ESOMAR Insights Festival Notes

Day 1

ESOMAR pivoted to our new virtual landscape with the Insights Festival 2020—an event focused on how research, data, and insights contribute to our daily lives. We jumped in to be part of this unique experience as it is currently being live streamed across social media channels and have already found it full of the promised conversations and content. We already caught a great session with David Evans from Microsoft, where he focused on brand love, “The New Brand Perception Battleground.” It was a fantastic wake up call to everyone in innovation first thing Monday morning (Pacific Time)!  

The session content showed that it isn’t enough to just have a great brand experience, a product that fulfills needs, and performs flawlessly in the moment of use. David delved into how the measurement of consumers’ brand memories can help increase spending on the brand over time, and that “defining brand memories are the moments that matter for world-class service brands.” 

The talk focused on how creating strong brand memories differs from just developing a product experience that people love; you need to be intentional. And importantly, defining strategies for building brand memories is a very different end goal than developing for usability.  

In the session, David reminded attendees:  

1. You can’t change what you aren’t measuring, therefore you have to measure the percentage of people who have “peak memories” and those who have “pit memories.” 
2. You want to create a frictionless product experience. 
3. That frictionless experience is very different from creating strong brand memories. Creating strong brand memories is about finding ways to create peak memories that last. These moments include: 

• • • Moments of Pride 
    • Moments of Connection 
    • Moments of Insight 
    • Moments of Elevation 

This focus on peak and pit moments also allows study of those areas which are creating the greatest negative experiences. Negative experiences need to be addressed most quickly as they are harming your brand. And the session covered how improving those positive brand memories is shown to increase the money spent on your brand over time.  

When you focus on only one area, you limit the connections you can make and the insights you can discover. At InsightsNow, we talk a lot about moments and their impact on the brand, and we enjoyed bringing this talk back to the team after attending on Monday.  

What other sessions have you attended or are planning to attend at ESOMAR’s Insights Festival?   We are planning on checking out Xabier Palacio’s talk on “The Global Insights Industry—Trends and Forecasts” on Wednesday, and Gabriela McCoy’s (Bacardi) talk on “The Consumer Matrix: How to Save the Humans” on Thursday, among others. Hope to see you there!