Session 4 Updates for the Co2014 Hyderabad

Hi all,
Session 4 Big-picture Recap:
We're done with a readings-Heavy Session 4 'Qualitative Research' today. To recap the four big-picture take-aways from the session, let me use bullet-points:

• We studied Observation Techniques - both of the plain vanilla observation (Reading 1 - Museums) and the 'immersive' ethnographic variety (Reading 2 - adidas).
• We then ventured into deconstructing the powerful habit formation process and arrived a 3-step loop framework to describe it for Marketing purposes: cue-routine-reward.
• We saw how the innovative combination of qualitative insight and predictive analytics can lead to windfall $$ profits (Reading 3-Target and reading 4-Febreze)
• Finally we saw how unstructured respondent interaction personified by a focus group discussion (FGD) can be a powerful qualitative tool for digging up customer insights.

Session 4 HW details:Pls read the contemporary caselet given below, from last month's Economist magazine. It deals with a story on how to help professional chess gain fans. A sporting chance - how fans plan to revive Chess

IN LONDON in April, a 22-year-old Norwegian turned cartwheels by the Thames. Magnus Carlsen, the world’s top-ranked chess player (and a model for G-Star RAW, a fashion firm) had just earned the right to challenge for the World Chess Championship in India next month. His battle against Viswanathan Anand, a 43-year-old Indian and world champion since 2007, is a long-awaited spectacle. Match organisers see a chance to turn a struggling sport into a global brand. Time was when the world stopped for professional chess. Millions watched Bobby Fischer, an American, beat the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky in 1972. In the 1990s a pair of matches between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue, a computer, recaptured some of that suspense. Yet despite booming interest in the amateur game, top-level chess has become obscure again, hobbled by squabbles and eccentric leadership.Enthusiasts spy a comeback. Last year Andrew Paulson, an American businessman based in London, bought rights to stage the game’s most prestigious contests, including November’s duel. For $500,000 the World Chess Federation (FIDE) granted Mr Paulson media and marketing licences for a decade—and the chance to make chess a profitable enterprise.The game itself has plenty of fans. Research in five countries by YouGov, a pollster, found that more than two-thirds of adults have played at least once. FIDE says 605m do so regularly. In India, where Mr Anand is a national hero, nearly a third of adults claim to play every week. The internet and smartphones mean novices no longer need a friend to play. Susan Polgar, a Hungarian-American grandmaster, says about 35 countries include chess in school curricula.But grassroots enthusiasm has not raised the profile of the professional game. Critics gripe about mercurial decision-making within FIDE. The sport’s governing body gets by on some $2m a year (FIFA, football’s federation, spent more than $1 billion in 2012) and has had only two presidents in 31 years.

So Mr Andrew paulson wants to do to world Chess what Kerry Packer did to world cricket, perhaps... The challenge clearly is to kickstart the virtuous cycle of more fans --> more advertiser interest --> more ad revenues --> more talent drawn in --> more competition --> more fans... How to get this cycle going is the Q. Clearly, the topic isn't as esoteric as it may first look. Football and Hockey in India suffer too from trying to kickstart this virtuous cycle in the shadow of big brother Cricket, for instance.The FGD then is partly a brainstorming session (from the firms' viewpoint) and partly an opining & evaluation (from a potential fan's viewpoint) of various possibilities. It may involve first trying to define what chess is or means to fans, what more it can come to represent, how to expand and leverage its present connect etc. Analogies with other sports such as cricket may come in as well, perhaps... I don't want to write more and bias the storylines you may come up with.

