From the Horse’s Mouth

Market research is getting a personal touch. While surveys and focus groups continue to offer the meat-and-potatoes that marketers need, many brands are augmenting that data by recruiting consumers to give more detailed information on their opinions and shopping habits. That sort of feedback is far from scientific and is often too limited in scale to justify any wholesale changes in strategy, but it can give marketers deeper insight to help establish predictive patterns, rather than reactive strategies.

“The majority of brands sell through retail in a timeline of eight to 18 months,” says Meg Kinney, senior vp research and planning at Integer Group. “You can’t just report on what’s hot — that’s established behavior. You have to focus on what matters to consumers and how it will influence their behavior down the road.”

That’s got some agencies putting research before development.

“The research part usually kicks in after the marketing work is done [when brands ask focus groups] ‘What do you think of this concept?’” says Ron Coughlin, senior vp-strategic business development at Strottman International, Irvine, CA. “We’re flipping that around to get the target audience involved at the front end.”

Intimate research can also help clear up misconceptions marketers may have about how consumers view their brands — attitudes that would not be addressed by a typical survey.

Some industry veterans are skeptical of the lasting value of anecdotal research. “There have been programs for the last 20 years trying to go beyond structural research, but they never seem to have a lifespan beyond a few years,” says J. Walker Smith, president of Norwalk, CT-based research firm Yankelovich Inc.

Up Close and Personal

Still, the goal of in-depth conversation is to coax instinctive, unbiased answers from consumers and to form an idea of how they shop and think in a relaxed atmosphere, not to generate answers that may be corrupted by the research format itself.

“I spent too much time on the other side of the mirror of a focus group watching things go awry,” says Jen Levine, managing director at New York City-based Just Ask A Woman, a three-year-old consultancy specializing in getting feedback from female consumers. To put women at ease, the agency hosts its own “faux talk show.”

“That may sound strange, but American women are into full disclosure,” says Levine. “We want them in a comfortable environment, not driving out to some creepy strip mall in the dead of night to sit on a focus group.”

The set includes a stage and an audience, with Levine and president-ceo Mary Lou Quinlan acting as Oprahesque hosts. Just Ask A Woman recently taped a “show” for Kellogg Co. that asked women about their fitness goals. “We had women talking about the bikini they hope to fit into soon,” says Levine. “And anything we ask them to do, we do too.” Other clients include General Motors, Saks Fifth Avenue, and CitiGroup.

Many agencies are assembling groups of friends to talk in a natural setting, instead of corralling random strangers in an intimidating focus group session. Golden, CO-based Integer recently completed a project for a fast food chain to get consumer feedback on the chain’s food and their perceptions of its competitors. The agency targeted the chain’s key demographic, couples aged 18 to 34, by placing a banner ad on heavily trafficked Web sites. Respondents were tasked with hosting a dinner party for their friends, serving food from the restaurant chain (all participants knew they were part of a research project but none were given the name of the restaurant). Integer assembled 40 participants and set up cameras in hosts’ homes to videotape the dinners. Hosts received $50 for participating and $20 for each additional couple they recruited.

“You just don’t get that same spontaneity with a formal focus group,” says Kinney. “An hour later we could see who was in a food coma and who was saying, ‘Damn, that was really good.’ You get more honest answers and you don’t have the bias of a domineering individual taking over a focus group.”

After the meal, Integer conducted three exercises to get more specific feedback. Participants got handouts just like the cell sheets teachers used to pass out in grade school. One ditto featured a list of fast food restaurants and a list of emotional reactions. Participants were asked to match specific emotions with how they felt before and after they ate at the featured restaurants (McDonald’s, for example, was often matched with “time-pressed” for before and “guilty” afterward). Participants were also asked to draw the last meal they had cooked at home. “The client had thought people were making the same kind of food on their menus, and only getting takeout when they didn’t have the time,” says Kinney. That didn’t turn out to be the case: “Home-cooked” meals were completely different, such as a bowl of Honeycomb cereal.

