Quirk's Blog

15 tips for getting the most out of focus groups

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Lynnette Leathers

Editor’s note: Lynnette Leathers is president of Mindspot Inc., an Orlando, Fla., research firm. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here under the same title.

Research is simply a process to get information and insights you don’t have that you need.

After you have reviewed all of the information you do have and you find you still have unanswered questions, you may need research. In the initial stages of a product or service offer, focus groups are often conducted.

Consumer-driven insights can move your business forward because your customers and prospective customers want to help you provide a better product or service. And, people love it when you ask their opinion! Think about it: If a company selects you from hundreds of other people and offers to pay you for your opinion, wouldn’t you feel pretty special? I’m just saying – don’t be afraid to ask your customers for help.

Whatever your reason for conducting them, here are 15 tips for getting the most out of your focus groups.

1. Keep an open mind. If you have already made up your mind and there is nothing that can make you change your mind, you don’t need focus groups.

2. Teach internal stakeholders (your boss, the advertising agency, the CEO) the benefits of exploratory research with customers. It is an opportunity to listen. Companies that listen to their customers are companies that win.

3. Define who you really want to talk to and learn from. Is it your current customers, is it a new market segment of customers or is it your competitor’s customers?

4. Define your key objectives. If you can only learn one thing from your customers, what do you want to know?

5. Ask objective questions and don’t lead the witness. A leading question will get you a predetermined answer in most groups. “Hey, how much do you all like this great new product?” versus “Here is a potential product that Company XYZ is considering offering to people like you. What are your thoughts?” I could write about how to ask questions forever – and that’s a long time. Perhaps another day.

6. Don’t be afraid of negative feedback. If you get negative feedback it doesn’t mean the moderator or the participants suck (to use a marketing term). It means you now have the opportunity to know that your idea, concept or advertisement may be polarizing or even poorly received by your target audience. With this comes the chance to make it better.

7. Don’t take it personally. If you get too attached to the creative or the idea you will miss the opportunity to have a winner. If you conduct a number of groups and your creative does not resonate with the consumer, be ready to make changes. It is always better to spend a few dollars on research versus spending the big bucks developing a campaign and having it bomb. Most clients do not allow their advertising agencies to have many in-market disasters. And the post-mortem on the campaign that bombed will likely be conducted by another agency.

8. Don’t be afraid of losing control (within reason). If your focus group participants are really taking an idea and running with it, let them talk! You will learn more than if you asked the questions. Just watch your time.

9. Be polite. Always say thank you. Be considerate of participants’ time – they don’t have to do this.

10. It’s OK not to say please. You are in control and a trusted guide, and most focus groups are paying gigs for focus group participants. Your participants are there to do what you say and help you. If you say please, it makes not helping or doing a particular exercise an option – and it’s not. This is not impolite. Really. It assures your participants that you have a plan for the next two hours and they will know what is expected of them. You are there to guide them and make it easy.

11. Dress for the front room – not the back room. If you are moderating in-person focus groups and you have people watching and helping in the back room, don’t dress for them! If your participants are showing up in jeans and tennis shoes, wear jeans and tennis shoes. You’ll blend in, which is what you want to do. For most people it is easier to talk to people who are like them. If you want to impress the back room, focus on doing a good job.

12. Have a great discussion guide. Not a good discussion guide – a great discussion guide. Why is good not great enough? Because this is where the guts of the discussion are. You should spend a significant amount of time thinking about the best ways to introduce your topics and get the most relevant and insightful information possible from the people who showed up to help you get the answers.

13. Ask for clarity. If you don’t understand participant feedback during a group, ask clarifying questions. “Can you give me an example of how that works?” Don’t fill in the blanks. You will be wrong.

14. Say it twice. Not everyone thinks the same way and if a concept is abstract or difficult to grasp, say it once, then say it again a different way and use an example.

15. Determine the type of group you want to conduct.

a. Online: These are fast from start to finish, featuring a high degree of sharing due to anonymity, with more data collected. Less expensive than in-person groups.

b. In-person: Use when it’s important for your respondent to physically touch and/or use a product or when you have everyone in one location.

c. Hybrid (a combination of in-person and some online groups): Often used when people are getting comfortable with using online groups. Then they often switch to online groups for the next project.