A deeper challenge is that watching chess is less fun than playing it. A single game can last six hours; its most riveting moment may be a strategic nuance known as the Yugoslav variation on the Sicilian. “Good chess leads to draws,” says Maurice Ashley, an American grandmaster. Mr Ashley believes that new game and tournament formats could attract a wider audience. Competitors in blitz chess must finish their games in half an hour. Matches lasting minutes make popular footage online. Yet many players resist fast games, arguing that they reward low-quality chess. FIDE’s enthusiasm for shorter championships in the 1990s and 2000s prolonged the professional game’s split.Lengthy duels could still flourish if packaged well. Golf’s slow pace does not stop big audiences following four-day tournaments; in the cricket-playing world, witty commentary keeps fans tuned to games that last five days. Lately ESPN, a broadcaster, has turned poker, spelling bees and Frisbee-flinging (see article) into tense, dramatic television.Mr Paulson, who made a fortune in Russian internet ventures, says chess matches can make “heart-gripping, heart-pounding entertainment”. (He is standing for president of the English Chess Federation on October 12th.) He plans more competitions in big cities beyond Russia and eastern Europe, where many now take place. In March he launched ChessCasting, a web application that offers statistics and commentary on big events as well as discussion boards for amateur pundits. He talks of reporting competitors’ sweating, eye movement and heart rate.Chess needs deep-pocketed backers to complete this transformation. Mr Paulson thinks firms will want to associate with a game that is “clean, pure and meritocratic”. But he has not yet announced any big new sponsors. “One mistake has been assuming it would be easier,” he says. A cartwheeling world champion might help.

Submission format:

• Title slide of your PPT should have your group name, member names and PGIDs
• Next slide write your D.P. and R.O.(s) clearly.
• Third slide, introduce the FGD participants and a line or so on why you chose them (tabular form is preferable for this)
• Fourth Slide, write a bullet-pointed exec summary of the big-picture take-aways from the FGD
• Fifth Slide on, describe and summarize what happened in the FGD
• Note if unification and / or polarization dynamics happened in the FGD
• Name your slide groupname_FGD.pptx and drop in the appropriate dropbox by the start of session 6

Any queries etc., pls feel free to email me.Update 1: FGD HW guidelines:A few more thoughts, guidelines on the FGD HW for this session. To keep it focussed and brief, lemme use the bullet-points format

• The point of the FGD is *not* to 'solve' the problem, but merely to point a likely direction where a solution can be found. So don't brainstorm for a 'solution', that is NOT the purpose of the FGD.
• Ensure the D.P. and R.O.s are aligned and sufficiently exploratory before the FGD can start. Different ROs lead to very different FGD outcomes. For example, if you define your R.o. as "Explore which advertising themes enable high levels of fan-connect" versus "Explore potential fan-connect across different chess formats", etc.
• Keep your D.P. and R.O. tightly focussed, simple and do-able in a mini-FGD format. Having too broad a focus or too many sub-topics will lead nowhere in the 30 odd minutes you have.
• Start broad: Given an R.O., explore how people connect with or relate to sports in general, their understanding of what constitutes a 'sports fan', their understanding of what constitutes 'excitement', memorability', 'social currency' or 'talkability' in a sport and so on. You might want to start with *sports* in general and not narrow down to chess right away (depending on the constructs you seek, of course).
• Prep the moderator well: The moderator in particular has a crucial role. Have a broad list of constructs of interest, Focus on getting them enough time and traction (without being overly pushy). For example, the mod could start by asking the group: "What do you think connects people to sports?" and get the ball rolling, then steer it to keep it on course.
• Converge on Chess in detail: After exploring sports in general, explore the particulars of chess as a sport - what is it, how is it viewed or understood, what is the perception of people who play or follow the game, how can it be made more trendy etc.
• Do some background research on chess and its history first. Know what different game formats have been proposed and tried. E.g., apart from 'blitz chess', there is 'chess by jury' in which two groups of people individually vote for the best next move and the move with the highest votes is played on giant screens, etc.
• See where people agree in general, change opinions on interacting with other people on any topic, disagree sharply on some topics and stand their ground etc.
• In your PPT report, mention some of the broad constructs you planned to explore via the FGD.
• Report (among other things) what directions seem most likely to be fruitiful for investigation.

External Speaker talk dates:Would've gone with next week Sunday after the midterms but its Diwali. Now I'm thinking of Friday 8-Nov, Sat 9-Nov or Sun 10-Nov Evening between 4 and 6 pm. If you have strong objections to this, pls let me know. Else I will pickup 10-Nov Sunday 4-6pm as the tentative date for the external speaker.Session 5 preview:We'll cover Segmentation and Targeting in session 5. This is both a theory and R heavy session. There'll be illustrative dummy examples as well as live exercises galore.That's it for now, more later.