Some agencies have constructed their own labs. Retail agency Fame, Minneapolis, last year opened a store called Once Famous that it describes as a “retail laboratory” (November 2001 PROMO). Staffers can observe shoppers in the aisles, which feature a mix of home furnishings and knickknacks.

Age Barrier

Marketing to youth is always difficult. Instead of guessing what kids like, many agencies are recruiting tweens and teens to fill in the blanks for them. Frankel, Chicago, is in the midst of developing custom panels with young adults “to avoid the translation error between generations,” says senior vp-director of planning Stephen Bullock. “Kids are telling us they’re tired of ‘fake real people’ and brands dumbing down their marketing. That by itself is not new, but the context is. Now we’re able to see what ‘dumbing down’ actually looks like to them.”

Integer looked inside for clues to youth marketing by forming the Ncrowd — a group of employees under the age of 30. “Our clients want to reach a younger crowd,” says group president Kathy Leonard. “We looked around and realized one-third of our staff was their target audience.”

The Ncrowd recruits friends and can tap a group of 200 to 300 at any one time. “It’s not scientific, but you can get input from your peers,” says 28-year-old Mike Chou, senior account executive at Integer and a member of the Ncrowd.

Mobile service provider Nokia, Irving, TX, tapped the NCrowd when it was preparing to launch text messaging service and wanted in-field confirmation of what its focus groups had yielded — specifically, Nokia wanted to know if its in-store sales sheets were working. Focus groups had laid the sheets in front of participants and asked if they were helpful. With the sheets put before them like that, participants said sure, the sheets are helpful. But the Ncrowd discovered that when consumers went to stores, they never paid attention to sales sheets; they depended almost exclusively on what the sales staff told them. “Nokia was wasting money on sales sheets when it really needed ways to incent the sales force to work with customers,” says Chou.

Strottman puts children on the payroll with its Kid Engineers program, recruiting kids to serve as advisors (June PROMO). “It’s a different perception,” says Coughlin. “Even if they can’t express what they’re thinking, they’ll draw it.”

The program includes more than 100 “engineers” who meet every four to six weeks in Strottman’s Irvine and Atlanta offices. Ages span from six up into the tweens and teens. “We’re creating a farm system,” says Coughlin. “As kids get older, they’ll move into an age-appropriate group.”

Strottman recruits kids through schools and neighborhood festivals. “Parents like it because kids don’t have enough creative outlets today,” claims Coughlin. Clients include Arby’s and Taco Bell.

This past spring, Strottman sent kids into grocery stores in southern California and Atlanta wearing headbands with hidden cameras, asking them to pick out 20 things they’d like to buy. The results “confirmed things we suspected but had no rationale for,” says Coughlin. Lessons included the fact that floor graphics can have language for mom, but need visuals for kids.

The study also recorded retail mistakes in the field. Companies like ConAgra and Heinz have spent a lot of money developing products they think will appeal to kids, such as Parkay Electronic Blue margarine and EZ Squirt ketchup bottles. But all that R&D doesn’t count for much if kids never even see the product: Strottman found that in many stores, the kid-oriented products were placed on the top shelf, out of kids’ sight. “We actually had to take the kids back into the store and point the products out to get a response,” says Coughlin.

The Los Angeles Times saw a Strottman presentation at a Kid Power conference earlier this year and was impressed enough to recruit the agency to help plan an event for next year. The Times annual events, such as Festival of Books and Festival of Health “bring the 2-D paper to life,” says senior marketing associate Louis Lopez. In July 2003, The Los Angeles Times will introduce Kid City. The event is still in the planning stages and the paper is using Strottman’s kid engineers to get feedback on some of the ideas, such as using a BMX ramp to illustrate the properties of physics. “We want to make it fun and educational,” says Lopez.

Sounds like the research itself.