Qualitative or quantitative? The old answer is that it depends who you ask, with creative types lining up on one side of the room and client marketers cowering in another. More recently, however, clients are getting results with qualitative research of their own, and creatives are still on side.
‘If you want to make a great ad it really comes down to a great brief, and a great brief has to have as much consumer information and insight as you can possibly have,’ says David Strickland, SVP of marketing at Zellers in Toronto. ‘A smart client will have a process in place to glean those insights.’
Zellers is an unlikely place to look for an advocate of qualitative research, but the 74-year-old discount department store has made a tremendous effort to use meaningful contact with its customers to glean important customer insights that translate directly into marketing campaigns.
One component of qualitative research at Zellers is the Mom Panel, an ongoing project originally launched in 2000. The panel consists of a loose network of more than 450 moms from across Canada as diverse as Zellers customers: urban, rural, northern and southern. Select groups are chosen from the panel for various ‘assignments’ throughout the year.
‘The Mom Panel is just one piece, not even a quarter of what we do, but in terms of its importance in helping us to develop briefs, it’s had a disproportionate impact on developing advertising. We’ve asked consumers to get involved by using their creativity to explain what they think and feel and behave – and the nature of the work makes it more valuable to the creative process.’
Projects vary from sending 40 women 1000 images to sort into likes and dislikes to mailing out disposable cameras so women can document how they use various products in their home. Other projects will involve up to 75 women, all working independently.
The good news, Strickland says, is that ‘We don’t have to say ‘one person in a group once said this.’ It’s ‘One woman wrote 15 pages, and here’s all the drawings, and 50% of the women drew this so it’s got to be important.’ It’s ethnographic in that you observe and try to figure out what’s the same.’
Jeff Spriet, president of Toronto’s Chokolat, a branded entertainment company, is naturally a strong advocate of this kind of qualitative research.
When he was with Toronto’s Seminal Group, they drove a motorhome into nightclub-land and invited partiers inside for an impromptu focus group. Respondents were asked to videotape themselves interacting with one another in a club-like setting, thus presenting client Labatt not just with opinions, but firsthand, first-person, recorded behaviour. ‘So many people are actually marketing experts that I think it does make sense to take down the focus group mirror and talk candidly and openly.’
It’s the direct nature of this data that everyone agrees is worthwhile. The chaotic quality of the information, as Strickland confirms, is precisely the reason creatives are pleased to see it. Strickland also points out that it’s important for creatives to see first hand what’s on the minds of customers, who often live a very different lifestyle than your typical urban copywriter.
It helps with new clients, too
While it’s only natural for client marketers to keep in touch with their consumers, smart agencies are also using qualitative research as a tool that allows them to quickly get in touch with a new category.
Noel O’Dea, president of Target Marketing & Communications in St. John’s launched a qualitative study at the beginning of a project with Irving Oil, an oil refinery and home heating company based in Saint John, N.B. Irving Oil wanted to launch a campaign for their furnaces, and O’Dea’s first step was to use focus groups and other qualitative methods to understand peoples’ perceptions of heating and furnaces.
Says O’Dea: ‘Without that research, we would not have used an unconventional approach to market a product that requires a lot of consumer involvement and is heavily out of sight and out of mind.’
Their research looked for insights into perception barriers, as well as insights into how they could relate something as boring as furnaces to people’s everyday lives.
The result was a highly unconventional campaign that won Target a Gold Cassie last November. The campaign was effective precisely because they used persuasive examples that got past those perceptual barriers, and allowed people to reach the conclusion on their own that a new furnace could be good for them.
Alison Simpson, president of Enterprise Creative Selling in Toronto also found qualitative research – in this case consisting of one-on-one interviews – invaluable for quickly getting her creative team up to speed on a new category. The client was Toronto’s Bird on a Wire, a brand-new network management company that wanted to advertise multiple services that would speak to and motivate both company presidents and their savvy in-house technical experts.
The resulting campaign, targeted directly to the two target groups, produced a number of immediate, qualified leads when the company launched, and helped Bird on a Wire get the attention of competitors and eventually being approached by, and sold to, AT&T.
It can still go wrong,
terribly wrong
While clients and creatives may rave about qualitative research, there are still those who detract, sometimes with good reason.
Qualitative research, while firmly established in select marketing circles since the 1940s, grew to its current level of popularity on the bandwagon of the dotcom era, which promised untold levels of interactivity and unlimited consumer insights for everybody.
As the industry matures, people are realizing that more multimedia equipment is not the answer to focus group woes, but that participant recruitment and screening must be a central concern.
Whole camps of people contend that focus groups don’t allow for any meaningful contact with consumers and are, in fact, likely to be full of opportunistic liars looking for $50 and a free snack. Optimistic consumer self-diagnosis, or selective memory in participants can damage responses.
A prominent Toronto creative director points towards another problem with the industry.
‘Research is a business. Some of these researchers are trying to justify their existence and that means they can’t be objective I’ve seen researchers still trying to milk clients after all kinds of ad tests, and that’s more about business and profitability than finding out about the response from the ad.’
How do you work with companies that might not have your best interests at heart? The simple answer, and one that is fundamental to conducting good research at all times, is that you need to know what you’re looking for, and how to know when you’ve found it.
