Is TMI the new normal?

Editor’s note: Burt Leiman is managing director of research firm Firefly Millward Brown. He is based in Chicago.

In a recent episode of the AMC series Mad Men, Don Draper took up the routine of keeping a personal journal. As he smoked and wrote, he admitted that the process of self-reflection didn’t come naturally to him - indeed, his life had to first hit rock bottom before he took up journaling, and only then as a form of therapy. And if Draper’s observation that “women smell like corn” is any indication, he has a long way to go before his journaling skills match his advertising prowess.

The fictional world occupied by the ad execs of Mad Men provides us with a painful recollection of a not-so-long-ago era in marketing, when consumers found it awkward, if not painful, to share their thoughts and feelings about the categories and brands they use. The fictional ad agency, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, is compelled to hire a trained psychologist to help them pry the pearls of consumer insights from the closed shells of consumers, circa 1964. And while Draper struggled to reveal himself in his private journal, Dr. Faye’s attempts to get consumers to open up in a focus group setting is portrayed as leading to embarrassment or downright humiliation: “Don’t worry, dear. Someone always cries at these sorts of things,” a respondent is reassured.

Their innermost feelings

While my own tenure in market research only reaches back to the early ’80s, even within that time frame I’ve observed a growing capability and willingness among consumers to reflect on and express their innermost feelings in a research setting. My sense is that this trend at least indirectly reflects the global adoption of social media in all forms and it has positive implications for those of us in qualitative research and for the clients who hire us.

Marketers have always sought deeper insights about how consumers engage with their brands, and the influence of social media on our ability to achieve this objective appears to have progressed as follows:

Before: The “Dear Diary” period
The process of self-reflection, soul searching and recording one’s deepest emotions has traditionally been the domain of women and girls, via diary entries. (Appropriately, a media blogger expressed surprise that Don Draper would take up the “sissified” practice of recording emotions in a journal.) Daily activities, both mundane and profound, hopes, wishes and disappointments were recorded and secured under lock and key. One imagines that the very idea of having these most personal, heartfelt writings revealed to others would have been mortifying for most diarists. And male journalists, as exemplified by historic figures from Napoleon to Lewis and Clark, appeared to stay an arm’s length from personal examination and emotional expression: “Joined Capt Clark, found the party in good health and sperits [sic].”

Deep self-reflection and the sharing of emotions seemed to be confined to female diarists - and perhaps psychiatrists’ patients - through the Mad Men era, and even into the ’80s and ’90s. As an account planner at Leo Burnett in the ’80s, I suggested a pre-focus group homework assignment, in which I asked consumers to record their feelings and morning rituals before, during and after consuming a bowl of cereal. This assignment was successful at revealing category and brand insights but initially there was much hand-wringing about this research add-on: Would consumers actually record habits and emotions surrounding something as basic as eating cereal? How much added incentive would be required to persuade them to cooperate? At the time, my colleagues considered this an “experimental” complement to qualitative research.

Current: The “Dear Followers” period
The ubiquity of social media is responsible for three phenomena that have implications for qualitative researchers:

Sharing with strangers has become normal. The terms “social media” or “social networking” are more commonly used by marketers and journalists than by those who actually use social media on a daily (or hourly) basis. But social media brands, from Facebook to Twitter to Orkut to Mixi, have become part of the global consumer vocabulary. Of significance, whether or not one personally posts through any of these portals, consumers across demographic and geographic boundaries have at least a minimal familiarity with the practice of sharing activities and attitudes over the Internet - with both friends and strangers.

Especially for younger demographic groups, broadcasting tidbits about one’s life has become normative. For other segments, it’s a practice that one may dabble in or perhaps try out one day. A recent global study of social media, fielded by Firefly Millward Brown, confirmed that regardless of their level of participation, the basic concept of thinking out loud in front of a broad, virtual audience is recognized as a mainstream practice across markets, age groups and income levels. A modern day Don Draper might choose to tweet his observations about booze and women rather than confine himself to paper and pencil.

Recalibrating what is private. As the various portals of social media were just beginning to gain ground earlier this decade, I heard critics who echoed the sentiments of the Dear Diary period: Why would anyone reveal such personal things to people they don’t know? Who could possibly be interested in reading my tweet about some new yogurt I discovered? And yet, the pace of personal revelation has been accelerating, even as I write this. For example, a quick Twitter search informed me that both PinkVintage and DavidGytn picked up diarrhea over the past 24 hours - and it’s going to interfere with how DavidGytn studies for an upcoming test. And msLaLaFantasy is out of paper baking cups but is considering the foil type of cup when she heads to the store.

Too much information? Not if I’m marketing diarrhea remedies or baking products (with apologies for combining those two product categories). And in general, for any of us qual researchers who strive to get respondents to trust us enough to share the personal details of their lives and brand affinities, the practice of sharing thoughts and concerns online can only be seen as a warm-up act for focus groups or one-on-one interviews. The lock has been removed from the diary and the boundaries of what is considered personal and private are dissolving.

