Beyond the Focus Group
Beyond the Focus Group
Imagine telling a 13-year-old that she has to find someone to take her to Borders so she can purchase the just-released album by her favourite boy band. She’d likely roll her eyes and pronounce, “WHATEVER,” as she typed a few things into her laptop and within moments accessed the songs, including cover art, downloaded via the Internet. Or, perhaps you tell a 25-year-old collector of video-game memorabilia that he has to scour weekend flea markets and the like to find old Nintendo game cartridges for his prized collection. He’d shrug you off, do a quick search on an online auction site, and find exactly what he was looking for in a matter of seconds. No driving or in-person searching involved. Examples like this, of course, could go on for pages. Thanks to the power of the Internet, the way we live and work has changed drastically.
Virtually every segment of our personal and business lives has been transformed. Regardless of how you feel about all the changes technology has brought, a few things are certain: The Internet allows for lightning-fast speeds, near-instant gratification, efficiencies once only dreamed of, reduced costs, and super-streamlined processes and activities.
Like most industry segments, qualitative market research and its traditional focus group approach have not gone untouched in this Age of the Internet. Businesses and researchers have taken focus groups to the web in the form of blogs, communities, social forums and message boards. These outlets have streamlined the process of collecting insights and also made it more affordable.
But one has to ask: Are these web-based alternatives to focus groups perfect substitutes for the in-person variety? What happens when you lose the visual aspect of a candid, stream-of-consciousness response, body language and interpersonal connectivity? How much are you missing when you don’t see those eye rolls, shrugs, or even tears?
For purely quantitative research, text-based applications can produce speedy and useful data. For qualitative research, however, they aren’t going to stack up in the long run. The problem? Thoughts and opinions tapped out on a keyboard will never result in the kind of face-to-face, personal exchange researchers desire and hope to get from in-person focus groups - no matter how many emoticons are used. 
The expressions, the emotions, the personal connections, the stream-of-consciousness thoughts - these are all critical for good, worthwhile qualitative research. These candid, face-to-face, truthful experiences are the core of the connections between brands and their consumers, forming the basis of great qualitative research. Unfortunately, today’s online, text-based applications are inadequate for capturing this dynamic.
Video-based online platforms, however, do capture these crucial non-verbal, emotive and candid insights. Moderator questions are sent via video to the participant, who responds with a webcam, simulating a face-to-face meeting. In fact, the platform can be set up so one participant can see and interact with other participants via video exchange. These things can’t happen with only a keyboard and transcripts of conversations.
Qualvu have recognised this and are now the leader on online qualitative video based research
Here are four reasons why video-based online qualitative research using the Qualvu platform takes research to a whole new level. This asynchronous platform is not just an online version of a focus group: It creates unique dynamics for both the researcher and the participant that can result in remarkably deep levels of insight.
Reason 1 : The Convenience Factor
Online video-based qualitative research is participant-driven. The respondent’s time is time is respected and appreciated: They can respond to moderator questions via a webcam during a lunch break, after work from the comfort of their own home, or late at night after the house has quieted down. Participants respond at leisure, within the project timeline parameters, when they are relaxed, willing and ready to respond with their thoughts, attitudes and opinions in meaningful ways.
This convenience factor leads to better, richer, more thoughtful research. The participant is not feeling harried from cross-town travel or the like. They feel respected, they know participating online is a huge timesaver, and they can concentrate on the task at hand: providing those critical, valued “behind-the-glass” insights researchers and clients crave.
Reason 2: The Significance of Setting
Through this participant-driven video-based method, the researcher gets candour that can only be gathered in this comfortable, relaxed setting - candour crucial to steer campaigns, product development or brand creation (and everything in between).
Mobile “wireless” webcams allow for even deeper beyond-the-glass consumer insights. For example, a researcher could ask a participant to take the webcam with him through his kitchen, pointing out the most-used and most-loved cooking gadgets. In a conference room, the researcher would never be able to have access to this level of depth.
Reason3: The Absence of Peer Pressure
Online video-based qualitative research allows for a situation that is utterly void of alpha males and females. With the online video platform, the participant can have a one-on-one, intimate “conversation” with the moderator. The moderator’s questions are pre-recorded and delivered straight to the consumer, virtually face-to-face. Peer pressure is certainly not a factor, allowing for completely open responses from each participant. Researchers are able to gather insights from every member of the group, wallflowers included.
