Being an apprentice is not looked down on at Trinity McQueen. I am not taken for granted and I am not patronised. Instead, I am a valued team member, I am respected in the office and I am happy.  I am living the fun part of University; working, earning, and visiting my friends who are plotted around the country for a boogie on a weekend.  And I, like my University friends, will get a qualification that will help me progress and do well in my life.

In 2016/17 alone, 12.5 million work days were lost due to stress, depression and anxiety. This is clearly a significant problem which employers are thankfully nowadays doing more to tackle. However, there is still a stigma attached to these type of health issues which companies are starting to challenge.

The story of Le Tour and L’Auto / L’Équipe (2 sports papers competing for dominance in France) shows that then, as now, a compelling story goes a long way to creating a captive audience and getting people to engage with your brand. And what is more compelling than an epic sporting contest where there are heroes and villains every year?

Companies now have the infrastructure to be able to create more meaningful engagement with their customers through hyper-personalisation, and no industry has showcased this more effectively than the entertainment and media sector - where streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix have strived to refine their complex recommendation engines.

He’s got a beard, skinny jeans and heavily tattooed arms but he’s drinking a piña colada…so is he still a hipster?  She’s wearing a flowery tea dress, has a sensible bob and is lovingly making her family’s packed lunches but she’s blasting out hip hop on her stereo…so is she still mumsy?  His hair is styled, he’s watching Netflix on his phone, but his expression tells you he’s not ‘living his best life’ …so is he still a millennial?   Can we really trust the ‘signs of self’ that we’ve become accustomed to using to understand cultures and subcultures?

Confirmation bias teaches us that people tend to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses. In other words, they can look for the story they want or expect to see. Businesses can therefore fall into a complacency trap, particularly if they are doing well or experiencing high growth. By finding a ‘burning platform’, this can help drive home the need for change.

It’s safe to say the video game market is flourishing. Asides from the flood of gaming systems and software available, the market is experiencing disruption in how consumers pay for gaming content. There is a shift from the traditional one-off upfront payment model to what is known as microtransactions, which are extra payments made within a game after the initial purchase to gain access to even more content - be it levels, characters, costumes or the ability to progress in the game.

The AQR’s Eyes Wide Open series brings together speakers from adjacent disciplines to examine a common theme. The most recent, on the evening of June 7th was on the subject of Human Packaging, asking the question what do we reveal by the way we present ourselves?

In January Facebook announced they were taking a new direction to strive towards more meaningful interactions on the platform.  It was a move to strengthen relationships between users and business pages.  Since then, however, we’ve seen controversy over data privacy and a growing lack of trust in the protection of personal data with such scandals including Facebook themselves.

The voluntary sector is thriving in Leeds because of the passion and tenacity of leaders and local people. But they have gaps in specific skills. They also have services we can use for our business purposes. Here are our top five ways we feel businesses, including ours, can support local voluntary and charity organisations:

Every once in a while, you have those rare days where you experience a magical moment that leaves you feeling supercharged, grateful, humbled, awe-inspired even.  Today was one of those days for me personally.  And as I often find, it involved getting out of the office. Myself and my colleague Becki spent the morning seeing with our very own eyes how our company investment in the Leeds Community Foundation is helping to support several communities and charities in Leeds – the city in which our Head Office is proud to be based. 

Trinity McQueen London has appointed Mich Preston as Research Director to expand its qualitative consultancy.  Preston joins during an unprecedented period of growth for agency, as it adds a string of new clients, including Debenhams, John Lewis and the IGD.  A retail specialist, Mich has 15 years’ experience and arrives from ABA Research, where she worked with some of UK’s leading brands. 

Even before a ball had been kicked, we knew the World Cup might be a nice boost for the economy – reports suggest that sales of 55” or bigger TVs increased by 140% at John Lewis on the first day of the tournament and overall TV sales are double this time last year. Then it happened. Kane’s last-minute winner vs. Tunisia. The thumping of Panama and England’s first penalty shoot out win at a major tournament for 22 years and first ever in a World Cup. Cue World Cup Fever.

It was a drizzly day in Greater Manchester when I decided that I was going to pursue a degree in History (I’m pretty sure the late 90s classic film Anastasia had a lot to answer for). I loved my degree, and I took the opportunity to learn as many things as I physically could. Everything linked together, in quite a delicious fashion, but after writing two dissertations about Soviet film and 1980s American media, I was ready to apply my skills to something more practical. But where to go?

Achieving trust is the holy grail for brands. Kantar Millward Brown’s BrandZ study  showed that over 10 years, brands with above average trust grew by 170%, whilst those with below average trust shrunk by 13%.  Despite the clear benefits of brands driving trust, it seems that trusting a brand or company is becoming the exception rather than the norm as consumers have an increased sense of ‘us against them’.