deutsche Bahn’s response. Instead of falling into a well-worn mantra about investment in the network, importance of customers etc. they decided within minutes to respond in a similar vein. They adopted the persona of the jilted boyfriend who understands his girlfriend’s frustrations and realises she would be a great catch for someone else. However given an opportunity he would try his best to mend his ways and woo her back.

The exchange was picked up by the German media and Deutsche Bahn received a lot of positive press coverage – quite an achievement given the speaker indicated Deutsche Bahn’s reputation in Germany is comparable to that of train companies in the UK.

Source: Ipsos MORI Political Monitor. Base: 1,004 British adults 18+, 12th -15th October 2013, splitsample question- approximately half (c.500) the sample were asked each iteration

Which industries are trusted?High street retailers, manufacturers and supermarkets are most trusted industries, whilst insurance, banks and utilities are the least.

High street retailers

Manufacturers

Supermarkets

British business as a whole

Creative companies

Construction companies

Law firms

Insurance companies

Banks

Utilities

48%

45%

45%

34%

32%

29%

28%

20%

18%

18%TrustDon’t trust

-8%

-5%

-13%

-11%

-10%

-16%

-29%

-39%

-53%

-45%


168 169

By allowing their employees to use their judgement, Deutsche Bahn and Nordstrom add some impetus to the rather over-used phrase that employees are a company’s best ambassadors. This is because the average customer can spot the real thing and detect when they are being treated as an individual, by an individual. Communication between customer and employee therefore becomes an opportunity for a company to reinforce or dilute its distinctiveness and to build or erode trust. At the end of the day reputation cannot be built by corporate advertising and PR alone. It needs to be constructed day-by-day by the behaviour of employees who, while they may be on board with the spirit of the corporate promise, also demonstrate that they are trusted to think and empathise as individuals in their own right. It still needs judgement, but brands’ authenticity is what ultimately builds trust.

To get in touch with Milorad, please email [email protected]

On one level this is simply an amusing story, but I think in many ways it also gets to the heart of how companies should behave if they want to truly connect with people and build credibility with the wider world. In this case Deutsche Bahn managed to break out of the sanitised corporate speak that so often deters people from paying attention to what a company has to say and managed to convey a sense of personality.

The way it responded achieved three things: it acknowledged it was having a conversation with an individual (by not sending a standard response which could have gone to anyone), it demonstrated that it trusted its employees by empowering them to empathise with the feelings of the customer and communicate in the way they felt was most appropriate, and finally, given the speed of its reply, it was clear its response was not rehearsed and therefore authentic.

In many ways the Deutsche Bahn story echoes the culture fostered in Nordstrom, a successful US chain of department stores, which leads the way in allowing employees to cut through process and protocol. Until relatively recently its entire training manual consisted of a single piece of card containing 75 words. There was a short welcome and expression of confidence in the abilities of the employee and then the following line: 'Nordstrom rules: Rule #1: Use best judgement in all situations. There will be no additional rules.' Although the manual has been subsequently expanded to accommodate mandatory legal considerations, the essence of the company remains the same – above all other things, your judgement is what counts.

Being innovative with innovation: how do businesses keep up with change?by Joe Marshall Head of InnoQuest Ipsos Marketing

Imagine having a job where you are challenged with coming up with the next great innovation – every day. Just come up with the next category-defining innovation that changes your industry – like tablet computers – no pressure!

Thousands of people in businesses across the world face this very task – and the pressures are getting tougher. We regularly convene round tables with managers like this as part of our own Innovation Council. One of the challenges facing people in these roles is not just market forces but also the challenge of running an innovation process in diverse, global multi-stakeholder organisations:

“We have this huge scary thing on the wall that is our innovation process but anything with that many internal players in it is never going to work.” Innovation Council member

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Being innovative with innovation Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

172 173

By definition, this is tough work. Technology clients need to operate at the cutting edge of their technological capabilities, while FMCG companies are challenged by saturated markets in finding any true differentiation which answers consumer needs:

“For all industries, innovation must be consumer needs led – which is not the same as asking consumers what they want.” Innovation Council member

The process of applying insights into consumer dynamics as part of the whole innovation process is becoming more challenging. While connected consumers, mobile shopping and a more value and quality conscious mindset leads to opportunities for businesses, there is a huge amount of noise that any new products must cut through to reach an attention-poor marketplace. Most fail.

