Archive for January, 2012

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

The use of MROCs is burgeoning.  They enable the researcher and the marketer to immerse themselves deeply in the lives of their consumers.  The experience is incredibly rich.  We can hear consumers in their own voice; we can peek into their homes.  They can show us the things and images that are meaningful to them and their families.  And, they still are able to talk among themselves in ways that make the most sense to them.  It’s an embarrassment of riches.

How do you make the most of these riches?  MROCs are qualitative research.  Right?  Yet, unlike a focus group or an individual interview, they don’t come at us as a simple, single stream of information.  Rather, they give us different types of information, both synchronous and asynchronous, and they give us tons of it.

As we have mastered the operational aspects of this approach, we have also developed principles for maximizing the learning it delivers.  Here are a few rules to follow if you want to get the most out of your MROC:

• Get your team organized and focused.  More so than with traditional qualitative research, it is important to assure that all team members understand the goals of the project and the specific details of how those goals will be achieved.  This is essential because most MROCs are built with a range of discussions, stimuli, and projective exercises.  There are lots of little pieces to keep straight.
• Give everyone on the team a research buddy or two.  Rather than ask every member of your team to pay attention to everything happening in the MROC, assign each member of the team one are two of the participants.  Have the team members follow everything that just their “buddies” say and do.  This makes the task of following the community much more manageable for each team member.  Moreover, by immersing themselves in the experiences of just one or two participants, team members will feel the consumer experience much more deeply.  In your meetings, they will become advocates for their research buddies.
• Use the technology platform to communicate questions and comments among the team members and with the community leaders.  It may be tempting to e-mail, text, or simply grab someone in the hall to talk about the community, but using the technology platform will allow everyone on the team to see every comment and serve as a repository for those comments when the project is completed.
• Hold a “study hall.”  It is important that the team not let the rush of information get ahead of it.  Therefore, we have found it essential to bring the team together almost daily to share the current state of its learning.  Since everyone has a research buddy, the regularity of these meetings is less onerous than it sounds.  We all want to give voice to our new friend.
• Give the team a framework.  While the study hall is great for collective sharing, we also find it useful for the group leader to send almost daily, but brief, summaries of the three or four key insights of the day.  Not only is the information valuable, but these insights focus the observations of the team members for the next day.

Following these simple rules will assure that your team gets the most from its MROC experience.

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

I was talking with some young men several evenings ago.   Yes, it was a focus group, and I was the moderator.  The topic was something of general interest, so I had also been conducting groups among older men as well as younger and older women.

The group began well with a bit of the typical bluff you expect from younger guys.  Then something interesting happened, something I had not seen quite so strongly.  A couple of the guys began alternately posturing and complaining about their incomes and job prospects. Suddenly, from that side of the table, every topic was dismissed as too expensive, or worse still, a rip-off.  At the same time, there was another guy who bragged about his recent activities, with a tone that approached condescension.  A gulf has split the group which I spend a good deal of time trying to heal when I should have been drilling down on the topic at hand.

Of course, in designing the project, I “knew” that group dynamics and commonality of interests dictated that I separate men from women and younger participants from older participants.  Being attentive to lifestage is crucial to developing a meaningful atmosphere in a focus group.  But, as one often does, I was willing to accept a “mix of incomes.”

I mention this incident because of a new report from the Pew Research Center on the perceptions Americans have of class conflicts in the country.

“About two-thirds of the public (66%) believes there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and the poor—an increase of 19 percentage points since 2009.”

“Not only have perceptions of class conflicts grown more prevalent; so, too, has the belief that these disputes are intense. According to the new survey, three-in-ten Americans (30%) say there are “very strong conflicts” between poor people and rich people. That is double the proportion that offered a similar view in July 2009 and the largest share expressing this opinion since the question was first asked in 1987.”

What is even more remarkable, this is a larger percentage than those who perceive conflicts between the young and old, or blacks and whites.

Now, this does not say that there are actual differences in outlook and beliefs between the affluent and the less so.  Although common sense suggests there are certainly behavioral differences.  But, if those of us who conduct qualitative research are going to engage groups in meaningful conversations, perhaps we need to think just as seriously about constituting separate groups on the basis of income levels as we do splitting males and females or younger and older respondents into distinct groups.