Reason 4: The Height of Content Intensity
In-person focus groups often result in quite low content intensity. (Content intensity is defined as the amount of insightful data generated by each person in the qualitative research session.) Peer pressure, of course, is a factor here.
Also, because of the nature of online applications, a project can be replicated across a number of locations, and adjustments can easily and quickly be made. For example, questions can be updated or added on the fly to optimize feedback. Finally, projects can be implemented with much more frequency than in-person focus groups due to cost savings and the inherent scalability of web-based platforms
The Best Organisation is a UK partner of Qualvu inc.
The customer journey - where will it end (or even begin?)
We’re hearing that phrase alot there days aren’t we - customer journey. Richard Greenhalgh blogged about it today on Brand Republic:
‘The phrase ‘customer journey’ is in vogue at the moment, and tends to be used in a wide variety of contexts. Tellingly more and more organisations are appointing internal ‘Customer Experience’ teams, though their remit or powers of execution are often unclear. The one thing that is certain however is that there is little consensus on what the customer journey truly means, and how using it effectively can benefit both businesses and consumers.’
The lack of consensus on what it means could well stem from the lack of understanding of where it starts. Does the customer’s journey start at the point at which they take action (e.g entering the supermarket, going online to book) or when they see your ad? Or does it start when they get those first rumblings of a need that isn’t yet fulfilled? In which case the journey could start months before any actually brand engagement or activity takes place. We would suggest it is the latter.
Every journey begins with an emotional trigger which drives the need - a point of realisation that I want something and right now I don’t have it. So in order to find relief from my pain of not having, I must go on a journey to find it. Every sales programme will tell you to ‘find the pain’ then position yourself or your product as the solution.
However, along the path to pain relief is a rollercoaster of excitement (that my need will be fulfilled) and anxiety (that maybe it won’t), disappointment (that it hasn’t been yet or may not be because there is a spanner in the works like a delayed flight or an out of stock product) and elation (finally I have got it!)
So our take would be that to understand the customer’s journey and give them the best possible experience of your product or service along the way, you must get under their skin and understand their emotional triggers and their emotional touchpoints - where and how does their pain turn into excitement and anticipation; what flips them into anxiety or disappointment, and what transmutes that back into elation and fulfillment?
‘Every interaction between customer and brand will have a direct influence on this journey and, ultimately, on the profitability and duration of the resulting relationship. But the reality is that businesses find it very difficult to join up the disparate silos to create an end to end view.’ writes Richard Greenhalgh.
When you map the customers’ emotional journey from trigger to relief (which means you really have to get to know your customers at the bottom of their hearts not just the top of their minds), what you need to do when, how and where to faciliate the best possible physical journey becomes so much more obvious and easier to implement. It becomes easier to see how those disparate silos need to work together. The end to end view is much more visible when you look at it through emotional eyes of your customers.
So if your pain is that you just don’t know your customers’ emotional map and how that relates to their physical journey with you, then allow us to give you some relief and provide it for you.
Brand loyalty – is it down to dopamine?
However, once the animal learns that the tone precedes the arrival of juice, the same neurons begin firing at the sound of the tone instead of the reward. Schultz calls these cells “prediction neurons” since they are more concerned with predicting rewards than receiving them. Once this pattern is memorised, the monkey’s dopamine neurons become exquisitely sensitive to variations on it. If the cellular predictions are correct, and the reward arrives right on time, then the primates experience a brief surge of dopamine, the pleasure of being right.’
These dopamine neuron signals are what allow us to make patterns and predictions in the real world. As long as the pattern is correct and the predicted reward follows, then we get our dopamine ‘fix’ and we feel good. So what does this mean for brand loyalty?
Well it seems reasonable to suggest that for brand-loyalists, their dopamine prediction pattern is that buying the brand gives them the reward of feeling good. And as long as the prediction of the reward is rewarded by ‘being right’, they’ll keep getting their dopamine.
There are however two other highly useful things to know about this in relation to buying behaviours and loyalty. Firstly there is the prediction error signal, which is how we learn what works and what doesn’t. If the event doesn’t produce the predicted reward, we don’t get the dopamine surge and so our sophisticated dopamine neuron predictive system flashes ‘error’. If we experience this error signal more than once or twice our predictive system starts to ‘look’ for rewards elsewhere.
This is what we refer to in NLP terms as cognitive dissonance or pattern interrupts. This is what we want to avoid doing to loyalists, but we certainly want to do with non-loyalists. We want to effect a prediction error signal on their choice of buying other brands or own label products.
How might we do this? The answer might be in another aspect of the dopamine reward system: the unpredictable reward.