It is generally accepted that consumer validation is critical in any innovation process. It forces a decision point about an initiative, especially when it has the potential to sap considerable time and money from a business. However, while the consumer context has changed, often the innovation processes have not - innovation research will still rely on database norms of behaviour from previous launches, consumers’ claimed (as opposed to actual) behaviour, and historic trends.

Indeed, a lot of traditional research often favours ‘me too’ products - consumers are more likely to be positive towards ideas and concepts that are familiar. Which may explain why you see so many iterations of tweaks and new flavours in existing products.

Creating, identifying and measuring breakthrough products is seen as almost impossible when using the traditional tool kit.

With the need to get products to market rapidly, most clients are also making proceeses for thinking about innovation far more streamlined:

“Success is linked to speed – how do we find ways to get things evaluated faster but also in a more iterative way… Quantified co-creation?” Innovation Council member

To this end, clients believe they should use information technology in far more advanced ways to reduce time and cost, and provide more effective research. But pressures on businesses are pushing the other way. They are too busy to give it enough attention – and everyone is so afraid of failure they are sticking to old methods:

“Still, the first question we ask agencies is ‘how big is your database of past data?’ – the need to measure is vitally important, but how can we collectively evolve?” Innovation Council member

Speed becomes ever more important. New, community based models for research are changing the way we make decisions and are fundamental to what we do.

Finally, our work shows that business needs to invest to get ahead - there is a gap in the training and development resources available to innovation professionals, and the companies that do best will be those who are willing to invest in R&D. You can see this when analysing the historic

We think that

15% of girls under

16 get pregnant

each year, when

official figures

suggest it is around

0.6%

Being innovative with innovation

174


performance of countries – Italy has lagged behind its rivals in IT investment for decades and is now paying the price. Secondly, it’s lonely out there – one of the things we are trying to do for people responsible for innovation is to create forums in which they can network – like our Innovation Council.

For more information contact Joe Marshall please email [email protected]

Ipsos MORI carried out 1,015 interviews online with adults aged 16-75. Fieldwork took place between 14th – 18h June 2013. Data is weighted to match the profile of the population.

It ain’t what you see, it’s the way that you see it: the ads we watch in 2013

by Keith Glasspoole Director Ipsos ASI

The UK ad industry has returned to its pre-crisis levels, and is predicted to grow by 5%28 in 2014. Whilst this is relatively small by comparison to the double digit growth in the BRIC markets, it is clear that things are looking up. Reports of the death of TV advertising have been greatly exaggerated – relative to the projected 5% growth for the advertising market overall, TV advertising is forecast to exceed this, growing by 7% next year.

However, the largest growth will be in online media, in its myriad forms. This is partially driven by mobile advertising, which has almost doubled, with the majority of UK adults now owning a smartphone for the first time in 2013. Another contributor is the growth in video-on-demand (VOD), which is, in turn, stoked by the growing penetration of tablets and internet-connected TV, with more and more households now owning an internet connected TV or tablet.

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There can be a tendency to draw an overtly simplistic distinction between ‘emotional’ and ‘rational’ ads – ‘emotional good, rational bad’. If only it were that simple. Making an ad with a stirring soundtrack and evocative imagery, and labelling it ‘emotional’, is no guarantee of success. What matters, is whether it resonates with the viewer. Does it make a connection with them by evoking something they care about? Specifically, does it make a resonant connection between the viewer and the brand? After all, people buy and use brands, not ads.

