Quantitative Research
Researcher's Inconvenient Truth
How long did you take deciding to buy/rent your current home? You knew immediately right? Most people spend longer choosing the curtains than the home.
Why is this? It seems to be that we still make our most important decisions instinctively. There has been a flood of popular psychology and behavioural economics books on the market demonstrating the consequences of this.
Why does most quantitative brand and communications research assume that decision making is rational? When the truth is that decision making is emotionally based, often post rationalised and most brand choice is impulsive, irrational and spontaneous. Current tracking models were developed at a time when television advertising was marketing communications. The last breakthrough model was Hall & Partners Frameworks which was launched in 1991!
When we talk to research buyers it becomes clear that people know the old model is flawed but it is so much easier to work on the assumption that it is close enough to the truth to muddle on with. There's a reluctance to dump historical norms.
Rip It Up And Start Again
We started Nursery Quant with the luxury of being able to build something from scratch that reflects the reality of the relationship people have with brands. And three things underpinned our approach.
1. Any research qual or quant from The Nursery has to be uniquely constructive, helpful and developmental.
2. Brand relationships need to be measured in a way that reflects what we now know about the role of emotion in brand choice.
3. The world of communications has changed forever. We can no longer cherry pick bits of marketing comms and expect to ring fence their impact without understanding a broader context.
So that immediately provided us with a logical basis for building our approach. Step one was to develop a set of techniques that enable us to measure the emotional relationship with the brand asked in a way that enables our survey participants to share what they feel about a brand, not what they know about it. The development of Flash tools for online research has come at just the right time for us, enabling us to bypass the conventional verbal and numeric scale questions. By using an array of visual stimulus, drag and drop approaches and visual metaphor (many of them proven techniques from qual research) we get much closer to understanding real brand meaning.
Four Foundations
At the heart of our approach are these four questions
Foundation 1. Associations
The first thing we do is assess top of mind associations by asking people about the first three words or phrases that come to mind when they see the brand. We chart the results as brand clouds. These snapshots give a pretty good insight into the typical messy ‘engram' in people's heads.
See if you can spot the banks from this survey of 16-24 year olds:
Foundation 2. Affinity
Next, and still keeping things loose and intuitive, we want to know predisposition and image. We assess proximity to the brand, how close do people feel to it using drag and drop measures for our brand and competitors.
No words, no numbers simply an intuitive response based on the brain's ability to interpret and understand the metaphor of closeness to a brand. What's been interesting so far is this measure looks to be a better, more relevant indicator of brand loyalty than anything else we have come across.
Foundation 3. User Image
Humans are fundamentally herd animals and better at describing other people than ourselves. We therefore come at brand image projectively using qualitative picture sort exercises that can give us a great read on the social context in which brands are consumed. Once again it means we can sidestep numeric scales and linguistic meaning to uncover how they feel about the brand.
And like all good qual researchers we don't just ask participants to choose but also to tell us why they chose the people they did.
Foundation 4. Momentum
Finally we need to understand whether the brand has 'sensed momentum'. Is it a brand on the way up or down? This has proved an especially useful measure as it not only gives early warning on things that are about to happen to brand sales, but it also responds very sensitively to multi channel brand communications. Seeing a brand message only on TV can only do so much for the brand, but when you see the ad, read something about it in the paper and hear your friends talking about it you know there is something happening.
... And More
Sitting in behind these four foundation questions are the sorts of diagnostics we need to help explore specific aspects of the brand, with a kitbag of drag and drop questions that keep survey participants engaged and responses relevant and useful.
Encounter Tracking
We've also developed a Java application for panellists' mobile phones to help us understand what types of brand encounters have influenced their perceptions of the brand. We get some of our survey respondents to download the simple app on their phone and then for a week ask them to let us know whenever they ‘bump into' a brand we are interested in - it could be advertising, it could be buying it in a shop, using it at home, overhearing a conversation or reading something about it. Each time they have a relevant encounter they simply fill in a few quick questions on their phone - where were they, what brand, what type of encounter and what did they think of it. Then when we analyse the brand meaning in more depth we see how it changes depending on the types of brand experiences are panellist have had.
And in this way, combined with some carefully designed diagnostic questions we can start to develop and test hypotheses as to how the full array of communications are combining to build stronger brand relationships.
Case History: Tiger Beer
Last year we evaluated a campaign for Tiger Beer. A target audience of young premium lager drinking men who shared an adventurous spirit saw Tiger Beer very much as something you drink with a curry. Very few of the premium lager values were present - the campaign set out to put that right.
A small budget multi channel integrated campaign, using localised outdoor, a dedicated microsite where you can register for a series of ‘'night of the tiger' events which recreate the wonders of the orient in a converted warehouse in Leeds.
A post survey amongst people who attended the event showed how much potential there is to build the Tiger brand with the right activity. Whilst curry remains a prominent part of the Tiger brand cloud we also see the emergence of words relating to provenance and quality.
And whilst curry houses aren't excluded from drinking occasions we see the beer being drunk in busy bars and clubs as well.
So the research was able to show is what the brand is and what it can become.
Intuitive Outputs
We designed our questions to be intuitive for participants, clients tell us they are equally intuitive for the brand team, no more death by PowerPoint.
The Tiger chart above and the Nationwide 'brand dashboard' below are examples of the sort of charts that clients can immediately stick on the marketing department wall.
Case History 2: Banking Sector
Work we have done in the financial sector has helped us understand what really drives brand relationships for younger adults (Aged 16 - 24). This summary dashboard of results gives us a vivid snapshot of what Nationwide means to this group and highlights challenges ahead.
A week's encounter tracking highlighted for us the importance of the branch - not just going in but even walking past in shaping opinion. It also showed up how Nationwide is much loved amongst current customers, but non-customers don't know a great deal about it, and suspect that it is not really for them.
Change is Coming
Response so far has been very positive. All the clients we present to buy into the premise and many become enthusiastic users of us for everything from managing their brand portfolio, international brand positioning, evaluating ‘below the radar' integrated campaigns, pre-testing everything from product promotions to TV advertising.
Another group of clients would love to use us but are prevented by an organisational addiction to current outdated systems. We're becoming experienced in helping clients with change management
Whatever your needs please give us a call.
Contact David Alterman This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it +44 0207 734 1166
