My three golden rules on Consumer Research.
A rudimentary search on Google for “consumer research jokes
and humor” gives very little in the way of anything funny, but rather a lot of
articles and studies on use of humor in advertising discussing its
effectiveness, and though this article has nothing to do with the former or the
latter, the fact that I started this with a search on Google is.
When I first started working in advertising, consumer
research was either Qualitative (focus groups) or Quantitative (clip boards), and
though that sort of cumbersome and time consuming approach still has a role,
albeit a smaller one, the real strategic driver today is data. From a consumer
research standpoint, the digital age has passed, where connecting with
consumers was revolutionized by reaching people easier and having them input
the data through online surveys saving both time and cost, but also until a
critical mass of people were digitally accessible, had teething problems of
skewing the data to a certain subset of early adopters.
Consumer Research 2.0 however is like a virtual laboratory
where marketers can observe, in real time, how consumers behave, what they
think about your brand, your communication and the competition’s. And with
social media, marketers are provided incredible depth in psychographic
profiling, not to mention advocacy and engagement with brands. Testing concepts
and offers before rolling out to broader audiences has never been easier, nor
more accurate in predicting actual behavior as there is no questionnaire bias
or any number of issues associated with traditional concept and offer testing
in controlled environments, but I seem to be getting ahead of myself again.
My three golden rules on consumer research, though “guiding
strategies” may be more apt than rules:
1-
Capture the DATA: The data is out there, you
just need to know where to look and make sure you are capturing it and ultimately
how to use it, and that goes for both existing and prospect customers. At the
core of all this data should be a decent CRM engine that integrates with all
your activities. If your business does not approach data correctly, it will
struggle to capture purchase behavior, customer satisfaction, campaign
effectiveness metrics, attrition rates and causes, share of wallet and customer
equity, online traffic metrics and media habits, and ultimately where customers
fall in terms of their lifetime value. Aside from existing consumer hard data,
there is a wealth of data on general population metrics that could help drive
your product, service or inspire the creative. And as for focus groups
discussing creative, from my experience, only serves to dilute potentially
great ideas into flat ones that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Rather,
put things out there in perpetual beta mode, in test cells, and optimize the
rest to the best designs, messages and mechanics. Even if you want to adapt the
work to offline media, the real life lab of the internet will tell you what
works best.
2-
Elicit, don’t Solicit: Last century when I
worked with FCB (now DraftFCB), they had a brilliant methodology for
understanding consumers to better resonate on a creative and message level. By
spending time in their natural environments and having the subjects clueless as
to what they are researching, and throughout the engagement, they lure them
into talking about life and surreptitiously have them weave in products and
brands into the discussions, and thereby extracting pure insights that would go
on to inspire great campaigns. The value of extracting genuine emotions and
thoughts is they are un-skewed by questionnaire bias nor by the unconscious
need to please, or even to antagonize the questioner. Also, avoid all incentives;
they just make your results meaningless.
3-
Research trends to predict behavior: Assuming
you’ve taken the first two rules to heart, the biggest questions that should
keep a business owner up at night is less about what is happening now and more
about what is going to happen in the future. What are the trends and what does
that mean for my business? The plethora of subscription based consumer and
industry data is, if selected and analyzed correctly, extremely valuable to a
business in doing just that.
(First appeared in Venture Magazine -Jordan in April 2013 issue)
