In the summer’s hottest movie, Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio plays the role of Domenic, the Extractor – a thief who steals ideas for his clients by entering others’ dreams. Extraction is routine to Domenic, but his newest challenge, Inception, is far more difficult. It requires the placement of an idea in someone’s mind.
Point man Arthur, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, poses a familiar question, “So how do you translate a business strategy into an emotion?” That question represents one of the biggest challenges in brand research (optimization, tracking, loyalty). While it is routine to extract information on functional attributes and personal benefits from market research respondents, the emotional stuff, (e.g. how does doing business with X, or using Y product, make you feel?) is much tougher to extract.
Psychologists tell us that emotions precede rational thinking. And rational thinking often justifies a decision that has already been made through an emotional response. In the movie, Domenic wants to implant an emotional response that will spur action, and is justified by a rational business strategy.
As market researchers, we are often tasked with the same challenge of helping clients turn emotional responses into business strategy (without the ability to leap into people’s minds). As a starting point, we often attack this issue by using qualitative techniques such as projection, laddering and mind mapping which are designed to explore consumers’ emotional responses.
- Projection exercises include analogies, collages, and other metaphorical techniques including thought bubbles and storytelling that help reveal hidden motives and emotions, and personification that ascribes personality traits to an image, e.g. for use in packaging research.
- Laddering techniques are used to uncover a person’s goals and core values and how they relate to product attributes. The technique begins with a product’s attributes and ladders on the consequences and then values associated with that attribute, in an A-C-V chain, or ladder.
- Mind mapping is used to extend an individual’s thinking about a product, company or topic, often leading to emotional discoveries. Beyond simply asking why, mind mapping moves a person beyond a single thought or experience to previously unidentified associations.
Try these techniques for exploring and uncovering the emotional underpinnings of your brand…and enjoy the movie!
Posted by Kathy Ofsthun. Kathy is a Sr. Project Manager at CMB. She is an avid hiker and swimmer, and is a humble new owner of a home built in 1694
This past week’s episode of the always awesome show Mad Men (episode 2, season 4) highlighted the ongoing disconnect between agency creatives and market research that most everyone in the market research industry has experienced at one point or another in their career.
In the episode, the newly formed agency of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is visited by a consumer-research company who wants to help the agency go beyond the surface of consumer behaviors and better understand their true motivations. The company's female representative, Dr. Faye Miller, asks senior staffers to complete a questionnaire as an example of what can be learned (the 0:57 mark of the recap below), leading to groans and the head of creative, Don Draper, to simply leave the room. Viewers of the show will recognize that Don’s departure was most likely driven by the first question, "How do you feel about your father?" Still, the faces in the room did point out how agencies tend to regard market research.
So, why do agencies have a problem with market research firms? I think there is shared blame in four primary areas.
Not speaking the same language: Perhaps it is a left brain/right brain thing, or maybe it is because no two groups of professionals that work together are trained in more different ways, but the natural conflict between the analytical, risk reducing market researcher and the free expression and boundary pushing creative executive often makes the dichotomy between the two roles contentious from the start. To work in tandem, both sides need to recognize this difference in approach and find a common ground up front that will help the findings be more useful and give creatives information that helps their process instead of undermining it.
Data Presentation: Market researchers generally present findings in charts and graphs with a heavy focus on the numbers, not the story. Agency folks are focused on creating stories using pictures and video. While creating research reports that fit the intended audience (using a majority of verbatim, imagery, and even video instead of charts and tables) will not solve everything, it will help focus the conversation on things that really matter.
Pride of Authorship: Agencies, and particularly creative teams within agencies have a healthy pride of authorship/confidence level about the work that they do. Don Draper, for one, is the king of thinking he knows better than consumers themselves. This trait helps agencies deliver more than the status quo, and can also lead to the dismissal of research results. Agencies and research firms need to have a healthy conversation about the validity of research findings and do so in a constructive way that is working with, not against the creative pride.
