John Kearon in Prague

It is a great pleasure to welcome John Kearon (back) to London in Prague.

John is the Founder, CEO & Chief Juicer of BrainJuicer Europe's leading online research agency. John was Ernst & Young's 'Entrepreneur of the Year 2005' and the company's innovative approach to research has garnered a number of awards including 'The Most Innovative Use of IT' and 'Service Business of the Year'.

Most important of all, John is passionate about innovation - innovation of marketing and market research techniques.

The workshop with John will take place on 10th of November at Long Tale Café, Osadní 35, Praha 7. We will start at 10am and we aim to finish at 3pm.

This is the agenda:

• The future of online research, moving beyond "fast and cheap" (10-11am)
• Finding and engaging the creative consumers (co-creation and crowdsourcing) (11-12.00pm)
• Building communities of interest (12.00-1pm)
• Lunch 1.00-1.30pm
• Moving from "me" to "we" research - mass ethnography (1.30-2.00pm)
• Group excersise: creating real case in Czech Republic where we put to practice the principles of co-creation, crowdsourcing and "we research". We will select 1 or 2 cases at the end and we will put make them happen!

Looking forward to see you in Long Tale Café on the 1oth of November!

If you want to know more or would like to register please fill in the registration form: http://www.londynvpraze.cz/registrace/lip/

And feel free to write to us on info@londynvpraze.cz or call us at +420 773 552 225.

Teresa Alpert v Praze

John Kearon: From Me to We Research

via researchtalk.co.uk

John Kearon (one of the Londoners in Prague on "From Me to We Research"

Posted via web from londoninprague's posterous

Branding and Marketing Yourself: Lesson from the Big Boys

It is a great pleasure to welcome Teresa Alpert to London in Prague! Teresa is one of the most gifted strategic planners I have ever worked with.

Teresa knows a lot about marketing and branding - she has given direction to many iconic global brands. And she is not only a great planner. She is a person with a very warm heart - she sees things from the point of view of the "ordinary" people whom the brands are sold - and these people are mainly women. Teresa passionately believes that there should be better advertising for women but also that women should get their fair share in business.

She had this great idea for London in Prague: to take the lessons from the big boys (from all the corporate board rooms and from the smartest brains in marketing and advertising) and giving it out to women who are running their small businesses - in Prague and later on in Russia, Indonesia...everywhere. Giving it out to women so women can market and brand their services (and themselves) better and compete more in the market place.

Here is more about the workshop with Teresa that will happen on the 3rd of July in Long Tale Café, Prague:

The audience: Women, entrepreneurs, students of Business or Communications, people who have their own small business, people who are thinking about starting their own business — or anyone else who is interested!

The content/presentation:
Rules of the Road for Branding and Marketing Yourself, Your Product, Your Service
Who Are You?
What Do You Stand For?
Who Are You Trying To Attract?
How Will You Reach Them?
Tried and true principles of branding demonstrated through examples from successful brands

Audience participation: creation of branding, working on "real cases".

And here is more about Teresa. In Teresa's own words:

Teresa Alpert

Fresh out of University, Teresa taught emotionally challenged teens and adults for six years –-- experience that has proven invaluable in the business world.

She left the classroom to work at AT&T where her short attention span came in handy. Over ten years she engineered computer systems, managed a billion dollar budget, launched a communications service that pre-dated the Internet and led strategic planning for future technologies.

Shrink-wrapping herself as a consummate communicator and technology expert, she left the client side for McCann Erickson and discovered that advertising really is rocket science.

Teresa is a brand lover and has had the privilege of working at some great agencies (DDB, Ogilvy) on some wonderful brands (IBM, iVillage, Compaq). Her current love affair (Director of Planning & Strategy for Lowe Worldwide in London) is targeting women for some of Unilever’s most important brands.

Teresa believes inspiration and insight can be found just about anywhere except a focus group facility. Just ask a great big juicy question and listen -- to leading edge kids, dreamers and schemers, social networkers and your mom -- because they will lead you to undeniable brand truths, business imperatives, great creative fodder, hidden needs, red hot emotions, and loads of other irresistible stuff.

Mark Earls in Prague

We are delighted to welcome Mark Earls back to Prague. This time for a workshop that will give the participants practical tips as to utilizing the principles of social influence.

Here is what Mark says about the workshop in Prague: "Nowadays, marketers are looking at different forms of social influence as the central means to shape consumer behaviour - from word of mouth to social media, "Social" is big. However, our ideas about how social influence works often turn out to be wrong. This seminar will try to sort fact from fiction and demonstrate what social influence feels like."

The workshop with Mark is scheduled for 1st of June - in Long Tale Café, Holešovice.