Three or four times as much dopamine is released when an event produces an unexpected reward. The dopamine prediction error signal suddenly gets a nice surprise and then starts to pay attention to this thing that might create a reward again in the future. Is this why special offers work so well? An unexpected dopamine rush makes us feel soooo good. BUT if we want to maintain the effectiveness of the surprise, it has to be linked or anchored with something that will maintain the dopamine surge for the future; it has to create a new predictable pattern for that good feeling.
In other words a special offer may create the pattern interrupt we seek to get the non-loyals to shift, but something else has to happen as well to keep them and convert them to loyals. A series of dopamine rushes may be needed to get them ‘hooked’ again. This has interesting implications perhaps for the efficacy of certain marketing tactics and the sequencing of employing them.
Susan Boyle; beautiful voice and marketing phenomenon?
Ok so I’m a bit slow on the uptake; I’ve had my head in a project for the last few weeks and am, it seems, the only person to not know who Susan Boyle is. Well now I do and today I became one of the many millions to watch her famous performance on Britain’s Got Talent on You Tube.
Firstly, I want to extend warmest congratulations to her. Her truly beautiful rendition of ‘I dreamed the dream’ moved me to the very core (yes, I cried!). I’m glad she has proved that you don’t have to be visually stunning to be utterly beautiful.
But it did also make me wonder whether I would have been moved quite so deeply had she not been such an ordinary woman. Is it the juxtaposition between her visual ordinariness and her vocal beauty that has catapulted her from an unknown village lass to a worldwide phenomenon? She reported to be possibly the greatest viral video star of all time, with more hits already that Barack Obama’s inaugral speech and Les Miserables are using her name to promote the show - advertising as ‘the show that inspired Susan Boyle’.
It certainly shows the power of the internet for generating attention and the power of the public in determining what is worthy of viewing and passing on. It also shows the power of the public’s emotion, which many brands ignore at their peril, for it is an emotional tidalwave that is carrying Susan Boyle to stardom.
I’ll bet there are brand teams the world over pondering the ‘Susan Boyle Effect’ and wondering how on earth they could tap into it.
Does insight stifle creativity? It doesn’t have to.
Yesterday I mentioned that Sir Martin Sorrel had cited recent research from the IAB, which looked at why clients value agencies and found that 87% of the sample pointed to the agencies’ “strategic consumer insight”. “Clients won’t move in the future unless they get quantitative justification for what they do,” said Sorrell. “We may not like it - creative departments of ad agencies certainly don’t - but that’s the way the world’s going.”
Nic Niewart responded to the Media Week article and Sir Martin’s comment with this: ‘If a creative worth anything finds this bad news, then you’re in the wrong business, baby. It is precisely the marrying of strategic insights- (the nodding of client heads in the early part of the pitch/presentation) COUPLED to a Brilliant Creative Interpretation of that sentence/finding/word that has been what great advertising is about. The client is happy, the agency is happy, AND you get combined great business results. Why has it taken so long for the bleeding obvious to be stated?’
This creative tension always intrigues me but having read a number of ‘death by powerpoint’ presentations of customer insight studies which pour forth data by the dozen but not much that is easily executionable, I can understand why creatives groan at the thought of yet more ‘insight’. It is interesting that an industry that is so focused on provising insight about customers should be so inept at providing its insight to its own customers in a form and language that is easy to read and interpret and is immediately actionable and executionable. How any brand manager can develop creative brief from 240 slides of data is beyond me, yet that is what they have to contend with.
I am going to unashamedly plug our work here - but only because it is directly relevant to giving creative teams insight that they can work easily with and which enhances their creative freedom rather than stifles it. The techniques that we use (Values Elicitation and Language and Behaviour Profiling) give brand managers and creative teams strategic customer insight, along with that illusive brand personality and distinct customer language bespoke to their brand which makes a clear brief easy, and enables the creative team to create their little hearts out.
To agree with Nic, it is the coupling of great customer wisdom and creative genius that leads to great advertising WITH business benefits.
Great insight, brilliant creative interpretation, fantastic business results - here’s one our insight made earlier (and we’re told had a sales uplift of 155%).
Dairy Milk - I’m thinking of defecting
I am somewhat bemused. Cadbury’s have released a new ad featuring children with dancing eyebrows. I freely admit to being a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk fan and consume far more of the stuff than is healthy, but I am seriously considering defecting to another brand because I just cannot see what their ads have to do with chocolate consumption. The brief apparently was to ‘Create a piece of content that gives people the same joyful feeling they have when they eat Cadbury Dairy Milk’. Hmmmmm, drumming gorillas and dancing eyebrows… I just don’t associate them with that ‘joyful feeling’ I get. Perhaps I am odd.
