Bureau West

Even beloved brands can lose their luster, and in most cases it can be attributed to one thing – complacency.  A brand sitting on top of its category can start taking success for granted.  It stops innovating, loses its soul by not focusing on cultural strengths, core values, and delivery of the expected ‘brand experience.’  The result is predictable; earnings and shares value start to plummet.

A great article in Inc. Magazine tells the story of how Starbucks started losing its leadership position and how CEO Howard Schultz put Starbucks on a trajectory to regain category leadership.  He lamented that Starbucks had become a fat-and-happy company that forgot how to innovate …”playing defense instead of trying to score.”  As ‘re-inventor-in-chief’, his main goal was to return the company to one that not only sold fresh brewed coffee, but also served as a ‘third place’ between home and work that was not simply transactional.  What guided Starbucks back to leadership?

• Research to inform the brand.  Listen to customers and employees for that critically important feedback that helps fix the problems, leverage strengths, and orchestrates renewed success.
• Executive introspection.  Gather key executives and dig deep to identify how the brand is doing operationally – good and bad – with regard to product innovation and delivering excellent service.
• Invest in employees and community.  Provide renewed training and motivation to boost morale so that store managers and baristas alike provide a unique, consistent brand experience.  And, use the brand’s scale for good, and maintain a socio-corporate conscience.
• Innovate and re-invent.  Guided by research, gut and serendipity, expand and introduce new product lines into new markets and delivery systems. Set the bar for utilization of digital technologies and social media techniques that put you on the top of the category.

Starbucks has returned to its position of supremacy.  By re-employing disruptive reinvention, it has introduced new products, reinvigorated staff, modernized technology, and runs a shrewder operation –  all of which have turned the company around in a rebirth as impressive as Apple’s.

Is your brand as healthy as it could be?  Are your customers and employees as happy as they should be?  Is a brand experiencing operational issues that impede optimal success or squander leveragable opportunities because of complacency?  We can help you answer these questions with proven techniques, tools and research.  Call me at 818-752-7210 or email info at bureauwest.com.

Source: “Starbucks: The Art of Endless Transformation,” Inc., June, 2014 

Brand loyalty has great value to advertisers: loyal customers refuse to purchase competitive brands and are even willing to pay more for your brand.  How do companies engender brand loyalty?  They do it by developing an emotional connection to their brands among their customers.

When we work with clients to create brand strategies, one of our main goals is to figure out how to develop that emotional connection.  We utilize a combination of market research along with a brand workshop with client executives to answer the following questions:

• How do customers feel about the brand and its competitors?
• What would get them to love a brand in this category?
• What is the “DNA” of our brand, the values we can leverage?
• Gap analysis: how do get to from our present situation to the desired emotional attachment?

Of course, the above is easier said than done.  When asked, customers don’t always want to admit to having “feelings” when it comes to a brand.  And company executives don’t always want to admit to the gap between where their brand is and where it needs to be.  But there are techniques to overcome those challenges.  We have a presentation that goes into detail about how to do so: “Charting the Course to Successful Brand Strategies,” and would be happy to present it, either in-person or via online meeting.  Just call me at 818-752-7210 or email info at bureauwest.com.

As you may know, I’m part of an international alliance of researchers, ThinkGlobal Qualitative.  We recently conducted multi-country research with dog owners.  One of the goals was to generate new product ideas.

We utilized a hybrid methodology, starting with a mobile diary, where dog owners in each country answered questions each day on their smartphones over the course of a week.  We then conducted an online bulletin board focus group, where participants could interact with each other.  This combination of methods was particularly effective: the mobile diary increased participants’ awareness of the details of dog ownership and primed them for the group discussion.  The diary, followed by the synergy of the group discussion, led to a large number of new product ideas.

One benefit of conducting the research in multiple countries: we were able to learn from each other.  After we saw some diary responses such as “nothing new to report today,” we came up with the idea of adding a “question of the day” for the U.S. research: each day, in addition to reporting about their interaction with their dogs, participants were also asked to focus on a more general question that helped prepare them for the coming discussion (e.g., best ways to teach your dog something new, biggest challenges of dog ownership).

Are you looking for new ideas?  Please contact us to discuss.

Sources: “Mobile Unleashed: Dogs Go Mobile and Connect Online,” ThinkGlobal Qualitative, 6/5/14; Bureau West research

 

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