Archive for October, 2008
Insight and creativity do mix
In the recent edition of Research (October 2008), the magazine of the Market Research Society, Anna Cliffe, head of research at Brahm, asks can researchers and advertising creatives ever get on? She writes ‘Developing and evaluating advertising creative has long been one of the most exciting and controversial areas of research. The relationship between research and advertising agencies has traditionally been one of wariness, if not outright hostility. Research can be seen as stifling to the creative process, with adverts developed ‘by committee’ and preventing creative expression.’
Cliffe goes on to discuss what she believes researchers bring to the creative process, and whether they should research the creative work as well as provide the insight for it. ‘Is there a case for the researcher - who should know the consumer better than anyone - being an integral part of the creative process, and then to evaluate the resulting campaign, being so much closer to where the campaign came from?’
We have some views on this too. If the research work has truly done its job and provided the best insight into the customer’s sensory and emotional motivation to buy, then the creative brief should flow easily from it. If the creative team are worth their salt and have that best brief, they should be able to produce an ad that scores a direct hit on those sensory and emotional hot buttons (and there should be no need for ‘meddling’ by anyone, which seems to be the creatives’ greatest beef).
Then the researchers, who provided these insights, should be able to research the creative work objectively and with an open mind - where the only decision is which creative treatment scored the strongest hit.
Perhaps some reference to the previous post on The Power of Instinct also comes into play. Seasoned researchers, who understand the creative process and have developed their instinct and wisdom through their experience, should be able to objectively ad test without ‘meddling’. And their understanding of the customer’s perspective should be a positive bonus rather than a bain to the creative team.
Perhaps the potential ‘meddling’ is more down to a lack of understanding of the customer’s real focus and their decision-drivers (by all involved) than the researcher’s lack of understanding of the creative process.
The power of instinct
In his book, Blink; The Power of Thinking without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of a statue, bought by the Getty Museum in the 1980’s. The statue was offered to the Museum for just under $10 million. It was an extraordinary find, being an almost perfectly preserved piece when other statues of its ilk had been recovered badly damaged or in fragments from grave sites or archaeological digs.
The Getty had the origins of the piece checked thoroughly by legal experts, scientists and geologists. Their analysis concluded that the statue was authentic. The reactions of art experts, however, upon seeing the statue for the first time, ranged from feeling ‘cold’ to feeling a ‘wave of intuitive repulsion’. They felt the statue was a fake and they were right.
Gladwell suggests in his book that when you develop an expertise in a particular area, your instinctive or intuitive reactions are based on your collective years of experiences that enable you to make rapid calculations unconsciously. You no longer have to think through every scenario in your mind, those stored experiences in your body do the work for you and present you with an apparently instinctive or intuitive answer.
Sometimes we can blind our instincts with science, and we can always find evidence to support a particular view if we go looking for it. More often than not traditional research methods take us down the wrong track because we are looking for evidence not experiences.
Far more effective in understanding how consumers make their decisions and why they behave as they do, is to throw out all assumptions and instead ask masterful questions that enable them to talk about their experiences in that context. The consumer is the absolute expert on their own buying behaviours and if you allow them to reveal that expertise, the information you get is priceless.
Asking the best questions to elicit that consumer experience also requires a certain expertise; an expertise developed through years of questioning and listening practise. Only through active listening can you know the next best question to ask. And that, like the art experts, becomes instinctive and intuitive.
Experts in consumer behaviour have listened to so many stories and so many experiences, that they just know the real from the fake, the key and critical behavioural drivers from the red herrings. They know because they feel it, whether it a wave of repulsion or sense of certainty.
This begs the questions:
Are we training our young researchers to hone their instincts or just their assumptions?
Are we valuing the wisdom and instinct of experienced researchers or is their wisdom being lost in the race for ever-new techniques that baffle us with even more science?
And are we completely missing the trick by not sufficiently tapping the innate expertise of the customer in knowing their own buying instincts?
Thoughts on the ‘credit crunch’
Yesterday I went to the local branch of LloydsTSB. I was the only customer for the few minutes I was in there and I got chatting to the ladies that worked there about dancing, because one of them mentioned she dances regularly. After a few minutes I went on my way, feeling chirpy from that encounter, even though banks generally do not induce chirpiness in me. I’ve been pondering why I felt good leaving the bank, and I’ve come to this conclusion: I felt good because I felt I was a human, a customer, and not just a number and a bank account. For a brief moment or two I had entered into a relationship with these ladies; I’d interacted person to person, not just teller to bank account.
And it got me thinking…
Is that what really lies behind this whole banking crisis, I wonder? In the drive for ever increasing profits has the financial industry forgotten that money is only a ‘promise’ and that people and relationships (i.e. their customers) are the only way that promise is actualised? Trying to cross-sell and up-sell, and loaning more money than the house value to people who can’t really afford it, is just chasing the cash while cloaked in a mantel of customer service.
Is the credit crunch the come-uppance for the financial industry for placing profit before people? Is this a warning for companies that put cash before their customers and forget that their cash flow is directly proportional to customer flow? (And that customer flow is directly proportional to the relationship you bother to build and the interest you take in really understanding them.)
The sad demise of Hardy Amies
The Guardian, Saturday September 27th 2008, reported the sad demise of Hardy Amies, the Queen’s official dressmaker for more than 50 years. So what happened?
Designer Jeff Banks is quoted in the article as saying that the brand’s clothes had become ‘distinctly mumsy’ and that the firm had failed to understand its customers. Richard Dennen, features associate at Tatler said: ‘I don’t know who their market is supposed to be’. Clearly neither do they.
Have they asked their existing customers what they value and want from the brand? Probably not! Now that is sad… or maybe just foolhardy.
You won’t fall into that trap, will you?