Clarity of Purpose: Agencies and market research firms often come at an engagement from completely different angles that make it hard for those of us on the research side. In many cases, agencies believe that research firms are being brought in to “judge” what they are doing, where as researchers see their role as providing input into the creative process. Again, clear communication at the beginning and throughout the project about the process, objectives, and use of the findings can help smooth this tension so that both sides are working towards a common goal; a happy client (and one that is easier to take than Lee Garner, Jr.).
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, his family, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
Don Draper might not have used it, but you can download our report on Engaging Consumers in the New Normal for free here.
A recent article on Boston.com, “How facts backfire: Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains” caught my attention for several reasons – some intellectual and some, well, personal.
As an employee of a company who used to have a tag line “Information for Decision-Making,” I believe in the value of facts in reducing risk and guiding strategic decisions, I love data and weaving a story from information gathered in our custom market research studies. I make my living from sharing facts! However, true confession here, as the liberal wife of a man who considers
Fox’s reporting “fair and balanced,” I recognize
my reluctance to accept political information presented as facts,
particularly from certain sources.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789: “Whenever people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” It is one of the primary underlying assumptions of modern democracy: people, furnished with facts, will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. However, recent political science studies by researchers at the University of Michigan have found that facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, they found the opposite. When misinformed people (particularly political partisans) were presented with corrected information, they rarely changed their mind. Some became more strongly set in their unfounded beliefs.
While more research is being done to understand why when we have things wrong – we can be so sure that we’re right – and why we’re unwilling to “admit we were wrong,” researchers believe part of the answer is in the way our brains are wired. People, generally, seek consistency; we accept and interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing our preexisting views (…anyone want to debate the presence of WMD in Iraq? You get the drift…).
While poli-sci researchers are working on the young field of “political mis-perception,” several points of interest were noted: (1) One avenue may involve self-esteem…if you feel good about yourself you’ll listen. If you feel threatened and agitated, you are less likely to listen to dissenting opinions; (2) Hitting people between the eyes with objective facts that contradict current beliefs – particularly if it can be done in an interactive way - seems to force many to adjust their opinions.
With that as background, then, as market researchers it is essential to be conscious of not just the facts we are presenting, but how they are presented. Three ways to make sure the facts don’t fall on deaf ears
- Make sure to go beyond gathering “information you want” and towards “what decisions you will make” as a result of the information. This means gathering input from key managers or executives about their beliefs and hypothesis and building them into the research plan. This approach helps on two fronts: (1) by hypothesis gathering, you can confirm managers’ beliefs on some factors while presenting new information on others… “you were right;” and (2) by focusing on the business decision (not a single fact), you get past the “I don’t believe that fact” problem and support forward movement of the business.
- Engage information users in positive interactive and engaging meetings at key points in the project – planning/kick-off, analysis review, presentations. And do this in a way that welcomes contrarian points of view and respects all participants. This avoids people questioning the “facts” at the end, when it is too late to make changes and makes it easier for non-believers to dismiss the information completely.
- Know your audience and share with them in a way that is comfortable. It sounds simplistic, but some people want pictures and stories, others want facts and data. Some want to be hands on the whole way through and others want a final summary. By knowing the audience, you can build a report that tells a story and makes “facts” relevant, interesting, and easy to act on.
Posted by Judy Melanson. Judy leads the Travel & Entertainment practice and loves collaborating with clients on driving customer loyalty. She's the mom of two teens and the wife of an oyster farmer. Follow Judy on Twitter at @Judy_LC
In my blog post about multi-source, multi-method research last week I talked about the explosion in qualitative techniques over the past few years. Tomorrow’s webinar about Innovations in Product and Service Development Research touches on some of the recent improvements in quantitative research as well.
The webinar starts at Noon ET and will feature CMB's Rich Schreuer and Amy Modini as they share the latest best practices and case studies from their years of conducting product and service development research across verticals. (Click here to watch).
If you’d like to see how some of these techniques feel from a respondent perspective, click on the link for each to go through our demo questionnaires.
