Oct 10, 2025 | Brands, Stories
Homebase featured on our High Streets (or more often Retail Parks) for over 40 years, but the name has now disappeared. The BBC Radio 4 programme: Toast covered Homebase recently: Sliced Bread – Toast – Homebase – BBC Sounds AMSR can track the...
Oct 8, 2025 | Brands, Research methods and industry insights, Stories
The news of the sad death of Jilly Cooper brings to mind the report in the Archive on the Sunday Times and other quality newspaper circulation trends in the sixties. This was illustrated by a hand-drawn chart, as this was before the invention of Powerpoint. As can be...
Sep 29, 2025 | Brands, Stories
When a brand exists in different formats, its owners can apply portfolio management to maximise its fortunes. Examining user patterns for Guinness over a 25-year period, using TGI data held within AMSR, illustrates this perfectly. Guinness has several formats:...
Feb 24, 2025 | Advertising and media, Brands, Stories
In the 2025 film Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy the much-loved lead character is still portrayed as a wine drinker, as she was in the original Bridget Jones’s Diary book of 1996 and the 2001 film. Back then her liking was for chardonnay, usually in a large glass....
Nov 27, 2024 | Advertising and media, Brands, Stories
Sometimes a TV campaign can have a positive effect on an entire category as well as the brand in question. That’s what happened with the vermouth brand Cinzano in the 1970s and 1980s. Vermouth was considered a Christmas drink by many, and one of Cinzano’s strategy...
Feb 23, 2024 | Advertising and media, Brands, Stories
In the late fifties ICI was Britain’s only truly global conglomerate and in its Paints Division there was already a free-standing market research company, called Household Product Research Ltd. As management trainees there, four new graduates were put through the mill...
