I was watching the premier of a new series on Bravo called Pregnant In Heels, which follows the business of maternity concierge Rosie Pope as she guides Manhattan moms-to-be into motherhood. The first episode focused on the Jacobs family, a self-proclaimed New York power couple on a mission to choose the perfect name for their third child and first son. The mother is a best-selling author who specializes in “personal branding” and believes that a person’s name is the first impression one makes. They were looking for a high-class name that could potentially be on the 2060 presidential ticket. Basically, they wanted to “brand” their baby and they wanted to use research to do it! (Babies as commodities – is research ready for this?!)
First, Pope gathered a so-called think tank of the types of people this baby would one day want to impress: a poet, a senior manager at a naming agency, a cultural linguistics expert, a baby-name blogger, etc. Then, we saw the couple behind the glass at a focus group facility (a nice plug for our friends at SIS International!) of everyday people who narrowed down a list of names (five the Jacobses loved and five they hated) to their three favorites. The Jacobses then took those three names (and three of their own favorites that didn’t make the list) to a dinner party of their close friends and asked for their input. The names, in case you were wondering, were Asher, Holden and Miles from the focus group and Tucker, Bowen and Bode from the couple.
What fascinated me was that the couple was totally pro-research . . . until the results didn’t jive with their own preferences.
Sound familiar?
The focus group of commoners was acceptable until their favorite name was ripped to shreds. Then, in the eyes of the Jacobses, the respondents suddenly became uneducated, out of touch and simply the wrong type of people. Instead of adjusting their course of action, the couple wanted to adjust the sample/respondent pool.
The Jacobses ended up choosing a name that was lambasted by the brain trust, the focus group AND their friends: Bowen. They picked the name that they liked, regardless of the rest of the world’s input. That’s fine for naming a baby but how many research clients have come to the same (ill-advised) conclusions because they simply didn’t trust the process?