Posted in Focus Groups, Market Research Best Practices, Qualitative Research | Comment

Getting (hyper-)personal with research

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Bryan Urbick

Some time ago, we began talking about hyper-personalization in branding, when it first cropped up as a trend we were seeing. Was it here to stay? Would it take off? Would it be a true trend or a fad that would fizzle?

Well, the idea of hyper-personalization seems to be bedding in nicely but there are some important lessons for brands to learn when seeking to use this as a new marketing tool. Indeed, even researchers should be
mindful when considering to utilize this trend in market and consumer research.

First of all, we really need to remember to keep the customer at the very center of the equation. Hyper-personalization, by its nature, means that it is individualized and the consumer feels it’s “just for me.”

Customizing a brand or research project takes a degree of effort on
behalf of said customer, so the reward factor needs to be noticeably
heightened when compared to the mass of mainstream, one-size-fits-all
approaches. There are brands that have used customization in a
gimmicky way and have fallen off the hyper-personalization bandwagon.

It pays to check out those brands that have been quietly personalizing
for years – Interflora for one, and of course Dell computers. Although
it’s arguably easier to construct a made-to-order, beautiful, fragrant
bouquet than to build your own computer, both are good examples of hyper-
personalization and of which other brands can use as benchmarks.
Another great example is Jones Soda, which has for years hyper-
personalized with its “Your Photo, Your Soda, Your Brand” campaign –
encouraging consumers to personalize their soft drink.

One of my current favorites in the U.K. has to be Heinz who, via Facebook,
invited customers to mail a can of Heinz tomato or chicken soup bearing a
customized get-well message to an under-the-weather friend. Heinz has
built on the accepted consumer belief of providing soup when people aren’t
well and has given an easy way for Heinz soup to be offered. Nurture and
warmth are solidified as brand values and the connection with the
consumer feels personal and positive.

Coca-Cola too has taken the plunge – for the first time in 125 years
it has started playing with its packaging by launching a “Share a Coke with…” campaign
in Australia with 150 of the most popular Australian first names. The
message here, however, is, “We have taken a stab at guessing your name.”
Can this be deemed true personalization or are they just pretending?
Only time will tell if this will deliver hyper-personalization or just be
perceived as gimmicky.

In research, particularly qualitative research, this is a fairly easy
trend to ride. In our conversations with consumers we listen and make
them feel important (they are important!). In quantitative research,
more could be learned. Trying to “fit themselves” into the four or five
answers provided can make consumers feel disconnected and is
one of the burnout-inducing factors on long questionnaires.

Because of consumer need, and the ability for technology to help
deliver it, hyper-personalization seems to be here to stay, in
marketing and in marketing research. We need to find ways, though,
to truly bring it to life so that it does not seem to be just another fad.

Posted in Brand and Image Research, Consumer Research, Food/Sensory Research, Marketing Best Practices, Qualitative Research, Quantitative Research, The Business of Research | Comment

Researchers, your brains are not enough

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Dan Womack

Editor’s note: Dan Womack, senior manager of insights at Columbus, Ga.-based Aflac, writes a personal blog called Womack Insight. The opinions expressed there are his alone. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared under the title “The question for 2012: What will we work to become?”

Last year at this time, I had a little fun with all the predictions about important marketing research tools coming in 2011 and posted my own prediction. In case you don’t want to read that post (or read it again), I’ll tell you that I suggested brains are the most important tools for the future of the marketing research and insights world.

I’m not backing down on that prediction. I still believe the greatest tools we have at our disposal are our brains. I will, however, add one twist to this for 2012: the addition of effort to the equation. That is, brains plus effort equals the most important tool for the future.

I’ve been reading some interesting work on the role mind-set plays in performance and achievement. It is an oversimplification, but much of the research indicates praising effort (with employees or students, for example) instead of or along with praising ability is key to continued success and greater achievement. Here is a good introduction that includes a quote I love: “We are what we work to become.”

