Namita Mediratta
First published in Research World November/December 2010
“In Hollywood now when people die they don’t say, ‘Did he leave a will?’ but ‘Did he leave a diary?” said Liza Minnelli. For many of us, writing and reading diaries – both our own and those of others – is a pleasant experience.
Though many researchers have indeed capitalised beautifully on the power of the medium, one can still say it’s underexploited, and seems to me a bit like the potato of research: a versatile and humble option which, given its merits, never quite seems to get the appreciation it deserves.
Why does a diary work? Well fundamentally, recording a diary is an intensely personal experience. It’s almost like talking to one’s alter ego, and thereby limiting filtration or sanitisation in its responses to the researcher’s questions.
A diary is also very well contextualised in the ‘now’, painting the moment in the moods and flavours of the instant, rather than looking at it through the lens of distant recall or post facto evaluation. Indeed Picasso had once called his art a kind of ‘visual diary’, which seems like a nice simile for the whole process of diarisation – just in reverse.
The other thing I personally love about the diary is its space for creativity – both on the part of the consumer and on the part of the researcher. Where else would one be able to put in pictures, collages or free text for one study, and switch to a much more structured approach in the next? It’s precisely this ability to be tailored that makes the diary such a versatile instrument.
Here are some examples of what I like, pulled out from papers, journals and work we’ve done in the past, both quantitative and qualitative, and the internet, which demonstrates the power of this instrument.
A brand equity research study was actually my first exposure to using a diary, and we used it as a supplement to ‘regular’ consumer groups in this study. The ‘spontaneous response’ argument aside, sometimes it helps to give (at least some respondents) a moment of introspection before we bombard them with questions, and the diary was our version of consumer homework. We’d given these women an (identical) stack of magazines, and a blank set of notebooks, along with some thought-provoking assignments, instructing consumers to select pictures which reminded them of various brands within the category, their relationships with these brands, how using these brands made them feel, etc. In sum, much of the regular stuff one would want to explore in an equity brand study. What stood out for us in this study was how enthusiastically (and creatively) consumers expressed themselves, and the richness of the responses. It was almost as if the diary, coloured pens and magazines set the respondents free to go back and explore their inner worlds with an almost childlike pleasure. We got passionate (or tepid) love letters to the brand, collages that clearly demonstrated how two brands, both premium, could speak in different tones, moods and language (think Polo Club pictures vs. the F1) and much more. Really rich, textured output, and from a client perspective, easy to hold up to the guys who develop ads to say ‘See, this is what we mean!’
Since then we’ve used diaries extensively in qualitative research to explore communication, brand cues, moods, feelings and associations, and it has never disappointed. Just when we thought we’d done what we could with it, we were faced with an interesting business problem: how to evaluate consumer reactions for a new category we wanted to enter. Any researcher faced with this question knows there’s really no point in asking consumers what they think about something they’ve never seen or used. At the same time, we did want to get a more ‘real’ response, based on what consumers were likely to go through when they actually used the product.
So, the task was to get something which told us what they felt ‘in the now’ rather than on the spur of the moment (freshly exposed), or days later in a reconvened group (when they may not remember they’d had a hard time opening the pack, for example). Here, a semi-structured usage diary helped quite a bit. When people told us they put something and ‘massaged it onto the scalp’ for example, we could easily link it back to their subsequent dissatisfaction with the product (that’s not how it was meant to be used!). Similarly, when a 25-year-old wrote about a little test she did to evaluate whether the product worked, we could translate those cues into communications almost immediately. And when we did, guess what, the communication worked really well!
From a quantitative perspective, usage diaries have been used in social research for ever. Typical subjects included monitoring how people manage time or money, monitor media consumption etc, all before the advanced measurement options became available today. The ‘time-budget’ schedule pioneered by Sorokin in the 1930s, (Sorokin & Berger 1938) involved respondents keeping a detailed log of how they allocated their time during the day. Since then, diaries have been used in transport planning studies, expenditure monitoring studies and to set weights for the retail price index in the UK.
Our exposure to quantitatively using diaries came with the Unilever Social Mission on Oral Care, where we were faced with the daunting task of evaluating behaviour (and behaviour change) on a ‘real’ and not a claimed basis. To make matters worse, our target respondent was the bottom of the pyramid consumer, with possibly low literacy. High technology solutions did exist, but finally implementing those came down to infrastructural adequacy and time-cost constraints. We needed something that could be rolled out easily and simply – not a budget-eating gorilla.
The brains at TNS came to our rescue, and designed a nice visual sticker diary which involved the respondent and her child sticking visually attractive stickers to help the respondent keep track of her daily schedule (including media habits, food and drink schedules and, no surprises here, the child’s brushing habits, among other things). In administering this like a dipstick, we could get real behaviour change data including consumer response to stimulus. This had many advantages, simple, adaptable, and engaging for mother and child to do collaboratively, without being overly dependent on literacy rates.
Surprisingly for us, and many people did ask us this, both at the pilot stage and in the study itself, we didn’t get people randomly sticking things on the diary or low income kids getting carried away by the novelty of the stickers. In fact, if anything, the opposite was true. At the pilot stage, people came to us saying they’d mistakenly stuck a wrong sticker somewhere, how could they erase it? Or worse, they had watched a TV channel which didn’t have a corresponding sticker in the diary! And we had to include blank ‘correction’ stickers in the diary for just such eventualities. So people did have fun with the instrument, but they didn’t abuse it. I assume that conscientiousness varies by target group of course, though I’m more inclined to trust consumers in the first instance and see how it goes in a pilot.
Praising the humble potato is one thing – one has to acknowledge that too much of it does make you fat. So there came a time when we did feel we might end up stretching it a bit. For example, like it or not, people don’t carry diaries around, or have the willpower to jot down every insignificant thing … so let’s say you’re trying to do out-of-home ice cream consumption, or you want to know how many tissues are used in a day if you have a cold. These are possibly instances where diaries won’t work as well. Neither should we expect people to stick to the regime day in and day out. I can certainly see how respondent fatigue could set in after being asked to record, say, ‘Did you drink coffee in the morning?’ for weeks on end. If it’s not a habit that’s at least slightly variable, or if the task is not in some way interesting, dairies may not be the answer.
Maggie Golding, qualitative researcher at Millward Brown Singapore, emphasises the importance of keeping a diary interesting. She uses colours, visuals, collages, and provocative questions to lead the consumer into a more introspective frame of mind where they’re more involved, rather than a ‘Let’s tick the boxes’ kind of thinking.
And then maybe it is time to switch over to the newer avatars of the diary – online journals with timers that automatically monitor compliance rates and remind you to fill it in, picture banks from the internet, using the mobile phone creatively to get ‘diary-like’ questions or video-based diaries. ‘Auto-ethnography’ is one of the words researchers are using. Well, a genetically modified potato remains, after all, a potato, and it’s still as versatile!
Namita Mediratta is regional CMI Director, Hair Care, Unilever Asia Pte. Ltd.
References:
http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/SRU2.html
Evaluating Social Mission Projects in Emerging and Bottom of Pyramid Markets: An Innovative Behaviour change Methodology
Raghavan Srinivasan, Namita Mediratta, Astiti Suhirman Esomar Publication: Nominees for the Prestigious Excellence Award for Best Paper 2009/2010.