So, we can confidently predict that the importance of an emotional connection with what you see in advertising will remain key. What is harder to predict will be the impact of changes in the way that you see it. While television is likely to remain the tried and trusted means of generating emotional resonance on a large scale, the rise of connected TV and VOD via internet-enabled devices means that behavioural targeting will soon influence the contents of your commercial break. The upside of this will be to reduce perceived wastage in ad spend (so dog-free households may never see ads for Pedigree Chum again), and increase the relevance of ads to those who view them. Not just ‘Opportunity to See’, but ‘Likelihood to Engage’. The downside, if your advertising misses the mark, is the ease with which brands can be vilified across people’s social networks. Advertisers will have to tread carefully – a recent study by Deloitte found that 45% of UK consumers are unhappy about receiving personalised ads and offers.

The convergence of TV and digital platforms continues to have implications for how advertisers seek to influence us.

However, one enduring trend in advertising is that, whatever the channel being used, creative is king. By this we mean that the quality of the creative content still has the greatest influence on whether an ad works. More so than the spend put behind it, the share of voice it commands, or, indeed, anything else. In other words, mediocre advertising won’t become great just because you see it a lot, or just because you see it more than the competitor’s ad. Great advertising reaches out to connect with people. It reduces the distance between people and brands. And, in the digitally connected age, it gives brands a chance to be at the heart of people’s conversations – for the brand’s story to be willingly shared and retold.

This evolving engagement with advertisement through digital platforms is further evidence – if it is needed – that content is, and will remain, king. For example, TV remains the tried and trusted means of generating reach for a campaign. However, the power of ‘retransmission’ i.e. sharing, can extend that reach beyond the paid for media spend, into earned reach by tapping into people’s desire to share great content. But to do this, brands need to create content with emotional resonance.

The importance of emotion in an ad’s success is beyond question. Those with a professional involvement in advertising will, no doubt, be familiar with the work of Binet and Field and Robert Heath. However, even those with only a passing interest will surely have noticed the buzz created by some high profile campaigns which pull on our heart strings. The combination of these and evidence from research has led to a growth in overtly ‘emotional’ ads – we can all think of advertisers trying to ‘do a John Lewis’, with varying degrees of success.

The public think that £24 out of every £100

spent on benefits is claimed fraudulently,

compared with official estimates of

£0.70 per £100

It ain’t what you see, it’s the way that you see it

180


Trends such as ‘showrooming’ and ‘multiscreening’ make purchasing behaviour more complex and harder to predict. It demands greater alignment of messaging – for example, in-store with mobile search, or TV with social media and e-commerce.

One of our clients is using the success of an engaging, character-led TV campaign to generate social media activity, which in turn creates direct links to e-commerce channels, and thereby shortens the path to purchase. It is questionable whether such activity would replace TV advertising – after all, for many large brands, very few people will actively engage with them on social media, and those that do tend to be least important for generating growth, as they will be buying the brand already29. What matters is not the ‘either/or’ – ‘TV or digital/social’ is as much a false dichotomy as ‘emotional or rational’. What matters is using appropriate channels, in appropriate ways, to most effectively connect consumers with your brand expression.

One element of the findings from analysis of our databases tends to be consistent from year to year, despite changes in the advertising world. Return on investment in an advertising campaign is many times higher when the creative content is engaging, meaningful, and addresses what consumers want to feel or experience.

As in the past, delivering this content in a well told story is essential; perhaps even more so in this connected world of shared media and experiences.

To get in touch with Keith, please email [email protected]

Ipsos MORI carried out 1,015 interviews online with adults aged 16-75. Fieldwork took place between 14th – 18h June 2013. Data is weighted to match the profile of the population.


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End notes1. www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/samuel-luckhurst/britains-

2013-summer-of-sport_b_3630631.html

2. news.sky.com/story/1126105/biggest-baby-boom-for-40-years-in-the-uk

3. www.gov.uk/government/publications/drug-misuse-findings-from-the-2012-to-2013-csew/drug-misuse-findings-from-the-2012-to-2013-crime-survey-for-england-and-wales

4. www.bsa-29.natcen.ac.uk/read-the-report/work-and-wellbeing/introduction.aspx

5. www.visionofhumanity.org/pdf/ukpi/UK_Peace_Index_report_2013.pdf

6. British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA29), NatCen

7. www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/21970879

8. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hungrier-than-ever-britains-use-of-food-banks-triples-8882340.html

9. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23501423

10. www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/aug/01/nation-media-multi-taskers-ofcom-communications-report


184 185184

End notes

22. Ipsos MORI Global Trends Survey, Wave 1 2013

23. www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/as-facebook-users-dropped-by-over-600000-in-december--have-we-shared-too-much-on-social-media-8450937.html

24. Ipsos MORI Global Trends Survey, Wave 1 2013

25. Ipsos MediaCT Technology Tracker, Q1 2013

26. www.ipsos-mori.com/threescreenblog

27. The Edenred-Ipsos barometer surveys employee populations in six countries: Germany; Belgium; Spain; France; Italy; and the United Kingdom. The latest wave was conducted online between 18 February and 15 March 2013 among a sample of 7,200 employees, www.ipsos-mori.com/edenred2013

28. Advertising Association, quoted in The Guardian

29. See our paper The Social Media Paradox at www.ipsos-mori.com/asi

11. Kahan, M. et al. (2013) Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government. Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 307

12. http://fullfact.org/factchecks/disposable_income_prime_ministers_questions-29240

13. www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/mro/news-release/real-wages-fall-back-to-2003-levels/realearn0213.html

14. www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/gva/gross-domestic-product--preliminary-estimate/q3-2013/stb-gdp-preliminary-estimate--q3-2013.html

15. www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2013/02/

16. www.cbi.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2013/11/uk-now-on-a-steady-growth-path-through-2015-and-beyond-cbi/

17. http://niesr.ac.uk/publications/uk-economy-5

18. www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/static/the-financial-capability-of-the-uk

19. Tetlock, Philip, 2005, Expert political judgement: How good is it? How can we know? Princeton University Press

20. Ipsos MORI Tech Tracker Q4 2012

21. http://news.o2.co.uk/?press-release=making-calls-has-become-fifth-most-frequent-use-for-a-smartphone-for-newly-networked-generation-of-users

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Some of our favourite infographics from 2013

The following pages show a selection of snippets from some of our favourite infographics of 2013. To see them in their full glory, please go to the websites listed below each one, or alternatively visit our data visualisation blog at: www.ipsos-mori.com/datafizz

Some of our favourite infographics from 2013 Ipsos MORI Almanac 2013

187

188


The Ipsos Top Cities Index www.ipsos-mori.com/topcities

The National Highways and Transport Survey 2013 www.ipsos-mori.com/nhts


189


190

The NHS at 65 www.ipsos-mori.com/nhsat65infographic

The Monarchy and the Royal Baby www.ipsos-mori.com/royalbaby


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192

In 2012, we asked 1,396 adults (aged 18+) and 460 young people (aged 14–18) about their day-to-day interactions with science and medical research to better understand their levels of interest, where and why they find out about it and who in the profession they trust to tell them about it. Here we present highlights from the survey. Full survey details and datasets are freely available from www.wellcome.ac.uk/monitor.

Engaging with scienceInformation about science and medical research

Seek Encounter

Reasons to seek

InformationWhen actively searching for information about biomedical research, people use a variety of channels.

Of the 35% of adults and 37% of young people who tried to look up information on biomedical research, their top reasons for searching were:

Base: 1,396 adults and 460 young people

87% Used the internet

86%

68%of over-65s

used the internet

Overall, most adults and young

people are very or fairly interested

in biomedical research

Of those adults who have seen biomedical research information on television, documentaries and news programmes are each mentioned by more than...

Young peopleAdultsYoung peopleAdults

Young peopleAdults

People are most likely to passively come across information about biomedical research through seeing it in the media.

A family member/friend had an

illness

I had a disease/illness I wanted to know more about

It’s just an area that

interests me

It is an area that worries

me

It was relevant to something I was

studying

Television

Newspaper

Website

Word of mouth

Radio

Magazine

Hospital or doctor's surgery

2924

2713

23

1213

92

74

63

35

Biomedical researchInterestThree broad areas of biomedical research stood out from a list of options as being of particular interest to people regardless of age or gender:




58%

75%

Complete or a great deal of trust

Very little or no trust

Doc

tors

/nur

ses

Scie

ntis

ts

(uni

vers

ity)

Med

ical

re

sear

ch c

hari

ties

Scie

ntis

ts(g

ovt)

Scie

ntis

ts(in

dust

ry)

Jour

nalis

ts

Gov

ernm

ent

min

iste

rs

67%66%60%

34%32%

59%

47%

In professionsTrust

Base: 1,396 adults

Adults trust different professions to different degrees for providing accurate and reliable information about medical research.