So, what mind-sets stand in your way? Our profession is full of very capable, intelligent people – there are lots of good brains out there and I am going to assume you own one – but what kinds of thinking limit your effort? How does your mind-set limit your employees, your colleagues, your suppliers?

Technology, economic conditions and turbulent business environments add up to some interesting challenges for marketing research and insights pros – now and for the foreseeable future. But with all this change and turbulence come many opportunities. What will we make of them?

What will we work to become in 2012 and beyond?

Posted in Marketing Best Practices, State of the Research Industry, The Business of Research | Comment

Why convergence will define marketing research in 2012

Posted on January 23, 2012 by April Turner

Editor’s note: April Turner is senior product marketing manager, custom market research, at San Francisco research firm MarketTools. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here under the title “Thoughts on market research for 2012.”

Every year ends with dozens of reflection/prediction pieces that look back on the past year and/or ahead to the next. While there are many possible themes for the market research world circa 2012, I’ll offer a single one instead: convergence.

Mathematically, convergence may signal the arrival of computational limits or even the irrelevance of sequence order. However, in market research “convergence” is more like what happened in the convergence of the telecommunications industry, where several services are available from the “same pipe.”

Here are some examples of areas in market research where we might see convergence in the year ahead:

• Mobile and shopper research will collide. A National Retail Federation poll recently found 41 percent of members were increasing investment in mobile retail and marketing. It’s crucial to continue to develop and test new mobile research programs to help us continue to progress.

• Mobile is no longer the “third screen.” Many households are moving to digital entertainment and away from traditional TV and the use of mobile streaming apps is on the rise. For brands, the ability to track advertising, image and sentiment will get more complex and the sheer volume of data will require creative new models to make sense of it. This is an area where research analysts can bring expertise to the conversation.

• Gamification of research will be extended to mobile devices. While there is still much investigation into the best implementations for game-based research, the movement to mobile devices will create pressure on game-like and game-based research. This will affect the validation of both gamification and mobile research.

• Economic issues in Europe will force brands to more closely manage pricing. The interconnected economies of North America and Europe create the need to have a global aspect for domestic price plans.

• Pricing and packaging will converge into a single study architecture. The trade-offs between changing or holding price points will drive new studies that collect attitudes on simultaneous changes to price, package size and quantities, all variables for pricing strategy.

• Social media drives statistical research and vice versa. Social media monitoring is being used to inform sentiment analysis across brands. However, the elements needed to make predictive assessments are still missing. Research analysts will increasingly experiment with adding social media metrics into time-tested models.

• Brands will begin using traditional methods to test and quantify social media trends. As the flexibility and speed of traditional studies increases, it’s harder to ignore the value of social media data in helping us better understand consumers. But what we need is the discipline of traditional MR methods to deliver predictive data necessary for business change. This will be especially useful in proving ROI for event sponsorships as well as understanding cause-marketing endeavors.

• The definition of actionable data will change to include visualization for the non-research stakeholders. Insights teams will partner with other organizations to deliver results to a wider audience. The need for storytelling calls for us to leverage research, business intelligence and analytics to create directive results that can be interpreted by a wide variety of audiences.

• Research analysts will increasingly utilize data from non-traditional sources to answer market problems, including customer databases, POS data and Web analytics. This may or may not be part of the “Big Data” evolution but multiple data sources will increasingly be found in study research.

• Traditional research methods will not die. Tried-and-true methods like surveys, ethnographies and the like will be combined in new ways, with yet-to-be-discovered methods to deliver actionable insights for business. There is no end to the opportunity for change.

2012 will be a transformative year for market research. We at MarketTools look forward to finding and developing new tools and partnerships in the months ahead. Happy new year!

Posted in Innovation in Market Research, Market Research Best Practices, Market Research Techniques, Research Industry Trends, State of the Research Industry, The Business of Research | 1 Comment

I think I hear the Starbucks truck

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Brad Weiss

Brad Weiss is research director, client and project services, at Cincinnati-based MarketVision Research.

