Better together

For many consumers, batteries are a commodity. Other than steering clear of off-label dollar-store power cells, the conventional wisdom is that a battery is a battery. Sure, countless ad campaigns have been launched and marketing dollars spent to convince us to the contrary but in the eyes of most, whatever’s on sale is fine.

Battery maker Duracell has been working to change that perception by creating proprietary battery performance metrics and introducing new types of alkaline battery and implicit research methods like eye tracking and galvanic skin response measurements have been a key to its efforts, says Ray Iveson, vice president of methods and measurements and global quality assurance at Duracell.

At the outset of our Q&A (presented here edited for length and clarity) he was quick to stress that he’s not a marketing researcher and that, aware he was being interviewed by a marketing research magazine, he views biometric research tools as supplements to – not replacements for – consumer research. Rather, he says, they’re part of a combined approach that offers companies a way to incorporate customer needs and wants to inform product development, something he learned the value of during his time at Procter & Gamble. After getting his master’s degree in biomedical engineering he worked at P&G in the skincare category developing new tools for measuring skin properties (visual appearance, color, etc.) and then did stints in haircare and laundry before landing at Duracell, which was owned by P&G at the time.

Quirk’s: P&G’s focus on the consumer is pretty legendary and it sounds like that has really stuck with you.

Iveson: I’m a measurement scientist and I’ve got almost 30 years now in doing measurements. And the similarities in what you need to do are amazing, regardless of the product you’re working on, especially in consumer packaged products. You have to start with the consumer because if you don’t know what the consumer both desires and doesn’t desire, you can’t translate it into the proper measurements that you need to make for your products. So you always have to start with the consumer.

So that’s kind of the background as to where I am today. Now I’m heading up the methods and measurements group and global quality assurance within Duracell. And my focus has been mostly on measurement science. But, as I said, you have to start first with the consumer, which is why we were so interested in integrating the implicit consumer feedback measures that we do today.

How did you determine which one or ones you wanted to use?

That was kind of a trial-and-error experiment. I mean, that’s the nature of research and development. You don’t always know what’s going to work and not work. There are traditional technical measurements of battery performance and there are traditional measurements of consumer feedback. And we would use probably what you’re familiar with – home use testing, panel tests or even direct consumer feedback – to help guide the product design strategy and the optimizations that we would do on our products. And that had been the nature of Duracell’s product design strategy until I arrived. But in my 24 years in Procter I learned that you can’t always trust that what a consumer tells you will be the whole picture of what they desire or don’t desire. And so that’s where we started to bring in the implicit measurement tools.

We brought them in and started using them to see what would give us a more complete picture of what the consumer desired, from both a battery and a battery-powered device experience. It took us a while to get to the state that we are today in terms of what we now use to objectify, if you will, the consumer response, and use that to help guide our product design experience. But the tools from iMotions were kind of our first foray into this area. So they had multiple tools available or within their suite – eye tracking, pupil-size measurement, facial expression analysis and [galvanic skin response]. And so we brought those tools in to try to figure out which ones would give us a more complete picture of consumer response.

Can you talk about why it’s helpful to use the implicit methods along with or instead of the explicit methods?

What I would first say is we don’t use them instead of; we use them to supplement. We use all of the traditional measures of the industry and we continue to use the explicit measures with consumers but we now supplement them with the implicit. The advantage that the implicit gives you is, as soon as you ask a consumer a question, regardless of whether you intend to or not, you can bias them in their response. With implicit measures you’re not asking anything, you’re merely measuring physiological response to a stimulus. And that advantage is huge in trying to build the complete picture of the response and what the consumer is actually valuing in the stimulus that you provide to them.

The other one that I’ll bring up is, I’ve dealt with consumer response across a number of different [product category] stimuli and I’ve found that in almost every measurement a consumer makes, they are non-linear in their response. And so having a way to objectively measure their response allows us to see exactly where they are linear and where they are non-linear. What I mean by that is if you presented a scale of 1-10 for a specific attribute, you might assume that the difference between a 5 and a 6 is the same as the difference between the 7 and 8. But when you line up those measures versus implicit data or technical data of that stimulus, you’ll often find that the consumer is non-linear in the way they use those scales.

What are some of the things that you learned about the processes that consumers go through when they’re buying batteries and what some of their considerations are? Is it just durability and price?

We know that there are numerous factors that affect consumer purchase behavior. And so it could be price, it could be battery life, it could be marketing. What you say about the product can have a big impact on what people will purchase. But the area that my team focuses on is value. And part of the equation in value that we focus on is product performance or device experience. So the way we quantify value is, how much performance or experience are we giving you in your device versus the price that you’re paying? I don’t do the work on the marketing area, I’m in research and development, but I want to build batteries that will give the consumer the greatest value for the price that they pay.