To the extent that this recalibration of privacy can be carried over to a qualitative interview, a skilled moderator (and his/her client) can only benefit from consumers’ growing willingness to reveal more about themselves. During recent focus groups, I asked respondents to describe the current medications they were taking. A septuagenarian revealed (to a mixed-gender group) that one of his prescriptions was for an erectile dysfunction drug, adding, “… and I gotta tell you, it works!” While I was not able to determine whether or not this fellow was a social media regular, his willingness to share such details with strangers exemplifies the trend that social media is pushing along.

Providing a plethora of digital journaling tools. In its infancy, posting to the major social media networks was limited to computer or laptop entries. But the ability to engage in social networking via mobile devices, uploading digital images on the fly, has expanded the depth of what can be shared with others - including embarrassing pictures that 10 years ago would have been considered “TMI.”  Moreover, these tools have made mobile sharing into an entertaining sport, to be played anytime, anywhere - at a party, at a store, at a Cubs game, walking the dog … or even while eating a bowl of cereal first thing in the morning.

In my experience, familiarity with mobile journaling tools has had the most direct impact on the quality of research I moderate. Unlike my hesitance to assign research homework in the ’80s, I now routinely ask respondents to capture category habits and rituals throughout the day as well as emotions, concerns and wishes that happen in real time. I ask them to capture what they’re doing via digital imagery and bring those images to our focus groups. In the ’90s, I had my recruiters send disposable cameras to respondents, along with a promise to reimburse them for photo processing. Now, I simply ask respondents to print or e-mail their homework images or I’ll have the research facility print images from respondents’ cell phones or storage cards.

With written and image homework in hand, my respondents demonstrate fantastic pre-thinking about our research topics and they’re always anxious to do a show-and-tell of their homework once our discussions begin. Significantly, across demographic segments, my respondents have either already engaged in similar digital sharing steps via their social media experience or they’re at least familiar with what is involved, based on what they know about Facebook or YouTube.

Four actions

So what does all this mean to qualitative researchers? Aside from directly leveraging social media portals (e.g., as recruiting sources or as a platform for conducting online focus groups) there are, at minimum, four actions that traditional, face-to-face qualitative researchers can take:

1. Exploit the shifting privacy boundaries.
During group and one-on-one interviews, moderators should feel comfortable incrementally pushing for more personal revelations from consumers. Or asking respondents to reflect on mundane day-to-day habits. Chances are that some of your respondent segments have already posted even more revealing (or boring) details online. An indirect approach, referencing social media, can help to legitimize this sort of probe: “If you were going to tweet about the pain you’re feeling, what would you write?”

2. Simulate affinity friendship circles during recruitment.
In the social media world, consumers feel more comfortable revealing themselves in the safety of affinity groups, be they school alums, fellow video game fans or employer groups. During the invitation to attend a focus group, for example, we can borrow from the language of social media friendship circles, assuring prospective respondents that they will be participating in a discussion among people whose answers to recruitment questions are similar to their own.
And, where practical, we can even simulate the social media practice of checking out someone’s profile by providing a link to the moderator’s online profile.

3. Build digital journaling homework into most qualitative projects.
As mentioned above, this step adds richness to what we learn from consumers and encourages early self-reflection that, in turn, makes for more efficient in-room discussions (see related article on page 28). Respondents have demonstrated that they’re eager to engage in this added step and we do not necessarily need to increase recruitment incentive in order to ensure cooperation. In a December 2001 article in Quirk’s (“Don’t forget to do your homework”) Tom McGee suggested that participation might increase if we promise consumers that they’ll be able to keep homework creations after a focus group is completed. In the social media age, this is no longer necessary. In fact, one bonus of digital journaling is that the moderator (and client) acquires a library of personal thoughts and images which can either be incorporated into the analyses and report or simply maintained as a resource to be mined later.

4. Consider tapping into social media sites for respondent quality-control.
The rise in social media participation also carries a potential negative when it comes to research security. The same consumer who enjoys sharing her food and television experiences might also feel inclined to blog about your client’s new brand extension or its advertising campaign for next quarter. To diminish these negatives when launching particularly sensitive projects, we’ve incorporated several safeguards: 

  • In addition to the standard recruitment security questions (about previous research participation or category employment), we’ve also added queries about whether prospective respondents host online blogs or Web sites.
  • We’ve conducted online searches for prospective respondents’ names to determine if they’ve regularly posted about the category to be researched or if they represent a security risk in some other way. We’ve challenged or eliminated approximately one respondent per high-security project by using this step.
  • We’ve required respondents to sign non-disclosure contracts which explicitly forbid them from sharing focus group content either face-to-face or via social networking. And, for the highest-security projects, we follow up our fieldwork with project-related keyword searches on portals such as Facebook and Twitter. Thus far, we’ve only had to follow up on a single forbidden tweet, but that single instance was sufficient to illustrate the value of our process.

Uninhibited revelations

Fifty years from now, AMC may produce a television drama that dramatizes the “vintage” advertising practices of 2010. I expect that, in doing so, it will portray ddraper64 taking advantage of the uninhibited revelations encouraged by the prevalence of social media.