Last week Media Week reported that WPP, the global communication group, is set to significantly shift its competitive profile away from traditional media and advertising operations to become a more strategic, insight-led organisation, according to chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell. Speaking at an International Advertising Association luncheon Sir Martin noted that WPP revenues stand at about £15bn, £4bn of which is generated by consumer insight, and he announced that WPP would be focusing more of its business in that direction. He cited recent research from the IAB, which looked at why clients value agencies and found that 87% of the sample pointed to the agencies’ “strategic consumer insight”.
“Clients won’t move in the future unless they get quantitative justification for what they do,” said Sorrell. “We may not like it - creative departments of ad agencies certainly don’t - but that’s the way the world’s going.”
So I am fascinated to know what ’strategic consumer insight’ led to the Cadbury’s ads (created by Fallon), and what quantitative justification they are getting to support them. Reports are that Dairy Milk sales are not soaring and that it has lost market share to Galaxy (and am I the only customer who is actually considering defecting to Galaxy or maybe Lindt?). Perhaps it is doing more for the Cadbury brand as a whole, let’s hope so.
Now here’s a thought!
Browsing the blogs while nibbling on my Ryvita and Kipper pate this lunchtime, I came across Rory Sutherland’s missive More kittens: Or how Sir Martin Sorrell can end the recession overnight, in which he is bemused why the mighty power of media buyers isn’t twisting the arms of the newspapers to write at least more balanced, if not more positive news.
‘Because, at the moment, it doesn’t really matter whether you are paying £20,000 or £10,000 for a full page in a British newspaper. What matters is that 50% of your £10,000 is being spent on paying journalists to write doom-laden articles discouraging consumers from doing anything except to cower inside their homes waiting for redundancy and repossession.
In short we are currently using our clients’ money to pay newspapers to destroy our clients’ businesses.’
He suggests: ‘Group M and the other large media buying houses should simply withhold all advertising money from British media until they learn to cheer the f*** up. And, correspondingly, we should lavish advertising money on feel-good media.
Imagine the phone calls. “Hello, Daily Telegraph, we were going to give you £100K to run a series of ads for IBM, but unfortunately you ran an article on repossessions yesterday. So instead we’re going to put all the money towards sponsoring “Dogs do the Funniest Things on ITV3 and a gatefold pull-out in Hello! Now, don’t do it again, right.” ‘
I think Rory has a point. We might be heading into the biggest downturn anyone under 65 will have seen in their lifetime, but there are still good news stories to be broadcast. There are companies who are still growing and doing well, brands that bucking the apparent downward trend, small businesses that have never been so busy, not to mention millions of people doing interesting things worth talking about. And if the papers run out of good news stories, they can always resort to fluffy kittens, but I suspect by the time they do we’ll be out the other side of this and denationalising all the banks we now suddenly own.
There is a more sinister side to the media’s obsession with bad news, which is of concern, and that is the psychological effect the gloomy news has on us all. This recession hasn’t suddenly come upon us in the last year, it has been creeping up on us for several years and yet a year ago we were still thinking we were a booming economy and spending as such. The only difference in what was really going on in the economy then to now is that no-one told us we weren’t booming anymore.
Perhaps we would all be better off if the media just balanced their news-telling, so for every doom and gloom story they hunt down, they also sniffed out a good news one. Then perhaps we could all feel a little more balanced and our media spend would be supporting our thriving client’s businesses instead of contributing to killing them.
In the meantime, perhaps we really should put our money where our clients’ mouths would like to be - in media that attempts to support and reverse an ailing economy rather than media that just adds to it.
It all comes down to one thing: what is valuable to your customers?
I was browsing through McKinsey Quarterly this evening and came across this report on Maintaining Customer Experience from December 2008.
I quote… ‘How can consumer businesses make necessary investments in service while facing the pressure on revenues and costs? Our review of the companies with the best customer service records in ten industries suggests that one key is to minimize wasteful spending while learning to invest in the drivers of satisfaction. Specifically, companies should challenge their beliefs about service and test those beliefs analytically. Many will discover that long-held, but seldom-reviewed, assertions about what customers really want are wrong.
Sophisticated companies that figure out what matters most to customers, eliminate the investments that don’t matter, and finance the ones that do, will thrive—and may find themselves, when the economy returns to normal, with fewer competitors.’