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, his family, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
I spent most of this week at the 2010 Shopper Insights in Action Conference, which is always one of my favorite events of the year because unlike many market research related conferences the attendees are eager to push the edges and try new and different ways to understand consumers. Even though they employ traditional techniques, they are hardly wed to them and epitomize the concept of multi-method, multi-source research (using multiple types of data and data sources to answer a question.)
We’ve been talking about multi-source, multi-method for years at CMB, but it is pretty amazing how much the landscape has changed even in just the last four years. Searching through the article archives I found a 2006 article that laid out many of the available qualitative tools, and it feels (how do I say this nicely?) a bit outdated.
While a quick perusal of today’s list is a bit overwhelming, I am certain there are plenty of options that I failed to include. There is both a challenge and an opportunity in the fact that consumers are smarter than ever and willing to provide more robust and useful insights than ever before. Between technology that simulates real world experiences and improvements in our ability to listen to consumers in their own environment, there is no shortage of ways to give and receive feedback. The hard part is choosing the right technique or set of techniques for a given situation and making sure that information users understand the biases and limitations of each.
With all of the available options, what new tools have you added to the tool box in the last 4 years?
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, his family, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
Last week I was riding home on the T (that's our subway here in Boston) and using my iPhone to check in on one of my fantasy baseball teams when I was recruited to take a CBS survey through their mobile app. After starting to participate (but not completing due to length) I came back to a question that is always on my mind when it comes to mobile research, are we as an industry spending too much time developing "mobile" ways of doing research instead of optimizing our online research for mobile devices?
For even the largest research firms, development time is limited and prioritizing resources is extremely important, so where should we be spending our time?
The case for truly mobile surveys: Conducting surveys using a mobile app allows you to recruit people to participate based on their mobile behaviors or enabling them to opt-in based on an activity they are currently participating in. It also ensures that the survey will be formatted correctly for use on the go. If you can keep it very short (a requirement for truly mobile surveys), you can get information at the point of experience that can guide improvements to the customer experience.
The case for mobile friendly surveys: As smartphone adoption continues to swell and the web browsers for even non-smartphones improve at a rapid pace, people are using their mobile devices as a primary, or at least heavily used secondary way to interact with the internet. This means that the people who are most interested in your products, services, etc. are checking and acting on their email from mobile devices. It also means that many of your "web" surveys are actually being completed via mobile devices. Or at least people are attempting to complete them via mobile devices. Researchers and panel companies need to recognize this fact and set parameters for layout and length that work with today's consumers.
So which is more important?
In the short term, I believe it is more important that every quantitative survey launched become mobile friendly and that how people are participating be asked up front. This may impact the ability to use interactive questions and shorten the attention span of the people you want to get feedback from, but failure to do this means that you could be making it impossible (or at least very difficult) for your target audiences to participate. After all, people who participate are a key audience for the market research industry and we all need to act in the way that best suits them and their evolving needs and behaviors.
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, his family, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
Jeffrey Henning (@jhenning), Kathryn Korostoff (@ResearchRocks) and I (@VirtualMR) are participating in the complimentary AMA MRC Virtual Event: Unveiling Marketing Research's Future Online on June 23 (hope you can join us!). Our session, "Tweet Off! Three MR Tweeps Bicker, Badger & Bust out of 140 Characters", will involve debates on the prickliest topics in market research.
As a lead-in to the discussion, I am serving as the verdict judge for an early debate between Kathryn and Jeffrey on the subject of self-reported respondent data.
Kathryn's point: "Self-reported information is not perfect. But it is less perfect in some cases than in others."
Jeffrey's counterpoint: "Respondents, as a group, have sufficient ability to self-report to provide valuable data for market researchers."
My Take:
No one would argue that self-reported data is perfect and any knowledgeable researcher would agree that some self-reported measures are better than others.
In her argument, Kathryn makes several good points about the well-known biases of self-reported data, such as over-reporting, impacts to post-behaviors, and social desirability (supported by research including Social Desirability Bias and the Validity of Indirect Questioning by Robert J. Fisher © 1993 Journal of Consumer Research Inc.)