London in Prague: 10 days after the workshop on semiotics with Ginny Valentine

We had a great workshop with Virginia Valentine on the 19th of March in Long Tale Café (and in Galery Třeštík).  Semiotics is not an easy discipline and it takes a somebody such as Ginny - real expert in semiotics and also a wise person who understands people - to make semiotics accessible. Ginny has been extremely open - she let us right in the semiotic kitchen which is a brave thing to do.

From the start, Ginny was clear with us as to what we would explore: she has made a division between the semiotics theory (not to be explored at the workshop) and the practice of semiotics in the fields of marketing, advertising  and market research - and it was this part that we have concentrated on during the workshop.  This approach was refreshingly different from the usual academic teaching of semiotics in this part of the world - too much theory and too little practice. 

During the day with Ginny, we have explored and got our hands on number of practical and helpful practices for semiotic analysis - we learned about how meaning is constructed in any form of communication - ads, packs, products.   

Many of us had already intuitively used parts of some of the techniques that we have explored (e.g. the paradox principle) and Ginny has provided us with a great framework and discipline with which we could make our intuition much stronger.  

The workshop was a success also because of the participants - they were truly interested in the subject and did great job at the excersises. Thanks!

The Other Half of The Equation: with Virginia Valentine

London in Prague is extremely pleased to welcome Virginia Valentine to Prague! Virginia Valentine pioneered the use of semiotics in UK market research. She is a fellow of the Market Research Society a multi-award winner and speaker at conferences worldwide. Virginia will lead us through a one day workshop on semiotics (19th of March 2009)

Consumer research explores and uncovers consumer insights: beliefs, feelings, needstates, brand relationships. But that is only half the story. Semiotics delivers the other half of the equation: essential insights about the cultural forces that drive these deep feelings – and how they are communicated through marketing messages. Perfect Crowd’s Semiotic Workshop shows you how the cultural other half works. How you can access the power of semiotics to decode brand messages - and then recode them in line with key cultural changes and consumer drives  

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN (the Agenda)

The 6 fundamental Techniques of semiotic analysis

• sign decoding)
• context interrogation
• metaphor mining
• code evolution tracking
• narrative analysis
• myth-making  

WHAT YOU’LL SEE UNDER THE SEMIOTIC MICOSCOPE

• The ‘hidden image’ of the consumer’
  
• Buried myths that connect with deep unconscious beliefs
  
• New emergent codes just coming over the future horizon  
  

WHEN? 19th of March 2009

WHERE? Long Tale Café, Osadní 35 www.longtalecafe.cz

HOW TO REGISTER? Write to info@londynvpraze.cz

2007 conference - on film

Still looking back: Greg's and John's presentations, 2007

Here are Greg Rowland's and John Kearon's presentation from the 2007 conference:

Greg Rowland Semiotics London in Prague 2007

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: perfectcrowd londoninprague)

John Kearon Creative Consumers London in Prague 2007

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: johnkearon londoninprague)

Looking back: London in Prague, 2007

This blog is a new home for London in Prague and place where we would like to keep the history of London in Prague...Here is a post written in 2007 about the 4 great speakers at the London in Prague 1st conference: 

"It doesn't matter how exciting a new technology is if it has no human relevance. And it is human relevance and appeal to our senses that distinguishes a winning product," says Richard Seymour and it is hard to add anything to that.

Greg Rowland's work has been a great source of inspiration for me. Encountering with Greg and semiotics was a bit shocking at first to the Eastern European and researcher in me. The Eastern European part of me, conditioned to believe that there are ideas and ideals set in stone and that "eternal truths" awaits to be discovered. The researcher in me was taught to believe that if you drill deep enough into the minds of people you will eventually discover the "truth". Semiotics helped me to see people and brands interacting in a way that is fluid, ever-changing and much more colorful and inspiring than the descriptions provided by traditional market research. This clip shows Greg Rowland exploring the world of "feminine intensity ":

John Kearon is a true innovator who re-defined the way in which online market research is conducted. Instead of taking the "pen and paper" questionnaires and throwing them on the internet, John approached online research using the nature of the internet as a medium for a different kind of interaction. The surveys that John designs are engaging and interactive, enabling the respondents to tag each other's answers, long before "delicious" was came about...

Matt Hart's role is crucial in the innovation process. Matt leads teams to use  raw materials - what we might call ‘sophisticated observations’ (generated by semiotics, ethnography or online research) - and trawl for productive insight, and then use this insight as a  inspiration for creative ideas.  The film here was created to support Matt's TV show called "Sick Day".  Matt uses the same principles he uses with people on the show that he does with companies. He forces us to think out of the box to a point when one starts to worry where it is all leading. But he brings us back, in surprising and elegant way, to the box - to the category, the brand and the business.