Family, Food & Fun: Research on family meals

Back in January 2009, we completed a qualitative research project exploring the topic of food and family meals for the BC Dairy Foundation and the BC Ministry of Healthy Living & Sport.


The existing facts on family meals had already established a link between eating together and a multitude of mental, physical and social benefits. However, in order to properly understand the topic, there was a need to move beyond facts and explore the feelings behind family meals.


Through our research, we found that meals involve much more than food and function, facts and figures. Meals bring together nutrition and emotion in our minds. Meals are about love. Meals are about friendship. Meals are about fun, and, most importantly, meals are about family.


Below is a presentation that shares some of our research on family meals, and the insights it uncovered. If you’d like more information on this research, or tips on how to reconnect family, food and fun, you should check out Better Together BC.

Interesting Vancouver 2009


If you live in or around Vancouver, you may like to check out Interesting Vancouver 2009. It’s a multi-disciplinary conference that’s being held the evening of Friday October 23rd at The Vancouver Rowing Club. According to its founder Brett Macfarlane, the objective of the conference is to “share new knowledge, things you’ve never known, or thought about.”

The evening has attracted a pretty eclectic mix of speakers, including journalists, creatives, foodies and researchers. At some stage during the evening, I’ll be sharing some research on the psychology of trust (how trust builds for people and brands).

If you’re interested in attending, you can get tickets
here. This is a not-for-profit initiative, so the prices are pretty reasonable.

How Brand Trust affects New Products & Services

In a recent North American study on brand trust, we found that when people trust a brand, 78% will give its new products and services a chance.

Why is this statistic important? Because according to Prof. Gerald Zaltman, “approximately 80% of all new products or services fail within six months or fall significantly short of forecasted profits.”
Reducing new product risk

New products and services involve risk. They involve risk for companies who must develop and launch their new product or service, but they also involve risk for customers, who must gamble their salaries and satisfaction on the promise of something new. According to the innovation expert
Robert Cooper, success is all about managing this risk, in fact, “if risk is to be managed successfully, the uncertainties of outcomes must be deliberately driven down as the stakes increase.”

This is where brand trust can play a role for companies and customers, because brand trust helps manage risk by reducing uncertainty. For example, the brand trust built by Apple, reduces the risk and uncertainty of buying a new MacBook Air. Similarly, the brand trust built by Google, reduces the risk and uncertainty for customers when they buy a new online advertising service.

Increasing new product success


When it comes to innovation, companies and customers have a lot in common; they both want something new, but neither of them wants to take a risk. This makes brand trust important, because when people trust a brand, 78% will give its new products and services a chance.

So if your company wants to improve its innovation success rate, or help prepare the market for innovation to come, perhaps you should start by building brand trust.

(If you'd like help measuring and building brand trust,
give us a call).

Informer or Meformer: Which twitter type are you?

There was an interesting comment posted yesterday by Bradley Hughes (thanks mate), highlighting a recent study from Rutgers University. 
The study examined the message content of 350 randomly selected twitter users and found two key clusters (or types) of user, Meformers & Informers. 
According to the researchers, "twitter users represents two different types of content camps; the majority of users focus on the self, while a smaller set of users are driven more by sharing information." So the question is, which twitter type are you?