It’s been interesting being on the opposite side of the spectrum over the last year, after moving from the client to the vendor side with MarketVision Research. I recall working with research suppliers and pushing for more of “the story” or the “so what,” hanging up from a conference call frustrated and disappointed because strong recommendations were missing from a vendor’s report. Usually, after multiple rounds of edits and having to invest significant time sifting through 100-plus-page PowerPoint decks and data tables, I was able to create the story I felt comfortable sharing with my business partners. This wasn’t always the case, but more times than not it was the reality that I worked in.

That frustration and disappointment is what fuels my motivation to add an element of differentiation to the social media insights deliverables for my current employer. We power our platform in part with Netbase, a company that pulls in social media conversations from over 95 million different sources. Given my years of experience on the client side, I try to put myself in their situation and in most cases the client researcher is trying to influence either marketing, agency or sales executives with fresh perspectives on how to build the business with a more consumer/shopper-centric approach.

I’ve been exposed to social media analysis examples while working on both the client and the supplier side and – not surprisingly – haven’t been overly impressed by what I’ve seen. I’ve also attended conferences where the general client consensus is that researchers are “struggling to see the value” in the social media data analysis they’ve received to date from their suppliers. In nearly every case suppliers have missed the mark on delivering “a story” or the “so what” and my fear is that it’s doing an injustice for the capability across the industry.

Listening in to how people are talking about brands, products, services and current events, etc., can offer rich insights. The goal we strive for is to actually make sense of what they are saying. In some cases it might be centered on various themes we’re seeing in the social media conversation. Or it can be as simple as leveraging a sound bite from a conversation as a source for inspiration for a new idea.

Take Starbucks, for example, a brand I am consistently listening in on, out of my own natural curiosity. I discovered a sound bite sourced from Twitter and it offers a glimpse of what a consumer wishes the future looked like: “If there are ice cream trucks in the summer, why can’t we have Starbucks trucks in the winter?”

Now that is a novel idea, and one that really hit home for me personally. I work in a suburban office park, a few miles away from the nearest Starbucks; it’s inconvenient for me to take a 3-o’clock break to hop in the car to get my grande skinny vanilla latte fix. But fast-forward a year from now. I can imagine myself chatting with colleagues and saying, “I think I hear the Starbucks truck.” You’d most likely find many of us there in line, especially on a cold winter day.

Admittedly, those kinds of idea-sparking nuggets aren’t always easy to find in the rubble of social media output. But when you do come across one, it drives home the value of expending the effort in the first place.

I have to thank Kim Dedeker, former P&G global consumer insights leader, for inspiring me to harness the power of active listening to drive bigger, better, more relevant ideas. I recall a quote she shared during a consumer insights symposium: “The 20th century was the era of the shouting brand. The 21st century will be the era of the listening brand.”

There is so much power in listening to social media chatter, making sense of it and telling the client a story in an easily digestible manner, with the “so what” called out in the form of ideas that they can go off and execute against. That’s a recipe for successful research, no matter which side of the equation you’re on.

Posted in Consumer Research, Market Research Best Practices, Social Media and Marketing Research, State of the Research Industry, The Business of Research | Comment

Researchers, don’t explain your profession – share your identity

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Jim Karrh

Editor’s note: Jim Karrh is director of MarketSearch, a Little Rock, Ark., research firm.

What is your identity as a marketing researcher?

I’ve been engaged in research – and going to cocktail parties – for years, but after reading this article in the Quirk’s e-newsletter, I was surprised by most of the responses marketing researchers offered when asked “What do you do for a living?” They ranged from serious to flippant to outright denial. That’s disappointing; we should all be proud of the work we do. Marketing research is also inherently more interesting than are most other jobs, so you should be well-equipped for any mojito-fueled question that comes your way.

Perhaps I can help. Marketing researcher is one of the professional hats I wear (and with pride). Another is that of a consultant in sales enablement – more precisely, creating conversational tools that help B2B sales teams be more effective.