Still, there are biases in every methodology. And as researchers, one of our roles is to identify, control, and consider these biases in designing and evaluating market research studies.
For example, behavioral/observational research beyond descriptive observational variables (just reporting the behavior that is observed) requires researchers to make inferences and evaluations, which introduces biases. Or in the case of using sales data, customer databases or scanner data are robust but often do not include all distribution channels.
So, instead of discarding some ‘less-than-perfect' self-reported data, there are several ways researchers can address the shortcomings of self-reported data to yield useful conclusions:
1) Review the self-reported results with a critical eye as part of a comprehensive, multi-mode research plan
2) Calibrate purchase intentions based on historical data vs. actual behavior (for example, 75% of top 3 box purchase intent actually purchase)
3) Assign relative value to Inflated self-reported expenditures (high, medium, low) for use in a segmentation or product development/launch study
My Verdict: Respondents, as a group, have a sufficient ability to self-report for market researchers to draw useful conclusions - as long as actual magnitudes and values are interpreted relatively rather than literally.
Posted by Cathy Harrison. Cathy is a senior project manager at CMB, loves social media, music, and kick-butt research. You can follow Cathy on Twitter at @virtualMR
Last week our client, Match.com, put out a press release citing some of our research about how the world of dating has changed over time (read more in the Washington Post) . In short, where there was once a stigma associated with the practice of online dating, that is no longer the case and it is an equally (if not more) viable way of meeting a mate than traditional methods.
Similarly, the debate over new vs. traditional methods in market research is one that has been burning up the market research related twitter conversation (#mr), blog posts, and conferences for ages but the increasing need to understand web conversations has brought it back to the forefront. Questions about the validity of website analysis, text analytics and sentiment analysis coupled with researchers' struggle to make sense of all of this unstructured data has led to the use and misuse of a wide array of tools. Others have covered the conversation already (see Jeffrey Henning's blog post: Social Media Research is Not the Same as Verbatim Coding), but I recall not that long ago debating the merits of online data collection and who was actually online anyway.
In the CMB archives we have numerous documents outlining the validity of the online channel that now almost seem laughable. I can't help but wonder if we'll feel the same way about these hotly debated topics three years from now.
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
Guest post from Jared Huizenga, CMB's Field Services Manager
There's a lot to consider when collecting international data. It's a whole different ball game outside the U.S. market. From methodologies to translations to project management, a lot needs to be taken into consideration-even in other English speaking countries. The first step to any successful international research project is choosing the right partner.
There are so many choices and they are not
all created equal. A single data collection partner will never be the right fit for every project. At CMB we have created our own Global Certified Network
to ensure we have the most well rounded pool of partners we can team up with on every project. Having our own certification process has allowed us to hold our data collection providers and partners to the same high level of expectations our clients have come to rely on us for.
To qualify for CMB's Global Certified Network our partners must agree to several strict requirements including industry standards, security requirements, data quality assurance, and project management guidelines. Some examples are...
- Industry Standards: All certified partners are required to comply with the ESOMAR
International Code on Market and Social Research. In addition, all vendors must comply with national, regional, and local laws. They also must sign Chadwick Martin Bailey's Confidentiality Agreement.
- Security Requirements: All partners are required take active measures with regards to respondent privacy. This is especially true when using client-provided sample lists. The partner must be CAN-SPAM
compliant and destroy all sample records at the end of a project-or at any time per Chadwick Martin Bailey's request.
- Data Quality Assurance: Partners must demonstrate that procedures are in place to guard against "bad" data and if any issues with data collection arise, partners are required to inform us immediately and offer proactive solutions. Partners must inform us upfront when they are using additional partners for data collection and they must give us the names of those additional partners if issues come up.
- Project Management Guidelines: Partners are required to provide a minimum of two points of contact and to respond to queries and requests from the CMB project staff as quickly as possible. Partners must also agree to participate in frequent meetings to give us status updates.
These are just a few ways we ensure our partners share the same commitment and high standards we do when approaching each project. This certification has also allowed us to build an outstanding network of partners with some of the best and brightest companies in our industry.
