The celebrated professor, historian and philosopher, Theodore Zeldin was on the Radio 4 Today programme last Friday extolling the virtues of proper serious conversation designed to discover what other people really think. He has sponsored a 'Feast of Conversation' weekend to encourage complete strangers to talk through a menu of conversation topics over a meal. The intention is to get well beyond small talk into big topics like: aspirations, anxieties, fears, desires, hope and despair.
Could this be applied to brands and the way they understand the individuals who buy from them or don't. Should brand managers or advertising planners sit down for a meal with customers or prospects and run through just such a conversation menu. It has the potential to reveal considerably more than the average "depth" interview and provides the ability to come at consumer motivations, attitudes and behaviours from quite oblique angles, which as the leading economist John Kay maintains in his new book, may well be the best way to find winning solutions. Food for thought. Quite literally in this instance.
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