44%

25%

22%44%

14%17%

30%4%

Talked to another person

Looked in a book

Attended a lecture or talk

Visited a hospital or doctor's surgery

!

46%32%

15% 7% 6%25%

60%

22% 13% 12%

Young people

AdultsAccess People were asked how they would prefer to access information about biomedical

research.

via a website

told about it in person

from the television

63%

67%

25%

25%

22%

23%


29%of over-65s

preferred using a website

Only

Adults’ preference to get information via a website relates to their levels of education

of those who have received higher

education

of those whose highest qualifications

are GCSEs

of those with no formal

qualifications

76% 67% 34%

The Wellcome Trust Monitor is a representative survey of the UK public designed to measure adults’ and young people’s awareness, interests, knowledge and attitudes in relation to science, biomedical research and science education. Wave 2 of the survey was conducted between May and October 2012 by Ipsos MORI. 1,396 adults (aged 18+) and 460 young people (aged 14–18) were interviewed face-to-face for approximately 50 minutes. The Wellcome Trust is a charity registered in England and Wales, no. 210183. www.wellcome.ac.uk/monitor #wtmonitor

Wellcome Trust Monitor Wave 2 May 2013

Lloyd’s Risk Index www.ipsos-mori.com/lloyds2013

Public Perceptions of Science and Medical Research www.ipsos-mori.com/wellcometrust

Changes inrisk ranking

2011 20131

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

High taxation

Loss of customers/cancelled orders

Cyber risk

Price of material inputs

Excessively strict regulation

Changing legislation

Inflation

Cost and availability of credit

Rapid technological changes

Interest rate change

Currency fluctuation

Talent and skills shortage

Reputational risk

Corporate liability

Poor/incomplete regulation

Major asset price volatility

Fraud and corruption

Theft of assets or intellectual property

Government spending cuts

Failed investment

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Loss of customers/cancelled orders

Talent and skills shortage

Reputational risk

Currency fluctuation

Changing legislation

Cost and availability of credit

Price of material inputs

Inflation

Corporate liability

Excessively strict regulation

Rapid technological changes

Cyber attacks

High taxation

Failed investment

Major asset price volatility

Theft of assets or intellectual property

Fraud and corruption

Interest rate change

Cyber risk

Poor/incomplete regulation


193


194

Margaret ThatcherPublic Image

1983 1990

1984 1990

Her Best Her Worst

Her Best Her Worst

0

Capable leader

Good in a crisis

Understandsworld problems

Understands problemsfacing Great Britain

Sound judgement

More honest thanmost politicians

Downto earth

Got a lot of personality

Narrow minded

Inflexible

Talks downto people

Out of touch

Q: Which of these statements comesclosest to your views of Mrs Thatcher?

41%

Like herpolicies

54%

Dislike herpolicies

45% 50%Like her Dislike her

28%

Like herpolicies

71%

Dislike herpolicies

Q: Here is a list of things both favourable and unfavourable that have been said aboutvarious politicians. I would like you to pick out all those statements that you feel fit Mrs Thatcher

49%

54%

32%

26%

22%

30%

40%

41%

47%

47%

62%

62%

62%

55%

37%

32%

8%

14%

14%

23%

20%

23%

30%

34%

Throughout Margaret Thatcher's time as Prime Minister, Ipsos MORI polled the opinions of the British public on what they thought of her. Based on average positive and negative scores across a range of measures we have selected two points in her Premiership to show what the public thought of her

at their most positive and most negative times.

www.ipsos-mori.com/thatcher

39% 60%Like her Dislike her

960 British adults, 18+, 17-18 May 1983

985 British adults, 18+, 3-4 October 1984 1,058 British adults, 18+, 26 November 1990

1,942 British adults, 18+, 15-19 February 1990

Understanding Scotland www.ipsos-mori.com/understandingscotland

Margaret Thatcher Public Image www.ipsos-mori.com/thatchersociety

Support for Independence

The Scottish Public Opinion Monitor

Understanding Scotland

Voting Intention

Satisfaction with Party Leaders

www.ipsos-mori.com/SPOM @ipsosMORIScot

“If there were elections to the Scottish Parliament tomorrow, how would you use your first vote?”

