Short attention span theater

Editor’s note: Ernest Potischman is president of Potischman New Products, a New York new product consultancy.

Since the dawn of marketing history, marketers have faced the infamous and daunting 90+ percent failure rate for new product launches. This has been a seeming constant despite ever more elaborate and mathematically bulletproof consumer behavior modeling systems putatively designed to accurately foretell the relationship between qualitative and quantitative research and the unforgiving real world.

The reasons for this "success gap" are varied and changing. Like rapidly evolving bacteria throwing off the latest antibiotic, we seem constantly to invent new mistakes in researching the intentions of consumers, thus keeping pace with and foiling the evolving mathematical models.

However, based on an admittedly non-projectable sample of experience in diagnosing and correcting such failures, it appears to this writer that to a remarkable degree the problem is often so obvious that it may be overlooked until it is either too late or too costly to correct.

Simply stated, even today’s most sophisticated marketers of new products are most often confounded not by bad ideas, but by good ideas badly communicated. Failure, as measured by low purchase interest generated under actual marketing conditions, is signaled by an often drastic falloff in communication recall and concept comprehension from levels achieved in earlier qualitative testing.

Which leads to the question: What goes wrong with a bell-ringing new product concept in the transition from qualitative to quantitative assessment that befouls its communication to the target consumer?

The answer can often be traced to the nature of the research, and more specifically, to the attention or inattention paid to the research process by the respondents.

Explored and nurtured

Typically, in the course of its development, a concept is explored and nurtured in focus group discussions where moderator and respondents focus rather intensely on the verbal and graphic representation of the idea. Not surprisingly, due to the nature of group discussion, and abetted by a moderator’s guidance, everyone eventually "gets it" - that is, even the least motivated or interested in the group eventually becomes equally as aware of the dimensions of the idea as the swiftest of mind and most interested. Thus, if the idea is intrinsically sound, we have a winner.

The stage is set for disaster. There will likely never be another moment in the short life of the doomed concept when so many people will focus their attention so sharply and so clearly on what the idea is, and on how that information is communicated to them. For the next step in the winning concept’s progress is often a quantitative concept screen wherein the idea, represented by headline plus copy plus a rough illustration or two, is shown in shopping malls to just-recruited respondents.

Often, that step becomes the last. The winner is judged a loser.

There are two elements that need to be addressed in plumbing this phenomenon. First, attitudinal. How does a respondent behave in a focus group versus a mall intercept? The answer is: differently. In a focus group, the respondent has "sold" her/his time, and is more or less committed to sitting down with others for up to two hours to discuss a given subject. In a mall intercept, frequently, the respondent is inveigled to spare a few minutes from a hectic schedule to read and rank one or more concepts.

Second, mechanical. This one has two branches: either too brief a concept has been written, allowing respondents to read what they will into the idea instead of reacting to the exact proposition behind the idea, or, oppositely, the concept wording is so thorough and lengthy that it isn’t easily understood when taken out of group discussion context.

Whether too short or too long, this can lead to artificially high interest in the concept initially because, in focus group context, it doesn’t matter - the respondent will come to understand the idea if enough discussion takes place.

Better things to do

Contrast the focus group with a shopping mall intercept for a con-screen. Observing in a shopping mall as shoppers are brought in for con-screen interviews will bear out this thought: Left on their own, busy people have many better and more pressing things to do with their time than carefully reading every last word in a new product concept. In the mall, watch their eyes as they cherry pick a path down the page, finding a few elements that, for whatever reason, attract their fleeting attention. As they do so, realize that your hopes and dreams for your product may have just been dashed by inattention to the details of your carefully constructed, if verbose, concept.

So, one way has not enough detail, the other, too much. Opposites? No. The same problem underlies: The respondent is being asked to evaluate an idea under different circumstances, and he or she, along with the client and agency representatives, have thereby been misled in their judgments as to the idea’s intrinsic merits.

An example from our files: A "winning" OTC drug product concept is developed through several steps of qualitative research. The refined concept is shown in focus groups to prime target respondents and most give it an enthusiastic thumbs-up. The careful moderator asks for individual recall cards. Respondents give a rich playback, confirming that they know what the idea is and why they want it.

As a fail-safe measure prior to production and market introduction, the winning concept is sent through a well-known and respected quantitative testing system. Unexpectedly, its purchase interest falls well below the norms for successful new products in the category. Even the main selling idea comes through at abysmal levels. The project is put on hold, the consumer research team scratches its collective head, and the brand manager takes another Valium.