Here’s the thing: This “short story” (or “elevator pitch” or “positioning statement”) deal gives most professionals a lot of trouble. They tend to err in one of several ways. For some the story sounds rehearsed, as if spat back from a company Web site, brochure or mission statement. Others have a story that sounds like grand-jury testimony – the company name, their title, maybe the number of years they’ve been grinding away, yet without any sense of what they actually do or why. A few others (like several of the researchers quoted in the article) might be flippant, cute or evasive about their jobs – and unintentionally convey a lack of seriousness or security.

So from the front lines of top-company sales messaging practice and coming from a fellow marketing researcher, here is some informed advice about what you should say (or at least how you should consider saying it) when confronted with the question of what you do for a living.

Think of your entire “short story” in five pieces, each of which might be 15-20 seconds in length. The pieces are inherently sequential, so ideally you are interesting enough for your audience to continue to ask follow-up questions. Here is the structure, along with starting-point examples:

• Your identity. “We provide the truth about consumers to companies who can handle it.”

• What you do. “In some ways, we are like a diagnostic lab that provides doctors with expert third-party analyses. But instead of doing tests on fluid or tissue samples, we are finding some bits of insight from consumers that our client companies can use to decide what and how to sell.”

• How you do it. “We typically ask questions in some particular way – through surveys, interviews or focus groups. We also have colleagues trained to just observe people and listen. As you might suspect, these days we are also using social media to learn.”

• What makes you valuable. “We’re almost always able to tell clients something important that they didn’t know already. Clients use the insights we provide to do many things – create advertising, design packaging, provide better service or even decide whether to go ahead with a new product idea.”

• An example success story (or even just a funny, relevant story from your experience).

Try this structure, choose your own language and examples and practice until it flows naturally. And be proud that you’re a researcher.

Posted in Consumer Research, Market Research Humor, Research Industry Trends, The Business of Research | Comment

What was the biggest decision that research influenced for you this year?

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Brett Hagins

Editor’s note: Brett Hagins is senior partner of Research Innovation and ROI, a Plano, Texas non-profit organization.

While I was discussing demonstrating return-on-investment from research with a vice president of research for a large retailer, he suggested including a question as part of an annual assessment of the research department:

What was the biggest decision that research influenced for you this year?

It is common to assess satisfaction with project work and to do some kind of assessment of the relationship between research and key stakeholders. However, the kind of question posed above begins to document the impact of research on the business.

If stakeholders are not able to articulate a decision influenced by research, then it suggests that all of the charts, graphs, slides and surveys may not be accomplishing their ultimate purpose.

This is an initial step to begin the process of demonstrating ROI from research. Companies that have not developed this process have a much more difficult time defending their budgets and preserving their staff.

Posted in Qualitative Research, Quantitative Research, State of the Research Industry, The Business of Research | 2 Comments

Creative consumers are a good thing, really

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Bryan Urbick

Editor’s note: Bryan Urbick is founder and chairman of Consumer Knowledge Centre, a London research firm.

I can still hear the voices, trying to persuade us against our idea.

In the mid-1990s when we first decided to progress with some new research methods we had developed, tested and refined, we had a few pushbacks. Stated simply, the methods involved working with consumers in the same way that teams develop new ideas – brainstorming, creative techniques to help people think out-of-the-box and utilization of various stimuli to help drive the creative process.

Of course the process was designed to ensure engagement and facilitated in a way that maintained focus on the project objectives. The crux of the objections and negative comments were based on the belief that consumers are not creative.

Our position then, as it is now, is that no one is creative when not in an environment conducive to creativity. The opposite is also true – anyone can be creative when the context is right.

Interestingly, the creative process was (and still is) a research tool we use to uncover opportunity areas. By evaluating new consumer ideas based on the prevalent themes, a picture of unmet needs emerges – and even if the consumer-created ideas are not pursued, the unmet needs can be clearly defined, with ways to address them clearly plotted out. The fact that by doing this style of research we were able to help facilitate consumers creating usable ideas was merely a by-product of the process.

Now, of course, consumer creativity is not a groundbreaking thought. Consumers, who were once deemed the last people a company would turn to for innovative ideas, are now often at the center of it all. Boundaries have blurred, hierarchies are flattening and at times it appears that everyone can be consumers, researchers, innovators and producers – all rolled into one.