“How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the way ... is doing their job?”

“Should Scotland be an independent country?”

Conservative

13%

Labour

35%

LiberalDemocrats

7%

SNP

43%

Other

2%

AlexSalmond

PatrickHarvie

WillieRennie

JohannLamont

RuthDavidson

No Yes

11% Undecided

55%

-3% sinceOct 2012

+4% sinceOct 2012

Change Change

34%

29% 39% 50% 28% 22%

Net Satisfaction

% Satisfied

+5% +3% -3% +7% 0%Net changesince Oct 2012

-4% +8% +7% +13% -7%

0

50

Au

g-0

9

No

v-0

9

Fe

b-1

0

Au

g-1

0

No

v-1

0

Fe

b-1

1

Ap

r-11

Ma

y-1

1

Au

g-1

1

De

c-1

1

Ja

n-1

2

Ju

n-1

2

Fe

b-1

3

Oc

t-12

Technical details: This presents the topline results from Scotland. Results are based on a survey of 1,003 respondents conducted by telephone. Fieldwork dates: 4th February – 9th February 2012. Data are weight by: age, sex and working status using census data; tenure using SHS data; and public-private sector employment using Scottish Government Quarterly Public Sector Employment series data. Where results do not sum to 100%, this may be due to computer rounding, multiple responses, or

the exclusion of “don’t know” categories.

Feb 2013


195


196

TWITTER ANNIVERSARY INFOGRAPHIC

As Twitter reaches its seventh birthday and with half of us in GB using social networks, the Ipsos MORI Tech Tracker looks at whether the social network has grown big enough to attain a long life-span. 50%

of the adult GB population use social media

For more information, please contact: [email protected] or visit: www.ipsos-mori.com

Source: Ipsos MediaCT Tech Tracker | Base: All Adults (1,024) / All visiting / using Facebook (475) / Google+ (161) / Twitter (167) / Linkedin (86) in last 3 months: Q1 2013

DEMOGRAPHICSThe number of us using a social network in the UK has remained stable over the past year at around one in two of us. Each of the networks have only seen small increases in penetration. The profiles of each of the social networks is also fairly stable – Facebook still reflects the GB online population; Twitter is younger and more affluent and LinkedIn is older,

more affluent with a male skew. So, while we may be seeing Twitter growing up and reaching maturity, what is encouraging for the platform as it reaches its seventh birthday is the high proportion of under 25s using the network, providing a strong base who can grow up with the social network over its next phase of development.

GENDER % WORKING STATUS %USAGE BY GB POPULATION % SOCIAL GRADE %AGE %

Male Female Working Not Working

AB C1C2DE

15-24 25-3435-4445-54 55-64

48 52 78 22

49% 21

27

3319

27

2217

13

22

67 33 85 15

09%

57

350304

2732

13

1514

54 46 79 21

17%

27342019

25

2718

14

16

80 20

16%

25

481611

40

1619

08

1749 51

DEVICE OWNERSHIP

Social networkers are leading the always-on, connected generation. We have seen ownership of smartphones and tablets leap to over 53% and 25% respectively as of January 2013, but these figures are even more pronounced when we look at those that use social networks. Close to nine in ten of Twitter users also own a smartphone, with iPhone the most popular handset, reflecting the instant and always on nature of the platform. Reflecting its business audience, LinkedIn users are the most likely to own a tablet, with ownership standing at 45%. The ability of social networks to adapt to the needs of the new mobile generation will be key to the next stages of their development.