Someone has heard about our prior work attempting to disentangle such marketing knots and calls us in. We take the same, precise, troublesome concept as tested back into focus groups and sure enough, they love it. We wonder about contamination; that is, are respondents understanding the idea on their own or are they being educated by the discussion itself? So, we conduct a day of 14 one-on-one interviews, with the respondents required to read the concept on their own. After just five interviews, we conclude that comprehension is extremely low, there is confusion about the main idea, and there is low buying interest.

We call a 30-minute halt in the interviewing process and, working with the attending client, manage to deconstruct the concept, isolating the troublesome words and the confusing elements in the illustration. Lacking an available computer or artist, we make rough modifications by hand and go back to interviewing. Comprehension and interest improve immediately but there are still problem areas.

After the ninth interview, we call for another hiatus and agree on a diagnosis: Some respondents are not reading the entire concept. Their eyeballs can be seen flitting around, not through, the text and they’re finishing reading it too quickly. Perhaps they’re missing key information? We make bold cuts; every word deemed not absolutely essential is pruned; secondary benefit claims are sacrificed for the sake of brevity. Back to the interviews: 10 through 14 yield clear comprehension, positive interest. We have a "winner" again.

Encouraged and invigorated by this process, the client goes into management in a fighting mood and, despite the unbudgeted expense, wins agreement for another quantitative screening assessment. This time, the concept breaks through the upside of all relevant norms. It goes to market and quickly becomes a real-world winner as well.

The difference between lose and win in this case is that the original concept, as tested, was too long and too complicated, with too many promises and arguments for most readers to handle on their own as opposed to in a group educational experience. But most product decisions are made individually by consumers, not in a group context.

Shortened attention spans

What, if anything, has happened to people’s ability to deal with complexity, even so simple a variety as that found in a typical print ad from 20 years ago? The answer: media-saturated consumers with lowered reading skills, multiple distractions, shortened attention spans, smaller vocabularies, a cynical viewpoint about marketing and a preference for icons and other visual cues over words as a means of receiving messages.

Concept ads designed for the Age of the Sequentially Read Printed Page are hopelessly irrelevant and impenetrable to these consumers. Our experience is that, on their own, consumers will pick up, at most, seven key words no matter how many are thrown at them. That’s not very many to accomplish the tasks of establishing brand name, key benefit/point of difference, and key supporting reason why. Try it yourself, on your brand, for a bracing experience.

So, you learn your lesson. The concept is kept clear, concise, to the point, and easy to read. You vault the con-screen high bar and you’re now on your way to advertising executions and real-world fame and glory.

Not so fast. More trouble looms ahead. Its name is entertainment value, what ad agency creatives put in to build attention and share of mind versus the plethora of other attractions vying for the consumer’s attention. The problem, roughly stated, is similar to offering kids ice cream at the same time as oatmeal. The eye and appetite tends to go toward the fun rather than the nourishment. Likewise, the execution of a carefully constructed and agreed upon copy strategy statement may win an award for Best Liked Commercial precisely because it is fun to watch and threatens no one with something as crass as a clearly communicated, hard hitting and motivating argument for purchasing the product.

Another case from the file. A few years back, a beverage powerhouse acquired a license to use the very well-known brand name of another company. They tested that name with target consumers and there was highly positive feedback. Encouraged, the company used qualitative and quantitative research to carefully construct a new product which was consonant with the brand name image and tailored to the target consumers’ taste preferences. In-home use tests yielded gratifying levels of satisfaction and repurchase intent. Retailers expressed willingness to stock and display the product.

Based on thick documentation, the advertising agency produced three commercials, and the product went into test market, where it failed miserably.

We, as a disinterested third party, were called in to find out what went wrong, and, if possible, recommend a fix. First, we suggested simply showing the commercials to a handful of target consumers in focus groups and one-on-one interviews, more to give us a feel for the category than as a diagnostic tool. Imagine the shock among ourselves and the clients when we discovered that the carefully contrived strategy and message was being sabotaged by the seemingly on-target creative executions. The consumers watched them raptly, yet inexplicably misunderstood their message.

Inexplicably that is, until the respondents were interviewed one at a time and were given an opportunity to describe in unstructured style what they thought the commercials were trying to tell them. Then it became clear: nothing. There was no perceived message particular to the brand, only generics of the category. But what of all the copy points inserted in the 30-second spots? Message not received. The viewers just plain missed them, not once, but twice. No one we interviewed wanted to buy the product, or even to try it once, yet the idea had been a winner and there was nothing wrong with its intrinsic product attributes.

Drop the distractions

The fix for these faults was readily apparent: drop the distractions, get down to business with communication of a single, clear and compelling reason for purchase. Make that objective the paramount guideline for revamped creative executions, and entertainment values a secondary guideline. But in this case the will was lacking to attempt another costly market test. The project was abandoned. As the old marketing aphorism has it, "Success has many fathers; failure is a bastard." No one wanted to claim paternity for an idea that had already failed once.

