Bureau West

I’ve just arrived back from giving a presentation at the Worldwide Conference on Qualitative Research in Budapest.  My presentation discussed ways to recognize when research participants are lying and methods to get past those lies, to understand what they really think.

The conference included many fascinating presentations, including several others that focused on ways to obtain a more accurate understanding of respondents’ thoughts and feelings.  One was given by my friend and colleague Daniel Berkal of The Palmerston Group in Toronto.  He gave a presentation about ways to combine ethnographic methods with focus groups to obtain deeper insights.  We recently combined methods at Bureau West when we conducted shop-along interviews with individual women at supermarkets followed by focus groups with all the women together.  That way, the women were able to talk about their shopping behavior as it happened, and then we also benefitted from the synergy of the group discussion.

Daniel took the approach a step further when he was tasked with learning about alcoholic beverage consumption at night clubs.  He recruited people to come to an evening at the night club to be filmed in reality-show style.  The club was kept open to other customers, though they had to agree to be on film – much like the situation in an actual reality show.  The next day (during the day), the people who had been recruited as research participants came back to the club for focus groups.  Placing them back in the same location helped them remember more detail about their experience.  In addition, Daniel and his colleagues played video of the previous evening to obtain more detailed reactions.

This type of approach, combining immersive research with a retrospective method such as focus groups, provides clients with more insights on ways to connect with customers and ways to more effectively promote their products.

Looking for ways to get inside your customers’ heads?  Please call us at 818-752-7210 to discuss.

Sources: “Breaking Down the Glass – Incorporating Immersive Ethnography with Conventional Techniques to Create Deeper Understanding,” Daniel Berkal, Worldwide Conference on Qualitative Research, 5/1/14; Bureau West research

 

A continuing care retirement community felt it needed to fix a broken business model, expand the scope of its non-traditional support and off-campus services, and modernize its image to stay current with trends in marketing to seniors.

An all-day brand workshop was conducted; the management team dug deep to identify what should stay and what needed to be fixed.  The session revealed significant agreement on core values, but several serious divides as to how the community could evolve as a business going forward.   One area of disagreement: to what extent would the community’s religious affiliation impede its ability to reach new secular prospects?

Research was conducted to test the assumptions generated during the brand workshop.  Many of the concerns were debunked.  For example, most prospects felt that, if the religious aspect were not ‘front and center,’ it would not have a negative impact.  In fact, the faith-based affiliation was viewed by some as a positive – being a non-profit made the community more desirable and reliable.

Based on the research as well as the core values garnered from the brand workshop, a new business model, brand architecture and brand identity were developed.  The focus of the community’s marketing strategy shifted from being print-heavy to one primarily driven online by a comprehensive website that integrated 4 business units under one single portal, the introduction of e-marketing, resident populated blogs, and other social media tactics.

What started with one brand workshop led to a new, contemporized and highly relevant brand. In only 18 months since its launch, the community has expanded from one market serving 925 people to three markets serving over 2000 with campus and community-based residential, support and enrichment services.  A success story indeed!

Can a brand workshop benefit your company?  Give us a call at 818-752-7210 to discuss.

 

“Omni-channel marketing” refers to marketing to customers through all the different channels by which they might engage with your brand.  The concept has become more important in recent years, since customers now have many different ways to learn about a product: in addition to more traditional channels such as viewing an advertiser’s TV commercial or their website, today’s customers might be searching online for advice about what to buy, or checking on social media, or reading reviews about a product on their smart phones while shopping in a brick-and-mortar store, or using an app to compare prices… and the list goes on.

In our research, we have found two major motivators for customers to use multiple channels: making the shopping process easier and finding the best price.  How do we best cater to those needs?  By making sure we’re there with relevant information and offers when the customer wants them.  For example, when they walk into your store.  While customers value their privacy, we have found they’re quite interested in receiving this kind of information if it will save them time or money and as long as they’ve given their permission.

My friend Scott Holmes, president of interactive agency United Future, calls it “At-the-Ready Marketing.”  In a recent article, he recommended a variety of tactics, including:

• Encouraging positive online reviews, and providing imagery and content that are easily shareable on social media
• Offering proximity-based digital coupons
• Rewarding loyalty with special perks that make shopping even easier

To learn how to most effectively market to your customers, give us a call at (818) 752-7210.

Sources: , Bureau West research; “Rethinking Retail,” Infosys, 1/14/14; “5 ‘At-the-Ready’ Mobile Retail Marketing Strategies – Getting Close and Personal,” iMediaConnection, 1/18/14

 

One of the most common uses of market research is to test advertising.  Companies want to create the most effective advertising possible; their target customers should be able to tell them how to create ads that will get them to make a purchase.

At least that’s the theory.  Of course, the reality is a bit more complicated than that.  Market research can be used in different ways at different stages in the process of developing ads.

I think one of the most powerful uses of market research is to conduct research before the advertising is developed.  That is, talk to potential customers in order to uncover the hot-button issues – the types of things they want to know in order to make the purchase decision.  We would use focus groups in this situation, and utilize a variety of indirect questioning techniques to go beyond the rational answers and get at the things that really matter to people.  This gives the ad agency’s creative staff the raw material they need to create great, impactful advertising.

But what happens after the ad agency develops a number of potential ad concepts, and they want to choose the one that will be most effective?  This is where things get tricky.  Typically, the ad agency will have storyboards for the different concepts – sketches or temporary visuals of key concepts, along with draft text for the ads.   The problem is, it’s difficult for customers to make the jump in their minds and imagine the storyboards as finished ads.  Here are some tips we use when conducting this kind of research:

• Make sure participants understand what the ad will look like when it’s finished.  When possible, we like to show an example of a rough ad followed by the finished version (from advertising for a different category).  That helps research participants make the jump in their mind.
• Level the playing field.  Make sure you’re using similar stimuli for the different concepts.  Don’t use beautiful photography for one of your concepts and rough sketches for another.  If you don’t have beautiful photographs for all the concepts being tested, then it’s better to remove them and just use the sketches.
• Don’t go halfway.  In many cases, I recommend against showing research participants half-finished ads.  If we can’t show something close to a final ad, we might be better off just getting reactions to a brief description of the advertising idea.  That way, we make sure we’re not getting reactions to text or visuals that might not be in the final ad anyway.

In some cases, once the ads are completed, advertisers want to conduct focus groups “just as a disaster check,” to make sure there are no “red flags” or misunderstandings.  This is the type of research ad agencies hate, since they’re afraid research participants will pick their advertising apart with comments such as “I don’t like red” or “the mom in that commercial is too thin.”  There’s some validity to those fears: when utilized incorrectly, this kind of research can lead to advertising that doesn’t offend anyone but is also completely forgettable.  In many cases, I recommend quantitative research for completed ads.  However, focus groups can work as long as we make sure they’re really being used as a disaster check.  So if most participants don’t understand the offer or don’t get a joke that’s being made in the ad, it may be worth tweaking.  But remember, they’re consumers, not art directors!

To learn how customers react to your advertising, give us a call at (818) 752-7210.