own a tablet %own a smartphone %

75% 35%

80% 38%

86% 36%

84% 45%

100

2

99

3 6 7

1114161719

22 23 24 25 26 28 30

3235363739

41 42 43 44 46 47 48

5456

62 64 65 68 69

7375 747679

81 83 84 86 87 88

92939495969798

70

50

51%

Looking to buy as first time buyer

in next twelve months

4% Say “it is in poor

condition” applies to their home

9% Want house prices

to rise by 15%+ in 2013

10% Want house prices

to fall by 15%+ in 2013

12% Say “too small, lacks space”

applies to their home

13% Expect private

sector rents to be ‘a lot’ higher in twelve months

15% “If had free

choice” would choose to rent rather than buy

27% Think Government

should spend less on housing

benefit

31% Disagree past development has “changed

character of area for worse”

29% Private renters interested in

shared ownership

33% Think next 12

months will be a bad time to buy

property

34% Agree past

development has “changed

character of area for worse”

38% Expect average

UK house price to be higher in 12

months

45% Agree there is a

“housing crisis” in local area

Disagree “more new homes need to be

built in my local area”

49% Agree

“already enough development

here”

52% Agree “more new homes need to be built in my local area”

53% Think next 12

months will be a good time to buy

property

55% Identify raising a deposit as main barrier to buying

57% HAs who

think tenants know ‘hardly

anything’/’nothing’ about welfare

reform

58% Agree “having a mortgage is

more risky than it used to be”

59% Renters who

believe will NEVER be able to afford

to buy

61% Would

support new development if

helped to create jobs locally

63% Think 1/4

or more of England already developed (real

figure is 10%)

67% Expect private

sector rents to be be lot/little higher

in 12 months

71% Think next 12

months will be a bad time to sell

property

72% Renters who

consider themselves house

proud

66% Support new

development if it means affordable housing for locals

77% Private renters

expect to be in the same tenure in 2 years time

80% Agree there is a ‘housing crisis’ in

Britain

82% Agree

“Government should give more attention to the issue of housing”

85% “If had free

choice” would choose to buy

rather than rent

89% Agree “my home is suitable for my current needs”

90% Agree “it will be harder for

children of today to buy/rent than it

is for me”

91% Say are satisfied with their home

78% of 118 MPs report receiving contact from constituents

about housing (top issue)

60% Oppose

Government spending less

on housing benefit if leads to

homelessness

51% Support simplifying

local planning decisions making it easier to build new

local homes

40% Think building new homes is best way of boosting British economy (top of list of 6 options)

18% Expect average UK house price

to be lower in 12 months

20% Social tenants did not know whether or not they had the Right to Buy

(May 2012)

21% Think Government

should spend more on housing

benefit

8% Spontaneously identify housing among most

important issues facing Britain

(2012 average)

Eighty percent of the public think

that there is a “housing crisis” in

Britain. Using the well known board

game, our graphic illustrates a

selection of key findings relating to

the crisis from Ipsos MORI polling for

a range of clients. Our commentary

on the findings follows below.

Our graphic illustrates the challenges and opportunities public opinion presents to those tackling the housing crisis.

For example, compare the 80% and 45% squares. The public senses a national crisis but less so a local one. Indeed, the overwhelming majority are content with their

homes (see squares 89% and 91%), and many don’t see supply as an issue. See square 45% again where this percentage disagree that more new homes need to be built

locally.

Further compare this with 49% and 63%; nearly half the public think there has already been over-development locally and most over-estimate how much of the country is

already built upon.

The crisis may be more about future prospects to meet aspirations (see 90% and 85% squares) and worries about ‘Generation Rent’. But compare the 9% and 10%

squares. Almost the same proportion want sharp house price rises as want falls in 2013, highlighting a crisis affecting different people differently.

Finally, the 82% and 40% squares show that housing is a priority for Government attention, so too is building homes over other infrastructure projects. But these, and the

sense of crisis, sit far above the 8% square.

