Lynn Fletcher has been known to spend her working hours hanging out in bars.

All in the name of research, mind you. Over the course of her 17 years as a planner (starting with Ogilvy & Mather), Fletcher has employed just about every knowledge-gathering trick in the book in the search for that all-important customer insight. And that includes mingling with a brewery’s target audience in an effort to determine the factors that influence brand preference.

‘How can I do a beer ad if I don’t spend time drinking beer?’ asks Fletcher, now vice-president and director of planning with Vickers & Benson Advertising.

In the last few years, planning has emerged as an increasingly important discipline within the marketing world. And research, both quantitative and qualitative, is one of the most indispensable of the planner’s tools. But just how, exactly, does a planner make the most effective use of that tool?

Neale Halliday, senior vice-president and head of planning with BBDO Canada, describes himself as a ‘heavy user’ of research. He considers it invaluable – but he also cautions against using it mechanically. Conducting a focus group simply because you’ve reached the point in the campaign cycle when you’d normally conduct a focus group is a mistake, he says.

Fritz Kuhn, senior vice-president, planning director with Leo Burnett, agrees there’s something of an oversupply of research in this business. Most clients have reams of data at their disposal, he says – what they lack is insight. It’s the job of the planner, Kuhn says, to take research in all its forms – quantitative or qualitative, secondary or primary – and draw from it as much insight as possible about both the brand and the consumer.

‘It’s the connection between those two that makes great advertising,’ says Kuhn. And it’s the ability to tease out that connection that makes a great planner.

It’s exceedingly rare, Kuhn says, that research and planning will lead directly to the final creative product. Rather, ‘it becomes part of the atmosphere that makes the ad.’

He cites Leo Burnett’s work for Trimark Investment Management as an example of the role of research in planning.

The agency picked up the Trimark business in 1995, Kuhn says, just as the mutual fund industry was starting to make serious use of traditional advertising. Research very quickly led the account team to the conclusion that Canadians, on the whole, understand little about the investment world.

‘It was clear to us when we talked to investors that the whole category is a black box,’ says Kuhn. Asked to draw a picture to represent mutual fund companies, for example, one member of a focus group sketched a locked door with questions marks all over it.

In order to build brand definition, the agency decided to take a straightforward approach and eliminate some of the mystery surrounding personal investment. So the first spot produced by Leo Burnett contrasted the loud, confusing action on the floor of the stock exchange with what Trimark does – namely, investigate companies.

‘We dig deeper’ was the message that Trimark introduced – and the company has stuck with it right through this past rrsp season.

Should research be employed to assess the merits of specific creative concepts? That’s a matter of debate.

Creative people, Neale Halliday notes, are skeptical about the use of research for this purpose – a view with which he happens to sympathize. Advertising ideas, he says, are as fragile as butterfly wings: Poke at them too much and you risk destroying them.

Ultimately, Halliday says, research is best used by planners as a source of inspiration, rather than as a device to predict the likely success of a particular execution.

A prime example of how research can provide that inspiration: bbdo’s work last year for Chrysler Canada on Dodge trucks. Primary research, Halliday says, indicated that four out of 10 truck buyers were first-time owners, and could just as easily have bought another kind of vehicle. Traditional truck advertising – in which a hairy-armed man’s man piles heavy equipment into the back of his pickup – wasn’t really speaking to that 40% of the market.

As the third-ranked brand in this market, Chrysler was interested in going after these non-traditional truck buyers. But how?

According to Halliday, the inspirational insight came when the agency, through an independent research company, brought together a consumer group of Dodge truck owners.

The first part of the two-hour process took place in the agency’s sterile boardroom, with a planner and a creative person listening in. But it was during the last 15 minutes – when the group was invited to go outside and discuss their trucks as they stood next to the vehicles – that the key to the strategy suddenly revealed itself.

While the participants all talked about the utility of their trucks for jobs and household chores, it soon became apparent that their emotional connection with the brand was rooted in their use of their vehicles to help out friends and neighbors in the community. One Dodge owner, Halliday recalls, looked fondly at his truck and said that what he remembered best was the day he used it to take the local Boy Scout troop to pick apples.

Although it’s rare that an idea will come so directly from a consumer, the resulting tv spot – which offered a truck driver’s eye-view of the world – opened on a group of scouts looking at the camera and asking, ‘Would you help us pick apples?’ The same spot also featured a priest asking for help to build a church.

The emphasis on human relationships over moving vehicles was unconventional for the category, Halliday says, but very much in tune with what the research had revealed about truck buyers.

‘It’s those little insights,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to be listening for them.’

‘Our preference is to think about the research as food for thought,’ says Julie Walters, senior vice-president and director of strategic planning with Young & Rubicam. Rarely, she says, does an individual consumer deliver a blinding flash of insight. Rather, it’s the planner who must have the skill to draw insight from what consumers tell researchers.

Walters points to y&r’s work with Prince Edward Island Tourism as an example of how this process unfolds.

The agency, she says, employed both primary and secondary research to investigate consumer behaviors associated with travel. What they discovered, she says, is that the type of person who travels to p.e.i. is likely to be less concerned with details of the trip itself than with how he or she will feel upon returning home.

Accordingly, the ‘Come play on our island’ tv campaign juxtaposed sights from everyday city life, such as traffic lights and theatre lineups, with enchanting p.e.i. vistas – the implication being that warm memories of your holiday will stay with you even after your return home.

The key to the campaign’s success wasn’t the research itself, Walters says, but rather the way the agency team used its instincts, in the planning process, to isolate that one essential insight.

‘We, as planners, work very hard to stay in touch with instinct, and often what happens is that you end up in surprising places,’ she says. ‘You don’t hear in a focus group, ‘Gee, going away on holiday is more about how I feel when I come home and whether I can carry that with me.” That, she contends, is something planners must be able to intuit from research.

The choice of specific research methodology may vary greatly depending on circumstance. Some, like v&b’s Lynn Fletcher, prefer qualitative research, believing that the best insights are more likely to be inspired by face-to-face contact with the customer or potential customer.

One result of this philosophy is that v&b planners have, on occasion, had the opportunity to make some unexpected additions to their resumes. In one memorable instance, she says, the team ended up working behind the counter of a local McDonald’s restaurant in order to glean some firsthand observations about customer behavior.

Face-to-face research also proved essential to the agency’s work last year with Concerned Children’s Advertisers. Because the work was pro bono, there was no budget for a major research effort. So, through word-of-mouth, the planner on the account pulled together a group of pre-teen girls, and talked to them about issues such as self-esteem.

From these discussions, the agency became familiar with the concept of ‘girl power’ before it had found its way into the mainstream. They leveraged the idea in the creative brief, and the result was the 30-second ‘We are Girls’ spot, which delivered an empowering message about young girls and their bodies.

However valuable research may be, it still has its limitations as a planning tool. Andre Beauchesne, partner and vice-president, strategic planning with the Montreal-based agency Bos, says that more than a year’s worth of research went into the final strategy for the 1996 launch of Microcell Solutions’ wireless personal communications service, Fido. The research delivered an understanding of the pcs market, and revealed how consumers perceived existing providers. But when it came to deciding whether to put the product’s brand name or the company’s corporate moniker to the forefront in the advertising, Beauchesne says, the client and agency relied on their own intuition.

‘We didn’t ask the consumer to agree or disagree with the strategy,’ he says.

Halliday, for his part, cautions planners against placing too much reliance on research – particularly when it comes to assessing finished or near-finished advertising creative.

‘At the end of the day,’ he says, ‘you have to recognize that it’s an imprecise science.’