Customer Crossroads

On how to get your customers to change their behavior

Behavior change is not easy.  Just ask anyone who's ever tried to diet, stop smoking, stop drinking, exercise more or stay on top of their to-do list.  That's why we have 12 step programs, personal coaches, and the whole self-help industry.
So if you really want to doom your new product to failure, introduce something that requires a real change in behavior.  It may work, provided it solves a BIG problem for your customers.  Even that takes time.
Look at the 10 year plus adoption cycle for ATM machines.   
Our take:
Leverage existing behavior patterns wherever you can. You'll add years to your life.

Qualitative Research: Asking the Right People

A lot of the art of good research is figuring out who to talk to.  It's never as straightforward as it looks. Let me give you an example from a recent project to illustrate.

One project I am now completing relates to a global company's brand as an employer. Initially, it seemed like we needed to talk to some soon-to-graduate students. And maybe a few people who had recently been hired.
After talking at length to the inside project team, we determined that we needed a much broader and also more specific base.  Here's approximately how we defined the group we ultimately included:

• Senior executives in the firm who are involved in talent pool recruitment and have clear ideas about the future needs of the organization and the culture.  Almost as important, in my view, is that they will need to support the outcome and recommendations of the project, and they are more likely to do this if they have been involved.
• Some recent hires into entry level positions. These are people who still remember the recruitment process, the other employment opportunities they had, and picked my client.
• Co-op and summer students who are interacting closely with the organization but are not yet permanent employees.
• Recent hires into senior positions.  These people have been working for several years somewhere else, and recently joined the organization, but not in entry level roles.
• Students. Ultimately, we decided we were looking for people from specific universities, in specific programs (some undergraduate, some masters level), who expressed an interest in specific career directions, and who were also getting good marks.

It would have made my life a lot simpler if we could just talk to anyone at all.  And finding these students has been a real needle-in-a-haystack exercise.  We got them, but it wasn't easy. But really, there would have been no point at all talking to students who were heading in a very different career direction, would there?

Every project has this problem

There are almost no projects where this kind of sampling exercise doesn't become an issue. A project currently in discussion involves a home health care product. Just imagine the possibilities... should we include doctors? Nurses? Chiropracters? Just people who used the product in the past? People who need the product but have never heard of it?

A huge part of good research is figuring out what you need to know and who you need to know it from.  If you just gather a bunch of people and stuff them in a room, give them cookies and ask them questions -- you'll definitely get data.  But you won't learn much that will help you, no matter how good your questions are.

Guiding questions to ask

Here are a few of the diagnostic questions I use to think these things through.  Please add your comments with your own useful guiding questions.

1. Who buys the product or service?
2. Who pays for the product or service?
3. Who uses the product or service?
4. Who influences the sale of the product or service?
5. Are there different segments of this market based on needs as we currently understand them?  What appears to distinguish these groups?
6. Could we distinguish repeat buyers from former buyers, from first-time buyers? 
7. Are there differences in product usage (e.g.light, heavy) that we should explore?
8. Do males and females approach this the same way, or perhaps not?
9. Are there important cultural influences that could be at work here? Ethnic groups? Language groups?
10. Is there an urban/rural dimension? A geographic dimension like west cost vs east coast, warm weather vs cold weather?
11. Are there different distribution channels involved?  On-line vs in-store vs. catalog vs. home-party vs. reseller etc?
12. What about after-sales service?  Should we talk to people who needed it? What about people who have complained?
13. What about the competitor's product or service? Should we talk to some people who prefer it?
14. Is there any way we can talk to people in the act of making the decision?  Or people who just made the decision?

How to distinguish Custom Research from a Poll
Figuring this stuff out is often what distinguishes custom research from a poll.  With a poll, you get a random sample of people in a given region or geography, like 1000 adults between 18 and 64. 

With custom research, the first part of the project often consists of developing a research strategy that will answer the business issues.

Now there's nothing wrong with polling.  But be sure that's what you need.

Technorati Tags: qualitative research, custom research, guiding questions to ask, deciding who to research, sampling

What is Good Qualitative Research?

I've decided there must be a lot of bad qualitative research going on.  Otherwise, why would so many people make disparaging comments about it?  I saw another one today, in an issue of Internet Retailer  -- a quote in an otherwise good article by Mary Wagner on listening to customers. 

One of the experts Ms. Wagner quotes provides a list of things marketers should monitor, like blogs, e-Bay, newsgroups, Flickr, etc.  It's a great list. Except for when he says you can learn things from Flickr "that would never be found in a focus group". 

Well, now just a minute there. You certainly can learn things from Flickr and from blog searches and e-Bay with a relatively small investment of your own time and resources. You might call that "Poor Man's Qualitative", and of course you should be doing it. Indeed, these are some of the things I do to brief myself when I start a new project for a client. But if you didn't get at least that much learning and much more from your paid research, you didn't get what you paid for.

So I think there is a lot of bad research going on, so much so that people no longer know what good qualitative research looks like and how to get it for themselves.  And getting good qualitative is a bit like understanding fine art -- there's a considerable amount of judgment involved. The good stuff has tremendous value. And you need a bit of education in the topic to be an informed buyer.   

Insider secrets will be revealed. Tips and tricks of the trade will be shared.  But I'm not worried about letting you in on all this. Because, oddly enough, the more informed you are, the less likely you are to think you can paint a masterpiece in your basement, and the more you'll want the good stuff. 