And so my focus is specifically on that area: What are the things that we can do in designing our batteries to help give greater value to the consumer? In doing this work obviously we have to use both implicit as well as explicit measurements of the consumer but we use industry-standard measures of the battery and our own proprietary measures on the battery. An example I can give you for how this would play out would be if I look at some of the research we’ve done on our alkaline batteries. We measured consumers’ explicit and implicit responses to device performance of flashlights. We powered [the flashlights] with both commercially available alkaline batteries and prototype alkaline batteries. And we found that in their combination of implicit and explicit response that they were not revealing all of what they ended up telling us they desired in their explicit responses.

So we used the implicit data to help set new targets for those batteries. And we actually were able to design batteries that are blind-test winners against all commercially available alkaline batteries in the marketplace today. With the combination of implicit and explicit, we found new targets for what the battery should do. And then from that, we designed batteries that perform better than anything in the market from a consumer perception standpoint. We took those newly designed batteries and put a black label over them so that nobody knew what they were. We took batteries from the marketplace and removed the labels and put black labels over them and tested them with the consumers. And when we did that with these new, redesigned batteries we found that the new design won against all other alkaline batteries in the market without exception.

The advantage of this iMotions platform, at least versus anything else we looked at, was that it measures multiple attributes. So having that ability to synchronize that data starts to allow you to develop new analytics, the outputs of those measurements that will allow you to get to a better place. For example, facial expressions speak volumes but your interpretation of that expression will be different from mine. And so having a tool that quantifies it down to an objective endpoint gets us to a way of taking these kind of nebulous and interpretable outputs into something that you can use in real science. So that is the platform that we used to kind of integrate with our explicit measurements to end up getting to that new battery design.

Did you have to convince any internal stakeholders of the value of using this approach? Can you walk me through that process of getting people up to speed on what biometrics are and how they work?

We brought in the implicit tools and tried them out. We found some insights that we thought were important to changing the way we design batteries going forward. We ended up executing the prototypes against those new targets, testing them back with consumers, still using the implicit tools to kind of fill the picture with the explicit responses.

It took us a while to get there – probably four years. But at the end of the day what made it easier to communicate and convince people of the value of these implicit tools was the fact that we went through full-cycle product development, launched a product and then tested it with consumers and showed that it was the right product for the consumer – even though their explicit feedback before that cycle would never have gotten us to that point, would never have told us that was the right way to design batteries.

And then once we built the product and put it into the marketplace, it was that blind testing that I told you about, when we went back and tested it with consumers and the consumers reported back to us that that was a clear winner versus what was already in the marketplace. That was all that it took to convince the company. 

Were there any differences between what people told you or indicated was important for them in a battery versus what you found out from their physiological responses? 

If you ask people what they want from a battery, what they’ll repeat back to you is what they’ve been told or what they expect that you’ll want to hear. And that generally is about the longevity of the battery. Because that’s the way batteries have been spoken about as an industry for [decades]. But if we design a battery that changes how a device performs, how does the consumer respond? Now, they may never in 100 years mention the device performance if you ask them. But how the device performs is part of what is important to the way we will design our batteries going forward. So we can manipulate the design to get different device performance. Figuring out what the optimal performance is through both the explicit and implicit measures was part of the key to identifying how we wanted to design the battery.

Duracell wants to use insights to advance how batteries are evaluated by all major industry players. Can you talk about that a bit?

There are industry standards for how battery performance is measured. And they’re incredibly valuable but one of the things that we’ve found is that how you technically measure product performance has to emanate from what the consumer desires and doesn’t desire. And those industry standards, while they’re very important, they’re tending to lag behind the electronics industry and the device marketplace. They don’t change as frequently as the marketplace changes. So we’ve had to design some proprietary battery performance measurements and analytics that match up better to what our consumer response data tells us in order to get to a different place. You can’t just rely on just the standards, you can’t rely on the explicit feedback; you actually have to bring things to the point of some different measurements that match up better to what the whole picture, the whole consumer response is telling you. And I obviously can’t give away the proprietary pieces but we’ve developed proprietary measurements and analytics to match it better to the consumer response that we were able to measure.

Have you seen any changes in consumer buying or what consumers say they want from batteries during the pandemic?

I think we’ve seen greater levels of battery purchase, because you’ve got more home offices, more home schoolers using wireless devices powered by batteries. And then we’ve seen an increase in gaming with so many people at home and many gaming devices require batteries. I’d like to believe the change in choice of batteries is more related to what we’ve been talking about, which is that we’ve designed a battery to do something very different versus the normal alkaline battery in the marketplace. And thus the choice is being swayed by its performance or the devices’ performance with the battery.

Any final thoughts on the value of consumer feedback – in all its forms?

To us, understanding what the consumer wants is core to designing the right products. [It’s a process] where you start with the consumer to figure out how you measure the right performance to develop the right products. Without the consumer, if you’re just doing it in isolation, sorry, but you’ve got it completely wrong. It has to start with the consumer.