Since that experience, we have conducted a number of diagnostic projects that resulted in improved concept communication and purchase interest. In each case, we and the client have undertaken a day of one-on-ones, entailing patient, painstaking exploration of the concept communications, whether in the form of concept statement, rough commercial, finished commercial or print ad. The interviews were interwoven with pauses allowing modifications to be made "on the fly" as learning progressed. By the end of that day, the client had a sharper, clearer, more motivating concept. Every time.

Now there is surely a point, the advertising creatives will say, when one has to trust their instincts and not those of a researcher bent on checking every last detail of the execution. Well, it’s your money. In the medical profession, it’s known as getting a second opinion. If the principle is good enough for life-threatening situations, surely it’s a sensible one for marketing situation where roughly and metaphorically speaking, nine out of 10 patients don’t make it.

The third eye

The lesson here is, it is vital to check the final concept, even when it has gone as far as final execution. But the question remains: how did it get to that point without the errors becoming apparent? The answer is that it is nobody’s fault, and everyone’s. If you work on something long enough, you lose objectivity, particularly the ability to see the idea as someone does who is unfamiliar with it. That goes for brand managers, in-house researchers, ad agency people, even outside research suppliers, including moderators. Including this writer. No one is objective enough to give a good first opinion and second opinion. So, you have to go to a fresh, objective viewpoint. Someone who has never worked on the project, yet has the experience to quickly diagnose weaknesses and provide solutions. Call that person The Third Eye.

Here’s how it can work for you. Make up your mind ahead of time that there will come a point, at the conclusion of qualitative concept development but before quantitative assessment, when it will be prudent and profitable to bring in The Third Eye to work over the concept with a fresh, unbiased view toward maximizing its clarity and persuasiveness. Assume that you will catch some heat from people with a stake in the project outcome who have already had an input and don’t wish it to be challenged. Stay with it; keep in mind that there are few things that can’t be improved by a fresh point of view, and if not, if it checks out perfectly, then be doubly assured that you’re on track to successful new product launch, one of the minority every year who are.

A final story with an unhappy ending. Working with a client employed at a Fortune 500 company, we created a new product concept that depended heavily on the symbolism of a logo device. Words surrounded the device, but in all the qualitative research we conducted, the art was the central persuader to every respondent who expressed buying interest. Satisfied that a market winner was in the making, the client sent it into the company’s proprietary quantitative assessment system. The system had never allowed for art, icons and the like. It was argued that for reasons of statistical comparability, the art would have to be deleted. We argued and lost. Shorn of its prime motivator, the icon, the concept failed miserably. The project was terminated. But nature and marketing abhor a vacuum. Another company had a similar idea a year later and went ahead, icon and all. It became a viable new product, one of the less than 10 percent of new products that survive introduction.

Get around the roadblocks

The good news in all of this? There are fairly simple things you can do to get around new product roadblocks like the ones described above:

1. If the consumer is going to be asked to read the concept on their own, keep to the point: concisely 1 tell them what it’s for, promise a benefit, give a reason why it might be true, separate it from its competitors. Period. And make sure that symbols and/or icons carry their share of the communication load. But beware of brainstorm winners, i.e., ideas that are incontrovertibly good, like "better value," but as mere promises mean literally nothing in real-world purchase decisions.

2. Learn how consumers scan the concept before risking quantitative testing. Placing an attractive visual element just past the key body copy, for example, may guarantee that few people will read the copy, preferring to let their eyes take the express track to the more rewarding visual element. In that case, if the copy is necessary for developing buying interest, you’ve just lost a sale. Visuals are important, but they’re not everything.

3. Check the concept’s communication ability with a day of one-on-ones, preferably conducted by someone skilled at deconstructing miscommunication.

4. During that day of one-on-ones, change the concept wording as you learn what isn’t working, so that by the end of the day, you have a clear story, clearly communicated.

5. If you are at the point that TV executions are finished, try to buy enough time to undertake even a single day of one-on-ones. Obviously, if a problem is unearthed, it won’t be fixed on the spot, but a last-minute reprieve to allow some re-editing may very well save the test market or regional roll-out or even national launch from failure.

There is another benefit that awaits you. It is entirely likely that in clearing up the confusion, the concept will be markedly strengthened, turning a merely good idea into a very good one, a very good one into a great one. That ought to make the extra day or two it takes, as well as the costs incurred, one of the better bargains around.

Notes

1 Concise copy doesn’t always mean brief copy. Exceptions where long copy may be necessary are very expensive products or services (a fine car, a top-end entertainment system, a new home, an IPO stock offering, etc.). In these cases, building confidence prior to major investment may dictate that a fuller story be told.