Here's the short list of topics that I plan to include, just to whet your appetite:

1. Asking the indirect question
2. Using imagery
3. Using storytelling
4. Talking to the right people
5. Going beyond rational and functional
6. Lying
7. How to find a good qualitative researcher – questions to ask, where to look
8. Homework
9. Anchoring
10. Listening at right angles
11. Having a conceptual framework to put the content into
12. It’s not just leading a group discussion
13. How to introduce bias, and how to avoid it
14. Putting people at ease
15. Research ethics

We probably won't need 15 articles to get there.  As I tell clients, "we will cover all these topics, but not necessarily in that order".

References:

Mary Wagner, Talk it up: The web turns up the volume on the consumer voice. Internet Retailer, May 2006 issue. link

Technorati Tags: focus groups, qualitative research

We are experiencing a higher than normal...

We are experiencing a higher than normal volume of e-mails, phone calls and proposal requests. If you are an existing reader in need of customer experience insights or inspiration, please contact one of the other fine blogs listed below, who can provide support during this unanticipated reduction in posts. New readers are advised that this situation is exceptional and infrequent, and we encourage you to add this blog to your blog reader in confidence that service will be restored as soon as possible.

Your readership is important to us, and we thank you for your patience.

How Marketing Research is Changing: Angus Reid at MRIA 2006

Our last speaker today was Angus Reid, a leading figure, who founded the company now known as Ipsos-Reid, and who is now chair of Vision Critical, a panel management software solution.

Sorry about the blurry picture, but he was an energetic speaker!

Looking back 100 years, he pointed to three periods of major change and social upheaval, each of which was accompanied by significant shifts in marketing research.

The 1930's

• the new medium was radio
• people were uncoupling themselves from the great institutions of the day, and the depression was seen as a failure of society in many ways
• George Gallup invented the public opinion poll as we know it today.  They were doing face-to-face interviews at the door, and a poll took about 6 weeks to complete.

The 1960's

• the new media were telephone and television
• gender roles and the role of youth were redefined
• there was a renaissance in marketing research, as the shift to telephone polling made results available in as little as 24 hours, instead of 6 weeks.

Today

• the new media are cellphone, wireless and internet
• globalization is causing major shifts in society and the global economy, creating new winners and losers
• a new dynamic is taking place in the relationship between researchers, their clients, and consumers.
• it may not be the end of the era of the telephone survey, but it is definitely the beginning of the end

These shifts are always more subtle than we at first realize.  Radio was better suited to the big brassy sound of a big band than the subtle variations of the violin, often lost to static, resulting in a shift in musical tastes.

Online research has resulted in much faster, cheaper data -- but not always higher quality. Comscore networks has reported that 30% of internet surveys are completed by only .25% of the internet population. In short, there are massive measurement and sampling issues, which the industry is only just starting to grapple with.

Consumers want 'CPC' - community, participation, control

The desire for community -- something we have commented on often in this space -- is a big driver behind new trends in research.  Customers want more control, more input, more say, more access. They do not want to complete a 45 minute questionnaire on a product that looks like something that was produced in the 1930's -- but now it's online.

'Bleeding borders' between marketing and research

Reid says that some larger retailers are starting to see strong linkages between their panels and sales activity -- panelists tell their friends, take them into stores to see new product.  It is raising the question of how many of your customers you want on the panel -- maybe potentially all of them??

Like the early days of film

In the early days of film, a stage play was mounted and filmed, because people didn't yet know how to make a movie. Online research is a little bit past this stage, but you wouldn't know it to look at most online surveys.

He challenged the methodology people to start utilizing the new capabilities more creatively, instead of just porting old methods onto new platforms.

A fantastic talk.  It's so nice when an icon lives up to their reputation, as Mr. Reid did today.

[PS. Funny joke he told, on the difference between BC and Alberta: "In Alberta, the people hate the government; in BC, the government hates the people".]

Update from the MRIA Conference in Calgary:Shafeen Charania of Microsoft

This morning at the MRIA conference in Calgary I heard Shafeen Charania speak.  Here in the E-Tabs sponsored internet cafe, I thought I would share the highlights of his excellent presentation with you. 

Shafeen spoke of how Microsoft blundered past it's peak of brand coolness because of its culture in the 90's -- at the time of Windows 95 release. They used marketing research to understand market size, instead of understand customers. 

They are trying to change this now, by being much more outcome focused, much more self-critical.  He was frank in his admission of the many problems we all experience with technology. 

As evidence of their efforts to reform themselves, he showed a hilarious video (that Microsoft produced themselves) of how Microsoft would approach package design for the iPod.  If you haven't seen it, it's wonderful. 

They are also trying to find more ways to surface conversation that is "not on the party line, but still inside the party", and cited Scobleizer as one example. The other, which I hadn't heard of before, is Channel 9. When I checked it out just now, there were 40,000 on line there -- apparently all built virally. This is the insider-developer view of Longhorn development. 

They are starting to use more ethnography globally.  And learning some pretty cool stuff: 

• families share multiple cell phones in Kuala Lumpur
• males surf for porn in internet cafes, not on the family computer in Malaysia -- he called this "public is private and private is public"

His last observation really had me thinking.  That only 9% of the souls in the world use a computer somehow.  And they are looking for ways to engage with the other 91%.  Not a bad takeaway from a breakfast session.