I notice this much more these days when conducting qualitative research projects, from the more traditional focus groups to many of our non-traditional methods. It seems as if consumer respondents feel more ownership and genuinely try to help companies develop new ideas to solve their problems.

It wasn’t that long ago (1909 to be precise) that American farmers were lobbying car manufacturers for an automobile with detachable backseats. It took about 10 more years for Detroit to come up with the pickup truck. One can imagine what the car makers’ response might have been: “These farmers … what would they know?”

“How shortsighted! How narrow-minded!” you might say. And yet this attitude from the early 1900s is not that dissimilar from those naysayers just 15 years ago who felt the need to tell us that “consumers aren’t creative” when we presented our research methods.

Why is this? I believe it is primarily driven by two factors: 1) there is a desire that those hired to create new ideas maintain their worth; and 2) they haven’t seen the context in which a typical group of consumers can actually create anything of interest.

I am thankful, though, that more and more marketers and manufacturers leap with joy when new and obviously very necessary design innovation is suggested by consumers – and many take note and pursue those ideas. Open innovation schemes are becoming more prevalent and ideas are accepted from many sources, including consumers.

It’s about time that we acknowledge that consumers can be creative and allow ourselves to tap into the rich resource of consumer experience to innovate our products and services.

Posted in Brainstorming Research, Concept Research, Focus Groups, Qualitative Research, Uncategorized | Comment

Conflicting data in online surveys: the Rorschach test of market research

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Lev Mazin

Editor’s note: Lev Mazin is CEO and co-founder of research firm Ask Your Target Market.

If you’ve ever taken a Rorschach inkblot test, you know the quandary. You’re shown what is, undeniably, a spot on the paper, but your mind starts drawing conclusions about what it “really” looks like. If you show it to someone else, there’s a good chance they’ll see something different. Same “data,” different conclusions.

Well, sometimes that happens with data from online surveys, too. Two people can look at the same data and draw different conclusions. This is particularly likely to happen if some of the data appears to be contradictory. Two common examples:

• Preference-ownership conflict — You do a survey and the majority of respondents say that they prefer Brand X but responses to another question indicate that they’re actually more likely to own Brand Y.

• Price-point conflict — Respondents report that their price sensitivity when purchasing your product category is high but they later report purchasing items known to be expensive.

Our challenge as market researchers is to recognize that there are potentially conflicting data points and to seek out the story behind them. For us, it isn’t just a gut reaction to an inkblot; we need to dig deeper.

Solving preference-ownership conflict

In many cases — and some product categories are more subject to this than others — intent simply gets derailed. What I intend to do and what I actually do can be very different. Impulse, coupons, in-store promotions, recent word-of-mouth and social media buzz can all conspire to change planned consumer behavior. I might be planning to purchase a Samsung cell phone but at the last minute I’m swayed by a promotion offered by my preferred carrier. I had the intent but my behavior was very different.

In this case, a great strategy is to be as precise as possible. For example, if you’re looking for accurate brand-related behavior, you could ask the question in two ways.

Version A: What brand of cell phone do you prefer?

Version B: The last time you bought a cell phone, what brand did you buy?

In this example, Version B is obviously more accurate because it removes the generalization from the equation. By asking a precise question about actual behavior, you’re likely to get a much more objective view. Space permitting, asking both can be very illuminating; you may have a customer group that “aspires” to own Brand A but in reality ends up often owning Brand B.

Another strategy for collecting accurate-as-possible purchase behavior is to focus on near-term time frames. Consider the following options:

Version A: How likely are you to purchase a new laptop in the next 12 months?

Version B: How likely are you to purchase a new laptop in the next three months?

Asking Version A will be more risky; it is just too long a time frame for people to predict a future purchase. If you want accurate information on planned behaviors, three-month or short time frames will get the most accurate information.

Solving price-point conflict

People can have a hard time accurately reporting their selection criteria, especially pricing-related criteria. After all, in a survey, people tend to report price is important to them because they don’t want to be telling retailers or manufacturers, “Hey, charge me what you want. I’ll pay it!” In some categories, people also simply have a hard time self-reporting their price sensitivity; they may perceive themselves as price-sensitive but not behave that way consistently (or vice versa).