Posted by Jared Huizenga is CMB's Field Services Manager. Jared is on the New England Barbecue Society's Board of Directors and is the pitmaster on a competition barbecue team.
Anheuser-Busch has always been part of my family. I was born in St. Louis and grew up a St. Louis Cardinals fan (while going to games at Busch Stadium). I also watched my father as he progressed up the A-B chain: when I was a toddler, I remember him drinking Busch; as a teenager, he moved on to Budweiser; and in my twenties, he achieved Michelob status (actually Michelob Light, since he was watching his weight).
Now that I have young children and am watching my budget, I've gone back to square one and am drinking Busch. (But, I'm not sure if I will be growing up to Budweiser or resurrected Schlitz, which has one of the more remarkable brand stories occurring right now - more on that in the future). A-B advertising is ingrained in my head: from Hoyt Axton singing the melodic "Head for the Mountains"...
...to the Budweiser Holiday Classic
So, when Ad Age posted an article about the Bud Light Drinkability campaign [Bud's Big Blunder: Letting Consultants Steer Brand (Ad Age)], I was quite interested; primarily, because the campaign didn't do much for me. I was even more interested in the article, though, since it relates to the gap between by-the-numbers strategic consultants and creative ad agencies. It left me calling out: "You really needed good market research to have made that succeed." In short, I strongly believe that this is a key area where highly effective market research applies.
There is a lot to learn from this- and I really think we (as market researchers) could have filled a role between the groups. Someone makes a comment in the article that "Marketing is a blend of art and science", and market research (when done right) bridges that gap. Comments in the article are quick to compartmentalize the pitch into rational vs. emotional (really, I have a difficult time differentiating between the two). In fact, we have to look at all successful advertising as having both objective (rational) claims and subjective (emotional) claims. You need to be clear on both components (when developing the creative), and succeed in delivering on both. In other words, even the most rational of advertising has a strong emotional component, and vice versa.
Effective implementation of a brand strategy must translate between the straight-line thinking (science) and the non-linear creativity (art). The challenge we face is that often both sides do not know how the translation occurs; in fact, it requires a different skill set. One side loves data; while the other side fears it. One side informs through numbers; the other side informs through stories. Through effective research, we can provide useful information to make decisions and tell stories.
Example: We overcome this by applying several techniques and types of questions to unveil this information. One project we conducted for a Fortune-500 brand illustrates this very well. The client asked us to conduct a segmentation to define the market in a manner for them to position their brands to maximize market share. The brands had already established positions as premium versus low cost, but it is a price-competitive market, and the client had difficulty defining the value elements to differentiate them. Each brand needed to deliver unique benefits so that they would not cannibalize share. Management consultants were brought in, and they made the case very simple: treat one brand as premium and the other as low cost. However, the marketing vice president found it to be difficult to implement when defining the products/services and when developing the creative campaigns.
This is where we came in. We conducted a thorough research project to define the preferences, needs, brand attitudes, and demographics within the market. The methodology included advanced conjoint designs and simple, yet highly focused, attitudinal statements.
We identified, defined, and "gave life" to unique groups of customers that enabled the client to position her brands in the market. The research maintained the initial structure of Premium versus Low Cost while establishing quantifiable value and opportunities for each of the brands; additionally, the vice president had information she could weave into stories and real-world examples to inform product development and the ad agency. The results have been noteworthy advertisements that weave together strong emotional and rational benefits, and strong brand growth through difficult economic conditions of the past several years.
Could the vice president have been able to connect all of the different groups in her organization without our research? Possibly. (She has not risen to her position through blind luck). Did she increase her chances of successfully uniting all of the groups by turning to us to provide the information she needed? Definitely.
And this is where Anheuser-Busch appears to have dropped the ball. The brand managers left the opportunity for miscommunication and misdirection between two very unique groups of thinkers. In the end, neither group had the information and ability (or possibly desire) to speak to the other.
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Posted by Jeff McKenna. Jeff is a senior consultant at CMB and a lover of the mid-west, beer, and brand alignment.