Of course, our graphic only touches the surface of a crisis which plays out differently by age, area and tenure. We will, for example, learn more this year from our

evaluations of the impact of welfare reforms on the private and social rented sectors. And we know that many local authorities and housing associations are also collecting

evidence to shape their response to the crisis.

Locally as well as nationally, it will be important to understand and incorporate public sentiment to help find the best solutions. Leaving too much to market forces and

hoping that nimbyism won’t prevail is unlikely to be enough to take us beyond crisis talk.

Sources: This graphic uses data from the Ipsos MORI Issues Index, Ipsos MORI Political Monitor, Ipsos MORI Summer 2012 MPs Survey, and surveys for a range of clients including Halifax, Channel 4, British

Property Federation, Inside Housing, Catalyst Housing Limited, Department for Communities and Local Government, and the National Housing Federation.

Survey fieldwork dates range from November 2011 to January 2013.

Graphic design by Tom Warren

Further information: Our latest polls, publications and commentary are available at our dedicated housing website pages.

Please contact Ben Marshall or @BenM_IM and Stephen Finlay, Ipsos MORI Housing, planning and development.

Follow Ipsos MORI online

Property Snakes and Ladders www.ipsos-mori.com/snakesandladders

Twitter Anniversary www.ipsos-mori.com/twitteranniversary


197


198

WALK IN THEIR SHOESAll too often, the Board is removed from the customer experience, failing to recognise that organisational concerns and customer concerns are two very different things. In this case, Board members were made to ‘walk in their customers’ shoes’: attending focus groups and ‘meet and greets’ with carefully selected customers; having facilitated conversations; and, for the CEO, working in a customer-facing role once a month.

Board Directors have higher incomes, and tend not to manage a household, so wouldn’t necessarily use our service, or if they did they’d use it in a very different way to how our customers would.

DIGDEEPERA high street retailer had spent the past year investing in the single customer view, building a system that unites over 40 different data sources under one roof. Now, this integrated database of point-of-sale data, website interactions, personal shopping lists, store cards and more has replaced ‘gut instinct’ in understanding both customers and business performance.

Everybody is desperate to understand what it can tell us to dispel current myths and legends about our customers, and then give us new insights to prioritise where the next big commercial opportunity is.

SHOCK AND AWEA new product launch wasn’t going to plan; the siloed nature of the business discouraged collective action. Senior Managers were failing to take responsibility and commit to finding solutions. Against this backdrop, the insight team hijacked their usual slot at the Board meeting and presented hard truths about the customer experience of the product launch – with passion. They didn’t hold back, and it worked: the CEO demanded action!

The only way to force yourself onto the agenda is in a public environment. There is something about that group dynamic and people being held to account.

• Orchestrate and facilitate carefully; leave nothing to chance

• Show them the average customer, not just the extremes

• Empower your customers – let them speak in their own words

• Avoid the minutiae and keep it blame-free

• Gain the CEO’s buy-in; senior managers will attend if they do

• Explore diverse information sources and listening posts

• Focus on the actionable – don’t get distracted by the interesting

• Link to your business objectives

• Deliver data in easy-to-understand formats

• Lead the Board by the hand: give next steps

• Choose your time carefully; when will they be most receptive?

• Talk in language they understand. Be bold and direct

• Build a clear argument that’s easy for them to agree with

• Instil action at the heart of your message

• Grab their attention – and do it in the first 2 minutes

Loyalty Council Member Loyalty Council Member Loyalty Council Member

GETTING THE BOARD ON BOARD.HOW TO ENSURE THAT YOUR CUSTOMERS’ VOICES ARE HEARD

AN IPSOS LOYALTY COUNCIL GUIDE TO:

THE LOYALTY COUNCIL RECOMMENDS

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE IPSOS LOYALTY COUNCIL PLEASE CONTACT [email protected]

Ipsos Loyalty Council: Getting the board on board www.ipsos-mori.com/boardonboard


199

• Advertising

• Loyalty

• Marketing

• Media, content & technology

• Reputation

• Social research

+44 (0)20 7347 [email protected] www.twitter.com/IpsosMORI www.facebook.com/IpsosMORI

50

Knowing more about life, business and society

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