The art of camouflage

Editor’s note: Robert J. Relihan and Sharon Seidler are partners with Chicago-based C&R Research and members of InVision, the firm’s qualitative research division.

“The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”  “It’s always good to be direct; don’t beat around the bush.”  “Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.”

We’ve all heard sentiments such as these. And, for the most part, we subscribe to them. Americans are dedicated to the notion that directness leads to speed and efficiency and, therefore, we like to go to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible.

But in qualitative research, taking the most direct route is often not the most efficient and certainly not the most satisfactory strategy.

When designing a flow for the discussion, it’s tempting to go for the jugular. Want to learn how people feel about a particular brand of cold cuts? Recruit lovers and rejecters, and ask them what they love and don’t love about that brand. It’s easy. It’s efficient. It’s also potentially misleading, boring and devoid of insight.

As the famed architect Eliel Saarinen noted: “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”

To charge in and ask directly about the brand or product in question is to behave in an unnatural and self-centered way from a consumer’s perspective. Few consumers shop with blinders on. They consider options and this means that they consider the total environment of the product - at the store and at home.

In fact, consumers rarely think of a brand without thinking of its category. The semiotic view that meaning depends on the network of relationships among objects really is borne out in day-to-day conversations with consumers. Their authentic feelings toward and consumption options related to McDonald’s require talking about Burger King. Any discussion of Coca-Cola must include Pepsi. If you ask directly about a brand, you rob consumers of the true source of their feelings.

Thus, a smart qualitative study will start broad and contextualize the topic or brand. Going a step further, a good qualitative study will camouflage the specific brand in question so that participants have no idea who is sponsoring the study - at least for part of the interview. We have, in fact, conducted whole studies involving multiple two-hour group interviews in which not one participant knew for sure who was sponsoring the study.

Why is this anything to tout? Is this just a game, or is there real utility to this approach? What is the value of camouflaging a qualitative study?

  • Respondents like to please.

We’ve heard the phrase about people from Minnesota being “Minnesota nice.” Well, it’s not just the case in Minnesota. Respondents, in general, (there are of course exceptions) like to play to the moderator. They like to provide answers they believe will be useful. Indeed, it is a good strategy to bond with respondents and make them feel part of the task, to make them feel a sense of a problem that needs to be solved.

Still, if the sponsor is concealed, one will find that alleged “lovers” will come forth with surprisingly critical comments about the brand, and “rejecters” will often reveal something that shows that they are actually less resistant than originally thought. The forces that operate to form the bell-shaped curve are powerful indeed.

What’s good about this is that the client learns some useful lessons about the potential cracks in his core dedicated user group, and also some ways to make positive advances regarding rejecters.

  • Often, the best, most revealing, comments are “toss away” comments spoken nearly as an aside.

In talking to a group about casual restaurants, a man almost inaudibly commented, while laughing, that he wouldn’t bring a first date there (in this case, “there” was the sponsor of the study). A little probing revealed that the restaurant was “too rough around the edges” and therefore would not be capable of encouraging the kind of sensitive relationship he was seeking.

This comment bubbled to the surface precisely because the man felt under no pressure to focus on a particular restaurant and come up with some great insight. He was just a guy letting his unconscious take over.

  • One learns about the larger context in which the product/brand needs to function.

Before you examine a product from 5,000 feet above the Earth, you should first look at it from an altitude of 37,000 feet to get the big picture.

There are two major contexts to address: at point of purchase and at home. The point-of-purchase context is the competitive frame and typically includes all of the products on the shelf. But sometimes the competitive set extends beyond the obvious product category. A shelf-stable snack food might compete with other nearby snack foods, but it can also compete with other portable, hand-held foods in general. This can encompass ice cream and yogurt novelties, microwave snacks and mini meals, fresh fruit, etc.

At home, the client’s product needs to survive a second kind of shopping trip. When one searches the kitchen stock of food for ideas for dinner, if, for example, it needs to be ready in under 15 minutes and eaten quickly, canned soup, frozen pizza, a cold cut sandwich and microwaved items like Hot Pockets are all going to compete with one another. So it’s important to understand the at-home context too, and the decision process that accompanies it.

Digging into these larger frameworks makes sense because it corresponds to the way consumers think about brand and product choices and reveals aspects that might go unnoticed.

The mechanics are simple

The mechanics of camouflaging a qualitative study are quite simple:

— During the screening process, bury the sponsor’s name among competitive names. Continue to bury the sponsor’s brand name in all subsequent questions asked about usage or attitude.

— If one is screening for a particular attitude (positive and negative are the most common) toward a new product concept, bury that concept among a few others so that the person does not know which one is the true focus. Create competing concepts that are plausible and beware of the potential participant who likes or hates everything.

— Label your screeners and other materials in the most general of terms. You want the hostess to talk about “the detergent study.” You don’t want a participant to walk in saying, “I’m here for the Wisk group.”

— During the interviewing process, employ an inverted pyramid style of interviewing. Go from broadest and most general to most specific. If, for example, you are investigating a particular brand of sliced meat or brand of bar soap, bring to the table a full competitive set of products. Some hands-on exercises will quickly reveal where the sponsor’s product lies relative to competition. Talk about each of the products, but do not reveal which one is the sponsor. This can’t help but turn up something helpful and perhaps unanticipated.

Few can remain cloaked

Having argued for camouflaging a qualitative study, one might reasonably ask: “But how can I conceal the sponsor and still address the sponsor’s issues?” Good question. The answer is that few studies can remain cloaked in camouflage from start to finish. But even if one holds back the moment of truth until the second half of the interview, one has gained quite a lot.

Once you move into the “revealed” part of the interview and show brand-specific new product ideas or communications, you can still use the principles from the first “concealed” part of the interview as a kind of backdrop for reality testing. Thus, if you heard even small negative comments about your client’s product in the first, camouflaged portion of the study, and now that same person is extolling the virtues of the new product concept, challenge him/her - not in a hostile way, but certainly in a way that points out the inconsistency.

In sum, to “see” your product truthfully, you’ve got to hide it. To go to the heart of the matter, you’ve got to take a circuitous route. And to showcase the product or service at hand, you need to bury it in its larger context. If you do this, you will be rewarded with insights that are honest, valid and useful.