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

Traditional qualitative research methods like focus groups and individual interviews have often been conceived as a first step.  I need to explore a new category.  I need to develop hypotheses.  Even, on a more rigorous and technical level, I need to pre-test a questionnaire.  In all of these cases, qualitative research served to point a brand or product team down the path that led to a new product, positioning, or campaign.

Over the past few years, we have seen growth in methods that put us in immediate contact with consumers.  Often consumers are in the moment of the experiences and behaviors in which we are interested.  So, we have seen the mining of social media, the creation of online communities of users, and various forms of mobile data collection.  All of these approaches have engaged marketers and given them exciting pointers to the future of their brands and products.

But these activities produce a wealth of observations and data.  They are capable of stimulating a mound of hypotheses.  It is possible to mine through the comments on a brand’s Facebook page or listen to days of Twitter feeds and come away with directions going various ways.   Now, what to do?  How does the marketing team get the targeted direction it needs?

The answer may well be several well-designed focus groups.

• The focus groups will permit exploration of each of those directions with consumers in real time.  It is possible to hear how they view the strengths of each and the problems they see.  The brand team is right on the spot with the moderator crafting rejoinders and alternatives, pushing the consumers to a place they might not have taken themselves.
• While there can be a ton of conversation in social media, it may not focus on areas that are of most interest to the brand team.  Focus group can force conflict and debate among the participants on those specific areas that can grow the brand or create the positioning.
• And, ultimately, hearing all of this discussion face-to-face from consumers “in the flesh” will galvanize the brand team like no other exercise.  In fact, when focus groups are conducted at the end of the process, there is much less need to observe the research niceties.  Why not have the consumers and the brand team face off in the same room?  Focus group steel cage?

So, savvy marketers will re-think how focus groups can help can help them in their development processes by saving the best for last.

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

It is sobering to read in the space of a few weeks that Kodak is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy and that Sears will be shuttering over a hundred stores.  These are brands with which baby boomers grew up.  They stood for values many held dear — “preserving memories” in the case of Kodak and “value for the entire family” in the case of Sears.

The names, of course, are not completely dead.  In fact, I still have more contact with them than I do with some other brands.  My daughter-in-law continually sends me “Kodak Galleries” of my grandchildren.  And, I have a niece who works in a Sears.  Although, I suppose it is telling that I didn’t mention purchasing Kodak products or shopping at a Sears.

The easy answer, and the one you have all heard, is that both of these brands could not adapt to changing competition.  Like the proverbial supertanker, they were difficult to change quickly and sharply.  The transition from film-based to digital photography may have been inevitable, but Kodak played a role in the development of the digital camera.

So how do marketers keep their brands healthy?  How do they assure they do not find themselves on the wrong side of changes in the marketplace?

• A brand is the glue that binds a consumer to a product.  It is the basis of loyalty and identity.  And, it tells the consumer what a product is not, who does not belong to its family, as much as it defines what the product is.  That “what it’s not” extends beyond its immediate competition.  McDonald’s kept its brand healthy by recognizing it is was more than simply “not Burger King.”  It was “not a sit-down restaurant.”  And, that meant it competed with Starbuck’s for snack occasions.  What is Burger King “not”?
• The wrong answer to the question of what a brand is “not” is “trying to be all things to all people.”  It may work for a while, but, as Sears has learned, a weak focus can make you vulnerable.  When Sears truly dominated a large swath of mass retailing, all was well.  But, over time, more focused competitors — some big, some small, some physical, some catalogues — chipped away at the margins.  In the end, there are a number of players doing a better job of being pieces of “not Sears.”

So, the successful marketer must keep a careful eye on what is outside of the brand’s preserve, far outside.  One way is to keep monitoring social media.  The tendency is to pay attention to what is being said about “my brand.”  But, the real goal has to be paying attention to what my brand’s users are saying about all of their consumption.  What products, services, activities are poaching on the emotional ties that used to be exclusively the domain of my brand?  More to the point, what is replacing those emotional ties?

Another more focused approach to this monitoring is with on-line communities of your brand loyalists.  This effort still can have a very broad outlook, but it also allows for probing into specific behavior and attitudes.  I suspect it was not simply the birth of digital photography that changed the world for Kodak.  It was also the different vision of friendship and relationships that Gen-Xers display, a vision that set great store in broad but immediate sharing of experiences.  On-line communities are great places for exploring these changing social constructs.