I have a moment of deja vu here. Isn’t that what I posted on here yesterday?
The role now of all purveyors of goods and services is to find out what those [customer] values are and to adjust to provision of them accordingly. Those companies that cannot fulfil the values of its customers will fall by the wayside. Those that can and do, will thrive. Whether in nature or in business, the fittest survive and the weakest do not.
One of the most rewarding things about the work we do at The Best Organisation is the ability to show clients where they can save money and get a better return on their ROI, by understanding what is important to their customers, i.e. those ‘drivers of satisfaction’. It’s also rewarding to know that the authors of that McKinsey report (Adam Braff and John C DeVine) are singing from our hymn sheet too.
Welcome Barack Obama. A new age has begun.
Today was the historic inauguration of Barack Obama as the new US president. I watched it on TV along with millions around the world. I am sure I am not the only one that felt a new energy and a new hope emanate around the man, even though his inaugral speech was tough and realistic. We do face huge challenges in our individual and collective economies at a personal and global level, and these challenges are necessary to sweep away an unsustainable way of living. But as Obama said in his speech, ‘Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished.’
And we still have values, needs and desires to be fulfilled. Our values may change but nevertheless we will still seek to fulfil them. The role now of all purveyors of goods and services is to find out what those values are and to adjust to provision of them accordingly. Those companies that cannot fulfil the values of its customers will fall by the wayside. Those that can and do, will thrive. Whether in nature or in business, the fittest survive and the weakest do not. We might like to think we can buck that trend, but we have yet to prove that we can.
Obama was elected because he fulfilled the values of the nation: for change, for freedom, for ’hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord….(And) an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.’
As businesses, if we want that kind of success, and that kind of loyalty (and we can have it, companies can still grow in recession), then we have to become very certain of the customer values that we are aiming to fulfil.
Why is it so hard to talk to women?
Men may still be the higher wage earners in most households, but women are the main holders of the purse strings, deciding what to cut back on, how much to save, and what to spend the hard-earned cash on. From techno-gadgets to the weekly shop, home decor to utility bills, women are the decision-makers (even when they let the men think that they are).
Belinda Parmar of Lady Geeks reckons the tech brands could be missing out on £0.5 billion in revenue by not marketing to women. ‘Ask any family who was in charge of buying the Christmas gifts, and you’ll find out its women not men. Women are not only buying technology for themselves, but as the Chief Household Officer, are buying for kids, husband, gran and friends. Women are in charge of the house, but more importantly are in charge of the living room (see battle for the living room) where much of the technology lives: PVR, console, HD TV…. ‘
Yet marketers seem to find it so difficult to talk to women? Is it because there are more male marketers? Is it because women are so complex? Is it that the marketing world just hasn’t learned women-speak? Or is it something else?
Perhaps the gender dynamics model developed by Pauline Crawford and Alana Mitchell can throw some light on the matter. ‘Not all women are the same, yet they are all ‘female’. Likewise with men; they do not all behave the same yet they are ‘male’. We all have within us mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics, preferences, and behaviours.
While having a female body means women have unique body parts and cycles, some women may be more ‘male’ in their thinking, decision making and in their logical responses, while many females portray the classic all female traits of nurturing, sensitivity and intuitive reasoning. Likewise within men, some may be more ‘female’ in their thinking preferences, emotional reactions, and actions and still be male through and through!’
A mere conversation about cars and handbags with Pauline and my colleague Di, bore this out. Pauline (the more masculine thinker of the three of us) wants great performance in her car and pure practicality in her handbag. Di (more feminine thinking) wants comfort and reliability in her car and a soft, squishy handbag. I (sitting in the middle ground) went for beauty and quirkiness in both, with scant regard for practicality, performance, comfort or reliability!
What is particularly interesting from the viewpoint of how to talk to women is that the language you use will vary depending on where on the masculine/feminine scale your female audience sits. So you’d need to have that knowledge as a fundamental pillar to your marketing strategy. Pointless trying sell a performance car to the Di’s of this world or a squishy handbag to the Pauline’s. But get the targetting and the language right and you are onto a winner!
In addition, your female buyers will have placed your product or brand in a specific context in their lives, they will have certain criteria relating to that context and they will have a whole other set of unconscious thought processes that drive their actual buying behaviours at the point of purchase.
It would be pretty good to know all these things before you start lavishing spending this year’s severely cut budgets. It would definitely make a difference to your ROI.