Neil Harrison
My name is Neil Harrison; I’m Planning Director at TMP. The role I undertook on the E.ON re-branding project was to make sure that a great programme of research we were undertaking was co-ordinated; that we were talking to all the right people at the right time; that we were asking all the appropriate questions and all that research was co-ordinated within a very short, concise period of time.
We started working with E.ON. E.ON were fantastically meticulous and thorough about the research they wanted us to undertake. Research took 2 or 3 months; we did both qualitative research involved in focus groups and a lot of telephone interviews. We also did quantitative research; so we were fairly confident that the conclusions that the research had come to were valid and robust.
The research wasn’t just research for the sake of itself; the research had to conform to the creative work we subsequently delivered. One of the themes underpinning that was the ‘Wind of Change’. You may well have seen a lot of TV advertising based exactly on that premise; and our work had to fit hand in glove with that so we were very keen to leverage all the impact that the TV advertising made.
We did a lot of creative conceptualising on the basis of that and that took probably around 2 or 3 weeks to come up with creative work that we thought was absolutely super. We ran a number of focus groups both externally so we spoke with call centre people; we spoke with retail people just to get a feeling of if you saw this work in the press; if you saw this work online, what would it mean to you; would you be attracted by it; what would be your reaction to it?