Connecting with the Consumer 2.0

 

The keynote speaker was Jose Antonio Rodriguez, Director of Marketing and Communication at Barcelona University. He explored the, by now, fairly well trodden landscape of Web 2.0 and its implications for research in order to fully keep up with what he called the ‘2.0 World’.

 

The main point he developed for researchers was that the multiple identities the virtual world allows means that conventional personality segmentation is a less realistic and useful way of describing people.

 

It also means that behavioural analysis is not only preferable, but essential. What people do is at least measurable: who they are is increasingly elusive.

 

But as with so many analyses of the impact of Web 2.0, there is the assumption that people will carry their behaviour with them as they grow older; for instance, blogging is now almost wholly concentrated in the 20–30 year old age group.

 

Playing with identities, made more tangible in the digital landscape, has always been a distinctive characteristic of young people; there are now just more ways to express and demonstrate them. So, rather like a great deal of youthful behaviour, people will simply outgrow it.

 

Nevertheless, the deeper point is that companies and researchers need to develop more inventive methodologies to understand what is happening in a world of constant interaction, feedback and sharing.

 

The Jetsons meet the Flintstones – anthropology and technology

 

The next talk was given by Esther Berrozpe, Whirlpool Group, and Paola Fael and Giuseppe Tonolini, of Research Plus (Italy).

 

Cultural anthropology and ethnography figured extensively in many of the papers today. In recent years, ethnographic techniques have been increasingly incorporated into many different kinds of research projects with great success and usefulness.

 

A particularly impressive example came from this presentation describing the use of a multi-country panel over a two/three month period by Whirlpool developing new technologically enhanced appliances.

 

New technology is known to be challenging to research: consumers are unreliable judges of how it will be used and success often requires collective acceptance rather than merely individual purchase.

 

A point not made by the presenters, but nevertheless important, is that technology companies are typically run by engineers with limited knowledge or respect for marketing and with a tendency to be arrogant in their assumptions.

 

Not so Whirlpool, which has embraced an ethnographic approach in the development of its appliances. The subject being described was ovens, and the need to understand the cultural rituals associated with cooking.

 

Countries such as France and Italy, with rich cuisine cultures, are ideally suited to this kind of model, which takes as its underlying hypothesis that new technology in the field of cooking appliances must not violate established food preparation rituals.

 

Thus an oven that cooks something quickly (like a microwave) needs either to be relegated to non-cooking tasks (heating, boiling water, etc) or the efficiencies must be made in other areas – like being able to cook several things at the same time. Most interesting however, was what they called an ‘imaginary diary’.

 

Having had the concept of the new oven (or whatever technology is being researched) introduced to them, respondents, kept two kinds of diaries: one that describes the food preparation task actually being conducted, and the other, how that task is imagined to be different using the new product.

 

This has a pseudo-reality to it missing in conventional research, and allows for analysis, diagnosing benefits, exaggerated expectations over time and with different tasks.

 

Redefining brand essence

 

Chris Barnham, of Chris Barnham Research and Strategy, gave a thoughtful analysis of brand essence.

 

He began with the observation that the subject evoked two general responses these days – boredom (we’ve been talking about this for too long with the inevitable consequence of it becoming calcified into onions and pyramids); and aggression (creative people finding it limiting and bureaucratic).

 

His argument was that not only is the conventional idea of brand essence as a static distillation independent of context wrong, but it lacks the kind of utility required to manage brands dynamically.

 

The crux of his argument distinguished between the idea of the brand as having a single essence and the idea of a brand being a collection of essences that are fluid, dynamic, flexible and responsive to people, place, context.

 

He traced this view of reality back to pre-modern philosophy, a pedigree that while intellectually interesting, isn’t strictly necessary.

 

Although his preferred phrase ‘propositional hierarchy’ – referring to the fact that a brand consists of a number of images/ideas/beliefs that can be manipulated according to audience and context – doesn’t flow off the tongue, and tends to disguise a quite straightforward idea, the attack is fresh and creative.

 

Once liberated from the obsession with the notion of a single essence, the opportunities of reinforcing good aspects and compensating for bad one become clearer.

 

Increasing the impact of Ariel’s advertising

 

Janet May, of Procter and Gamble (P&G), and Siamack Salari, Everyday Lives, discussed what ethnography can reveal about the moments, moods and locations when consumers are most responsive to communication about washing powders. This was a dream assignment from P&G, according to Salari.

 

Although the general question about how people consume media has been around for decades, only recently has anyone seriously tried to answer it using a research methodology.

 

The IPA Touchpoints survey using diaries provides a rich tapestry of quantified data on where different media are consumed, but only with some kind of ethnographic observation can one understand the more complex emotional moods that accompany media consumption.

 

Although samples are notoriously small in any kind of ethnographic research, this is more than compensated for by the creativity of the output – the voices of women talking about what they are doing, when, and what it means, is a vivid source of insight and creative stimulation.

 

An excellent example of creative media thinking in laundry products is summed up by the image of a woman on her balcony hanging out clothes, looking down at the street as she does so and seeing washing powder advertising on the roofs of buses.

 

Semioscreen: a new, powerful analytical cocktail

 

Storytelling is another theme that is gaining currency these days, and Joseph Sassoon, Alphabet (Italy), described how the classic French semiotic models lack the subtlety and flexibility required to be useful in communication analysis. His technique blends the rigour of the French approach with the narrative skills of Hollywood.

 

While it seems unlikely that advertising creative people will spend much time delving into the classic works of anthropology (although George Lucas is known to be a follower of Joseph Campbell, a guru on the subject of myth and legend), a study of Hollywood described in the many books written about script writing would sharpen up the narrative power of a lot of contemporary advertising.

 

The point Sassoon made was that despite the overwhelmingly visual nature of advertising these days, the power of a good story is timeless, and universal and no one does this better than Hollywood.

 

When traditional models don’t work: slippage, constructionism and proxy ethnography

 

Dana Barach, Janssen LP, and Kendall Gray, Kendall Gray Consulting, took on perhaps the most bizarre example of the boundary pushing in methodology characteristic of today’s Research 2.0.

 

They described an experiment called ‘Proxy Ethnography’, which involved trying to understand a dilemma in the marketing of an anti-psychotic drug.

 

The dilemma was that doctors said they recommended it but patients wouldn’t take it, while patients said that doctors didn’t recommend it. Standard questioning procedures clearly didn’t work, and filming over time was too expensive.

 

So the authors (client and researcher) devised a technique which involved role playing with the client – a woman – playing the role of a psychotic patient, with the interaction observed to understand exactly what doctors were doing.

 

Although the presenters stoutly defended their actions on the basis of success in unravelling this dilemma and the actionable marketing results produced, there was a feeling in the audience that an ethical line had been crossed.

 

This is an example, albeit an extreme one, of what is by and large a healthy and necessary development in market research – i.e. a much more inventive, more collaborative, more interactive relationship between researcher and subject. It does, however, raise issues of exploitation and questionable ethical practices if uncontrolled.