what was once thought to be purely rational decision-making. While advertising has always been conscious of - and not afraid to appeal to - emotion, it has now entered the realm of the ultimating market research vehicle, the focus group.
In a media-obsessed society where big events like the Super Bowl are judged as much on the quality of commercials as on the game itself (Quick question: do you even remember who played in the 2011 Super Bowl? Or who won?), everyone is an expert. This has led to a certain amount of cynicism among an ad-saturated public. The result is that companies are not getting feedback that gives them the insights they need. In effect, consumers are vomiting up what they have heard from the big advertisers themselves. To attempt to gain more useful insights, companies are trying to tap into a deeper level of understanding by encouraging more indirect, emotional response to questions. This might work, especially when insights gleaned from more in-depth analysis of online behavior are combined with the new focus group methods. JL
Tanzina Vega reports in the New York Times:
"Welcome to the new focus group. Be it making collages or using mobile applications that track participants’ purchases minute by minute, advertisers are experimenting with new ways to learn about what consumers think of their products.
Experts say the traditional focus group, in which participants are guided through a discussion about a product or brand while marketers watch from behind a glass window, suffers from a few shortcomings. Responses can be influenced by a marketer’s presence, and one person may dominate the whole group.
“We’re savvy, we’re jaded, we’re tired of advertising,” Ms. Sanna said. All of that media saturation means consumers are giving marketers similarly jaded answers to their research questions.
Malinda Sanna, the founder of and strategic planner for Spark, a market research company based in New York, guided the women through the process of creating large collages using materials from tables decorated with all kinds of materials: a Styrofoam cake with Barbie dolls perched on each layer, fresh flowers, coffee beans and scented oils.Ms. Sanna and her business partner, Terrie Koles, started the Sensory Safari, a collage-building exercise in which participants create collages based on their feelings about a brand, a product or an advertising concept.
At a recent event for Unilever, Ms. Koles artfully decorated four tables with objects representing different senses — touch, smell, sight and taste. Participants were given iPods programmed with pop music and asked to visually represent how they felt about the concepts for two Web-based applications for Suave, a Unilever hair care line.
While the women were creating the collages, representatives from Unilever watched from an adjacent room. One montage, which included an upside-down Barbie doll in a pink taffeta dress, her outstretched arms giving the appearance that she was falling from the sky, represented vulnerability and the “ultimate feeling of not being in control,” Ms. Sanna said. Depending on the context, outstretched arms also represented playfulness and openness, and they were a theme in many of the images the women selected for their collages.
Noelle Tate, who contributed the upside-down Barbie, described the experience as “liberating.”
“How often do you get to go through a room with tables full of a beautiful array of objects, scents, textures, plants, flowers, pictures, etc. etc. etc., and just be stimulated through all of your senses to express how you feel?” Ms. Tate said in an e-mail.
David Rubin, the marketing director for hair care at Unilever, said watching the women gave the company deeper insight into how to approach consumers. The collage-building process, he said in an e-mail, helped participants “get out of their comfort zone and talk about emotions they might not even know they had.”
When Time Warner Cable was testing a new ad campaign, the company used the Sensory Safari to see the reactions consumers had to the company before and after seeing television ads.
Marissa Freeman, the senior vice president for brand strategy and marketing communications for Time Warner Cable, said the collages made before the ads were shown, tinged with negative imagery like tangled ropes and roller coasters, were “not surprising.” After seeing the ads, participants created collages with more positive images, including the word “Technology” with a heart drawn around it.
“There’s no better way than nonverbal communication to understand how people feel,” Ms. Freeman said.
The use of traditional focus groups has sometimes been fraught with pitfalls for marketers. One of the biggest focus group debacles came with the invention of New Coke, which briefly replaced the traditional Coca-Cola formula in 1985. The company spent millions of dollars on market research, taste tests and focus groups in an effort to thwart its growing competitor, Pepsi, only to find a public enraged by the decision.
“People have feelings about Coke and about brands like this that are incredibly deep,” said Michael I. Norton, an associate professor in the marketing unit at Harvard Business School.
Ravi Dhar, a professor of management and marketing and the director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management, said traditional focus groups can still be useful in certain situations, like generating ideas in the early stages of a product’s life. They are not good, however, when it comes to testing products or concepts. “You don’t want consumers to be scientists, you want consumers to be consumers,” he said.
Tom Denari, the president of Young & Laramore, says one of his passions is to “kill” the traditional focus group.
Mr. Denari’s agency takes a different tack, interviewing consumers in their homes and leaving them with journals called “Little Truth Books” for a week or two. “It forces people to think a little more deeply than they normally would,” Mr. Denari said.
When Ugly Mug Coffee wanted to retool its brand, Mr. Denari’s agency asked consumers to use the journals to draw family trees showing which family members were coffee drinkers. They were also asked to list some of the worst things about coffee, what their coffee “cut-off time” was and why they drank it at all.
“The whole goal is the get to the heart,” Mr. Denari said. The research helped Ugly Mug create new packaging and expand distribution from just a few stores to more than 1,500 grocery stores around the country, he said.
Marketers are even turning to Facebook to run focus groups. The advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, part of WPP, recently used the Facebook Groups feature for virtual focus groups they held on behalf of clients like Gap and Ikea, and for larger brands like Unilever and Kimberly-Clark.
Tim Maleeny, the head of strategic planning for Ogilvy & Mather, said Facebook was a quick, affordable and natural place for a focus group. “They are already there,” Mr. Maleeny said of the Facebook users in the group.
Cellphones can also be a place where marketers can peek into their consumers’ buying habits. A new mobile application called Over the Shoulder, created by the market research company Egg Strategy, allows participants to respond to marketers’ questions by posting photos, videos, audio or using text message. Marketers can also follow a consumer’s exact location using mobile technology.
Tom Trenta, the president of Egg Strategy Chicago, said the app helps marketers gain access to consumers in situations deemed too personal for a traditional focus group. Mr. Trenta said the company had been approached by the makers of feminine hygiene products, condoms and cigarettes.
A recent and less intimate example of a marketer using the app was the brewer MillerCoors. The company, hoping to understand why men buy certain beer brands, followed 40 men for 20 nights at bars in Chicago and San Diego during February and March.
The instant feedback helped the brand answer questions like, “At 8 o’clock you were drinking a Miller Lite, at 10 o’clock you were drinking Heineken. What happened?” The researchers tallied thousands of choices made in real time and found that men were “choosing brands that they don’t like the taste of simply because the brand says the right things about them,” Mr. Trenta said.
“We heard guys tell us things we’d simply never heard in traditional research,” Sarah Ross, the marketing director for innovation at MillerCoors, said in a statement. “We’re considering a whole new brand to fill a need that we’d never quite seen before.”
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