How can we address this in an online survey? Understand that there is a gap and collect both the self-perception information and the actual behavioral data. For example, continuing with the laptop example, certainly include questions on selection criteria, including price. But also ask questions to assess actual price-sensitivity, which may be reflected by: brands they buy; specifications of current laptop (if they have one); and how much research they do before they buy (real bargain-hunters tend to do a lot of price comparisons before they buy).

All of the above can be good proxies for price-sensitivity.

Context and precision

You always have the possibility of conflicts in your research data. By adding some good contextual questions and being precise in your questioning, you will be able to get to the real story behind those discrepancies and collect more objective data in the process. Be careful studying those inkblots, though; sometimes your first conclusion is not the real story.

Posted in Interviewing, Marketing Best Practices, Online Surveys and Research, Quantitative Research | Comment

Social misgivings: a critique of social media research

Posted on August 9, 2011 by James A. Rohde

Editor’s note: James A. Rohde is consultant and founder of James A. Rohde Consulting, a Pittsburgh research firm.

Most industries deal with trends and research is no different. In some extreme cases the word trend is unfitting when viewed through 20/20 hindsight. A little while back, online surveys were a trend and now they are pretty much the standard. Of course, not all trends are so lucky; lest we forget the ethnography hype between 2006 and 2009.

Now, just because new tools and trends get hyped up does not mean that they are not valuable. It’s simply that they become overused – and for the wrong types of information. Most end up looking for an excuse to use a methodology instead of honestly assessing it as the best way to understand the issue at hand. Usually this is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you know that that is what you’re doing.

It is without really knowing where our latest research trend is going that I would like to direct your attention to research in social media. There could easily be some disagreement here but I would call this the most hyped research at the moment (another top contender would be neuroscience but not many can afford that yet).

The temptation of social media research comes in two dimensions that I can notice: 1) access to all kinds of current and potential customers, and 2) insight into needs/wants without having to ask questions.

First, let’s start with the benefits. I will concede that if access is the goal, social media is cheaper than popular research methods – maybe, depending on what it takes for your brand to get moving and generating some buzz. Let’s say you already have 100,000+ followers. A quick assessment of your followers could lead you to discover unknown archetype or geographical segments. That is a pretty big win and it comes at a much cheaper price than a study designed to find such a thing. Maybe.

Then there are the benefits that come from gaining pure insight without skewing any results by setting respondents up with a question. Once you have your followers, who are ideally interacting with your brand in some way, you can see who they are and what they are saying about you! This type of monitoring can lead to all kinds of insight like a brand buzz index (different than brand equity index) or possibly an alternate use for your product.

So how can something so good be considered hype? Well, besides the fact that all of this requires constant monitoring of your social media accounts, the insights stem from the coding of what is equivalent to a giant open-end question … but worse. The whole purpose of asking a question goes beyond just getting the answer to a specific issue you want to explore; you are setting the context so that the answer can be properly interpreted.

Say you run a sock business. You can launch one new cotton pattern this season and you have three to choose from. Social media gets used as research so that customers can react to the patterns and give their opinions. Sounds harmless and honestly it’s remarkably quick, cheap and easy.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that while customer reaction may have allowed you to pick which pattern you are going to run with this season, there is no context. People really seemed to love pattern No. 2 but most of the people who loved that pattern are the same ones who buy your more expensive wool socks, which does not have that pattern since it’s new. Now, maybe next year you’ll run that pattern in wool but for this round you have moved sales to a less-profitable item.

Though let’s be optimistic and say that even considering the lost sales in wool socks, the demand for the new pattern more than makes up for it. In fact, it has become so popular that you can’t keep them in stock, mainly because there was no way to predict the popularity from the comments reviewed. I’m not sure there is a match to the frustration of gaining a sale that you can’t cash in.

In the end, remember that context is important! I don’t want people to walk away believing that social media for research is completely useless. Of course it has its place in the research industry. I simply believe it is a much smaller place than it is getting credit for.

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