Sandeep Dutta
Every contact point a researcher gets with a consumer represents a huge opportunity to explore and discover new consumer truths. Yet at the same time it is getting increasingly difficult to maximise the moments of engagement with the growing breed of disengaged consumers. Living in an age of instant gratification and unbridled hedonism conventional market research is seen by the man on the street as excruciatingly boring.
Qualitative researchers everywhere experience attention deficit syndrome in their respondents all the time, which is likely to result in superficial and phoney responses. Thirty minutes into a focus group, one gets to see the look of boredom on the face of respondents; the painful silences punctuated by the moderator’s earnest questioning; answers being offered but few real insights being generated. It’s easy to say “they were a difficult set of respondents” but the truth is that we have a responsibility to do better.
While we devote considerable time and energy in sharpening our questioning tools are we ensuring that the consumers are responding to these sophisticated tools with the requisite earnestness? We also invest energy and money on fancy presentations with the objective of engaging with the client. But have we seriously thought of engaging more meaningfully with our respondents? Don’t we know that all inspirational insights emerge from energised and enthusiastic consumers; dull and lifeless consumers can only give us dull and lifeless results?
Form matters
We all know about the medium being the message implying that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. People in the advertising world are staunch believers of this marketing truth and make creative use of media to connect with today’s over stimulated consumers.
But have we researchers paid enough attention to this when we design our research? Well, the answer is not exactly a no. Digital technology and social media have given researchers the opportunity to experiment with both content and form and make research attractive to the participants. However when it comes to classical qualitative research tools like focus groups and depth Interviews not much attention has been paid to make them more engaging.
It is time that we gave some thought to repackage qualitative research and make it attractive to weary consumers. I will share with you some experiments to make qualitative research alluring to Indian consumers. The good news is that they gave us positive results!
Television-ised research
Interestingly, both the experiments with form were heavily influenced by popular television shows. Popular culture is all about creativity, challenges, participation and engagement. All these have immense potential to engage research participants.
In the TV space, the two universally popular genres are the Talk show and the Reality show. We applied the format of these two immensely successful genres to engage more deeply with respondents.
How ‘Big Brother’ helped women reveal their secret hair stories
The client, a leading player in women’s hair care market with a range of hair care brands, wished to understand the role hair oil plays in the lives of the women and how they go about switching brands in this category. Previous studies conducted by the client came up with some reasons why women switch brands but these were seen to be superficial and too rational. The client believed that there was more to it. And we believed that to get to the elusive truth we needed to retrace the chain of events that preceded the switch moment and explore every little emotion that she experiences during that period.
Not an easy task to get into the profundity of a woman’s emotions. Of course depth interviews were the first thing that we thought of but had doubts if regular depth interviews would deliver the goods.
Our inspiration to make depth interviews more intensive came from the famous ‘confession room’ set up of one of TV’s most popular reality show, Big Brother. In India it is known as Big Boss and has been a huge success since it first aired a couple of years back. The confession room creates an atmosphere where a house inmate is encouraged to be deeply reflective and brutally honest.
We recreated the ‘confession room’ in a research facility. The respondent was made to sit alone in the confession room while the moderator, sitting in an adjacent room, played the role of the Big brother whose voice is heard by the respondent through audio transmission, but is completely invisible during the interaction. The moderator, in a carefully cultivated deadpan voice urged the respondent to walk down the memory lane and express their feelings , thoughts and actions when brand switch happened.
Initial reaction of the respondents on finding themselves all alone in a dimly lit room was eerie, though at the same time there was a palpable excitement about the opportunity to act out what they have been watching on TV for years. In fact the familiarity with the form helped them to overcome their initial anxieties and understand what is really expected of them. They responded extremely well to the questions of the invisible moderator and within few minutes of the interview got completely engaged with the topic. The respondents cut themselves from the outside world their propensity to engage, share, express and reveal heightens. This is what a respondent said after going through the Big Brother experience:
“I simply forgot that I spent two hours talking endlessly. I do not even remember what all I said but this much I can tell you it was a great experience. It was like I could hear my own voice and my mind so clearly for the first time.”
The switch stories that the women told us were impressively rich. Just adding a new spin to the classic depth interview resulted in an output that was substantially nuanced, deep and authentic.
We The People generates a stormy debate between consumers and clients
We The People is an award winning debate show running on a prestigious English news channel in India every sunday for the last 12 years. The focus is on current affairs where about six to eight panelists are invited for every discussion. The panel usually consists of eminent politicians, social scientists, academicians, social workers and celebrities, while the audience poses questions directly to the panelists. The show is anchored by a fiery and respected TV journalist who ensures that people speak out their minds and engage in lively and provocative debates.
The brief from the client, a health food and beverage giant with a presence in India, was to explore the attitude and beliefs of cutting edge health conscious Indian consumers towards health. The research was expected to provide some thought provoking ideas to a delegate travelling from the client’s global headquarter to India with the aim of launching a range of health products targeted to the upper end of the Indian market. The local client being a seasoned research buyer insisted that the research reveal true and honest opinions of the progressive consumers and not an over optimistic and glossy version often peddled to outsiders. In addition, the client was keen that the delegates get a chance to interact directly with these progressive consumers and get a trusty understanding of their minds.
It became quite evident that this would be no ordinary research. Identifying cutting edge consumers and convincing them to participate in a research is a challenge by itself. To create a highly stimulating environment where they are sufficiently engaged and feel encouraged to be analytical, creative, and futuristic and interact with the client team was next to impossible. Conventional focus groups do not allow direct client interaction and is too tame a format to excite and provoke consumers.
Again we turned to television for inspiration and structured the interaction in the lines of ‘We The People’. It’s a format that compelled people to be expressive, to dare and be opinionated! As mentioned earlier the show has three types of people participating in it: the panelists, the audience, and last but not the least the anchor person who facilitates the discussion. In our adaptation of the format, the researcher was assigned the role of the anchor, the client team were the audience and the opinion leaders were the panelists. A large conference room in a plush hotel was hired where a replica of ‘We The People’ was created. The cutting edge consumers (there were eight to ten of them) were seated in a semi-circle occupying the centre stage and were surrounded on all three sides by the client team (there were about twenty of them seating in concentric circle around the consumers) while the researcher with a roving micro phone in his hand was mostly on his feet. As depicted on the show, in the first forty five minutes the consumers were encouraged to put across their point of view on health management on the table. From there on the client was given permission to ask questions, seek clarifications and where appropriate challenge the consumers. The researcher played multiple roles, that of a devil’s advocate, a maestro and a cheerleader, ensuring that the discussion was stimulating and meaningful.
The client team was thrilled with their experience of being face to face with cutting edge consumers and entering into a debate that provided them with enough fodder to have a perspective on Indian people and health management. The positive outcome of this experiment has prompted us to use this format whenever we desire to go beyond a discussion and engage consumers with a debate along with clients.
Focus Groups + Creativity
The thought that I like to leave behind is that we researchers need to acknowledge that research as it is peddled today to consumers is boring and we could do with some dressing up. Titivating research is really not that difficult as these experiments suggest and television is not the only media that can help do it. Popular culture today is replete with innovative formats that are evocative, exciting and yet meaningful. We just need to pick the right stuff and use it to make research more palatable. So next time when you watch a film, listen to music, play a game just think if there is anything that you can steal to smarten your next research.
Sandeep Dutta
