What's in it for me?

Editor’s note: John Holcombe is president of Miami research firm Insights Marketing Group.

What a difference a couple of decades makes. Even as recently as the 1990s, many marketers were stuck in industrial-age, product-centric paradigms of selling attributes and benefits (think of Don Draper on Mad Men asking his staff, “What’s the benefit?”). Under this paradigm, researchers were tasked to provide marketers the “what.” As in, this is what consumers think, this is what they are doing, this is what they say they want (a majority clearly prefers benefit/feature C over B or A). Marketing research was all about the dutiful reporting of consumer feedback to customize the parts or attributes of a product or service that was already created in order to help sales and marketing sell it better.

But in this hyper-competitive, increasingly globalized marketplace, the research deliverables have gone from giving the what to providing the so what and even the now what.

Radically changed

The ubiquity of great products at great prices (witness the recent trend in plasma and LCD TVs) has radically changed the predominant consumer value orientation. They no longer look for more of what a product is (more benefits, more features) for less. Rather, they want to know what’s in it for me? How much high-value is added? The questions of what have given way to the whys and hows of product development and consumer-brand relationships. The emotional, experiential, aspirational, personal and/or communal value of a product or brand is more important than its basic benefits or features shared by all similar products or brands.

As Susan Baker put it in her book New Consumer Marketing: Managing a Living Demand System, “At the start of the third millennium, a paradigm shift in commerce is clear: we have moved from a production-driven economy to a consumption-led economy. The ‘them and us’ adversarial approach to trade is giving way to consumer involvement in all aspects of product and service development and delivery.”

She further suggests that the new role of marketing is to “establish sustainable competitive advantage through superior processes of value definition, value creation and value delivery. At the heart of each of these processes is a core capability - insight, innovation and agility.”

Require different data

The shift has forced a reorientation of marketing activity away from product-centric ideas toward consumer-centric ideas. Marketers that are consumer-centric require different data from their qualitative researchers because they are now responsible for creating value - trying to see into the future and build stronger emotional connections to their consumers by understanding their different contexts and cultures. They need the so what and the now what. It is within this consumer-centric orientation that the intersection of marketing research and deliberate creativity lies. Because as we move away from a dutiful reporting of the what toward the so what and now what, we are forced to apply creativity processes to marketing research processes: We are forced to make connections “between the seemingly unconnected” (William Plomer).

When one considers this reorientation of marketing it becomes understandable why the recent spate of focus group-bashing took place. Focus groups conducted under a product-centric paradigm are generally designed only to get at the what. A standard, semi-structured guide featuring 90 minutes of straight Q&A does tend to yield answers that “are the product of deliberation,” and that deliver a bias “in favor of the conservative, in favor of the known over the unknown,” in the words of Rapaille and Gladwell.

New tools and techniques (often shared by practitioners in the field of deliberate creativity) are required to get at the data that the marketers desperately need to uncover. In the now-infamous “Shoot the focus group” article in BusinessWeek, the chief marketing officer at Yahoo! said “My research department doesn’t know it, but I’m killing all our focus groups.” Yahoo!, she went on to say, has been getting little useful information from such groups. She likely felt that the information she was getting was the what; as in, “We already know what they do online now; we need to know what they might do next!”

Uniquely qualified

But even though focus group-bashing was an expression of frustration with our inability to quickly and effectively adapt to the new consumer value orientation, qualitative research remains uniquely qualified to measure the new consumer orientation and fulfill research needs in the innovation age.

Qualitative methods include: 1) participation in the setting,  2) direct observation, 3) in-depth interviews to gather data, and 4) analysis of documents and materials (content and cultural analysis). These methods not only fit the need for creativity and innovation, they are, in fact, the very tools that the most innovative companies use in their consumer-centric research programs. Only qualitative research can identify the human dimensions of consumer value - be they emotional, experiential or cultural - that can be translated into breakthrough or adaptive innovations in products or services. Only qualitative research can evaluate value definition, value creation and value delivery for the consumer; they are dynamic and decidedly subjective.

Yet to meet this new consumer value orientation, qualitative researchers will need to bone up on their skills in consumer anthropology; creativity and co-creation; and action and/or strategic planning.

Consumer anthropology is about sharing the experience with consumers as a passive or active observer. This raw, unfiltered experience or immersion will largely replace consumer feedback, which is highly rationalized. The nuggets that come out of these types of qualitative studies - the insights that identify or measure the emotional, aspirational or cultural value of products, services and experiences - will form the basis for business innovation (new products, line extensions, new services, etc.) and marketing (new ways to connect and communicate). Gathering qualitative data through interviews is subsumed under the broader anthropological approach. Focus groups will remain popular due to their efficiency, but qualitative researchers will opt to get closer and closer to their customers, through forms of commercial ethnography and more use of in-depth, one-on-one interviewing. Cross-functional client teams of participant observers will increasingly interact passively or actively with their customers: Finding the nuggets can be easier with many pairs of eyes.

Creativity and consumer co-creation will start earlier in the qualitative research process and involve the participation of consumers at the fuzzy front end of new product or service development initiatives, new marketing and advertising campaigns, and improvements in overall consumer experience. It is no longer enough to have consumers react to products and services that are already designed. More and more consumers want to express themselves with me-branded products. Like facilitated creative problem-solving sessions, moderators will need to facilitate groups of consumers to find creative insights and solutions to the key challenge being investigated. Skills in ideation and brainstorming and creative interviewing tools and techniques (well-known ones such as free association, storytelling, projective and metaphorical tools and not-so-well-known ones like meditation and visualization, creative dramatics, proto-cepting and brainwriting) will be used more extensively, replacing standard Q&A formats.

Action and/or strategic planning will be the new deliverable instead of e-mailing a PowerPoint deck with conclusions and recommendations and being done with it. The 2006 Research Industry Trends study reported that “clients must look for partners that not only see the challenges but also see the promise and how to get from here to there.” That’s a paradigm shift with powerful implications for reporting. Qualitative research consultants will work with the client - either as a facilitator or as a participant in facilitated sessions - to develop new product and service ideas, or new marketing strategies and communication platforms, to get them from here to there. This new deliverable, the outcome of facilitated client workshops driven by qualitative consumer insights, will help get your client’s marketing and brand teams from the so what to the now what. Client brand teams can take consumer learnings, turn them into consumer insights and then use those insights as a starting point for new product ideas or communications platforms.

Better equipped

By becoming more skilled in consumer anthropology, creativity and co-creation techniques, and facilitation and action/strategic planning, qualitative researchers will be better equipped to meet the demands of the innovation age: to deliver more insight, innovation and agility to help their clients see the promise and how to get from here to there and to move from the what to the so what and now what.