Your Research Presentations Too Dry?
Liven them up with real people … and maybe just a splash of alcohol
Chevy ads show the power of real people
Chevrolet believes the success of their long-running Real People, Not Actors TV ad campaign, reflects today’s social-media culture. “The number-one way people today find out about things is they look for people they trust,” Steve Majoros, Chevrolet’s director of marketing told The Atlantic in August of 2016. “We want to make people feel like, hey, this isn’t just us telling you. This is your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, people just like you.”
We want to make people feel like, hey, this isn’t just us telling you. This is your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, people just like you.”
Steve Majoros, Chevrolet
Majoros said that Chevy’s audience testing demonstrated measurable, positive effects from the ads that have now run for more than 3 years.
The May 2017 Crain’s Automotive News cited a Nielsen award for Chevy’s “Unbranded” TV spot, saying, “the work resonated with consumers in memorability, branding and likability.”
The article quoted Chevy’s U.S. VP of Marketing, Paul Edwards, saying, “we’ve been able to leverage real people to tell that benefit story through their own words, through their own experiences.”
A Caveat: Presenting Research vs. Conducting It
This post is about using real people to communicate the results of formal consumer research to an audience.
These are presentation ideas, and should not be confused with the techniques used to conduct the original research.
Wendy’s always conducted consumer research using the strictest research methods and standards.
The techniques in this post were employed after the formal research was conducted.
As much as possible, we interviewed only people in the same demographic as the original research subjects.
This let us accurately reflect the research findings, but with a bit more personality than could be achieved with PowerPoint slides alone.
*Brolick left Wendy’s in 2001 to become president of Taco Bell, and later became president, U.S. brand building for Yum Brands. In 2011, he returned to Wendy’s, serving as President and CEO from 2011 until his retirement in May of 2016. He continues to serve on Wendy’s board.
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