Naked hires psychologist to help drive consumer insights

Naked Communications has hired the agency’s third psychologist, Brooke Ward, previously a research fellow at Deakin University.  

Naked hires psychologist to help drive consumer insights Brooke 112x150

Brooke Ward

Adam Ferrier, Naked consumer psychologist and founding partner, said: “There isn’t that much insight in this business, lots of stating the bleeding obvious with an enthusiastic power-point presentation – but not much genuine human insight.

“We are obsessed with ensuring we do communications that result in behavioural change, and psychologists learn scientifically validated frameworks that help us not only understand, but predict human behaviour.”

Brooke will be working on a number of clients in Naked’s Melbourne, as well on the agency’s insights products.

She joins Simon Thatcher and Ferrier who are both consumer psychologists.

Cricket Australia recently appointed Naked Melbourne to handle its brand strategy and consumer insights. The work covers at all aspects of cricket in the country and how the various forms of the game are communicated.

March 24th, 2010 at 2:13 pm

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Comments


  1. Adro
    24 Mar 10
    3:08 pm

    2. Insight is more art than science. I’m yet to meet a psychologist (reductionist and mechanistic trained thinkers) with an original insight not out of a text book or based on a pathology. Sure you can packaged it up with some “enthusiastic power-point” and make it look good but.

  2. Peter Williams
    24 Mar 10
    3:49 pm

    3. @Adro

    Wasn’t Einstein a reductionist?

  3. Tom
    24 Mar 10
    4:17 pm

    4. Naked cricket. Finally the ladies will tune in!

  4. @peter williams
    24 Mar 10
    4:58 pm

    5. No, integrative and holistic….his best ideas came from day dreams not logic and thinking about the big picture.

  5. Peter Williams
    24 Mar 10
    5:40 pm

    6. Here is a quote from Einstein’s 1905 black body radiation or ‘Light Quantum’ paper that he won his Nobel prize for. Please respond with a quote from a marketing psychology report that is more reductionist.

    3. On the Entropy of the Radiation
    The following considerations are contained in a famous paper
    by Mr. W. Wien and are only mentioned here for the sake of
    completeness.
    Consider radiation which takes up a volume v. We assume that
    the observable properties of this radiation are completely deter-
    mined if we give the radiation energy p(v) for all frequencies.t
    As we may assume that radiations of different frequencies can be
    separated without work or heat, we can write the entropy of the
    radiation in the form
    S = VIO* (NP, V)
    dv,
    where 4 is a function of the variables p and v. One can reduce cf,
    to a function of one variable only by formulating the statement
    that the entropy of radiation between reflecting walls is not
    changed by an adiabatic compression. We do not want to go into
    this, but at once investigate how one can obtain the function 4
    from the radiation law of a black body.
    If the temperature of a black-body radiation in a volume u = 1
    increases by dT, we have the equation
    or, as a4/ap is independent of V:
    dS = !
    ? dE.
    aP
    As dE is equal to the heat transferred and as the process is
    reversible, we have also
    1
    dS = 2 dE.
    T
    Through comparing, we get
    84- 1
    ap T*
    —
    This is the black-body radiation law. One can thus from the

  6. Ricki
    24 Mar 10
    5:56 pm

    7. woah

  7. magic monkey
    24 Mar 10
    10:58 pm

    8. @PeterW—a bit off topic, albeit you hammered home your point.

    Personally, I don’t think physics and psychology are quite the same thing, as much as many would like to think it is. perhaps down at a sub-quantum-level, there will invariably be links between all sciences, but that’s still now a work in progress.

    Powerpoint presentations are always good to impress bored execs in a meeting, especially if their own IT skills don’t reach those dizzying heights.

  8. Saywhat
    25 Mar 10
    9:29 am

    9. @peter williams….very dull and you missed the point….you can only cut something up into smaller bits if you see the whole first

  9. Larry
    25 Mar 10
    9:33 am

    10. i reckon it’s the right approach … would much prefer to listen to a psychologist than a hysterical rambling ‘strategist’ telling me the sky is falling.

  10. mike wilson
    25 Mar 10
    11:18 am

    11. we’ve got ‘hysterical rambling strategists’ as well!

  11. Freud
    25 Mar 10
    11:52 am

    12. Will clients also lie on a lounge for agency meetings?

  12. Jane
    26 Mar 10
    10:56 am

    13. All Psychology does is package complex human constructs, such as behaviour, into neat little constructs so that they are easy to understand, can be used in research and used to predict human behaviour. Most psychological research gathers information from “real people” – it just surveys a lot of them at once or interviews them and then summarises these findings into an easy to understand way. For example, “conscientiousness” is a construct that is used a lot in personality research – but underneath that construct is a number of different behaviours – such as always getting somewhere on time, organises time etc. Conscientiousness has been found to be a good predictor of job performance (just after cognitive ability) so if you are looking for a new person to fill a role you will ask them or give them a valid and reliable questionnaire about conscientiousness. So instead of flying blind – Psychology gives the job hirer a construct to focus on when judging a new job applicant and knows that this construct is a good predictor of job performance (based on research).

  13. anon
    26 Mar 10
    1:06 pm

    14. As a marketer who has an undergrad degree in psychology and post-grad in marketing, I think this is a very good step in the right direction.

    I think there is a danger of marketing taking what I would loosely call ‘pop psychology’ as fact.

    For example, I remember in my marketing classes being taught Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as if it was fact. However in psychology, and even the ‘reliable’ source of Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.....y_of_needs – under ‘Criticisms’ ), although it sounds like a good logical idea, there is little to no evidence that this happens in real life. I think this is a good example as to why a greater level of scientific accountability is required in marketing.

  14. Mr Corbett
    26 Mar 10
    1:24 pm

    15. “we’ve got ‘hysterical rambling strategists’ as well!”
    Mike – I thought Baxter had gone?
    Boom tish!